Ever since I can remember, I’ve had a habit of using fire as a big metaphor in my life. Thinking about it, it’s not ridiculous that I used flames to translate some of my feelings and experiences onto paper; after all, I am a fire sign. An April Aries with all the right buttons, if you believe in that stuff. I don’t particularly do, but I know enough to find it kind, like a warm embrace, acknowledging that maybe, at least on some astral level, my words make sense. Lately, however, my flaming world has become more than journaled words of introspection and comfort. What I liked to assimilate with anger, warmth, love, and every little moment I found fitting enough, has been overshadowed by the reality of our world. What do you do when the fire you’ve surrounded yourself with for years becomes raging? When every particle around you becomes deathly, eating up oxygen with a vengeance?
That’s what this world feels like to me at the moment.
Using fire for myself was never this suffocating. It was freeing, powerful, and exhilarating. Honesty, pain, and comfort all at once, but controlled. At my hand and of my own doing. Seeing the world in flames is different. It’s a forest fire fueled by the careless weapon of indifference. There are no actions being taken and none to expect. We are all watching as it grows in vengeance and despair, as it burns and destroys — taking and taking in every way.
Every morning I watch and read the news as they roll in; that fire I recognize burns within me, but it’s nothing but embers against the raging flames outside. “We aren’t angry enough,” some say. “Why hasn’t this made national news?” “Why is the world still turning as usual?” Elected officials, mocking the very chairs they sit in. Politicians breaking the trust of the citizens they’ve sworn to protect. Companies carelessly taking from the planet just for the sake of them and their wallets.
I could go on and on; there is a collective feeling of fatigue that pushes us down, weighs our shoulders until every breath we take is but a sigh. I wondered, for a second, how specific should I get? Do I have to give names to these flames? Faces to the matches? At this point, I don’t think I need to. I can ask anyone, “what did it feel like to watch the news today?” Most of us can feel it, most of us can mourn what this life was supposed to be, and can watch as every day becomes a repetition of a single question: “What now?” Because if anything is certain, it’s that every day something despicable and broken happens — it shows up like clockwork, bringing another load of weight to our lives and selves.
It’s a vicious ongoing cycle, and it leaves everyday individuals like us at an impasse. It makes us feel little, unmoving, and unimportant. Powerless in the face of a tornado. I can recognize it sounds pessimistic, wrong, and dejected, but I think we’re past the point of painting niceties and wishing for clear skies. There is nothing to win by pretending to stay positive in these times. I do not ask for pessimism, but I will frown at overdone positivity. Staring at the face of atrocity, pessimism is not a thing.
Don’t you see? The world is in flames, and I don’t even have a bucket of water. Some say there might not even be any water left.
The world is in flames. I knew it when I woke up one day and found an AI generated video posted by the Governor of Puerto Rico, a supposed satire song about Trump’s superiority over Russia and China and against Communism.
The world is in flames. I knew it when scrolling through X, AI slop of an ex-president posing as a monkey, one of the most racist and disrespectful connotations there is against Black people, was taking over social media. Turns out, the current President of the United States had posted it. Two posts down, people were screaming and recording ICE assaults, against immigrants and American citizens. But it’s okay, because a minute after scrolling, a data center construction was being proposed for yet another farmland.
The world is in flames, and they are all over me, as I read account after account of powerful, vicious, and rich people being at the center of the Epstein Files, and nothing is being done. Rape, child assault, trafficking. Politicians, artists, leaders, and powerful people we expect to be the ones advocating and helping us, and our countries are the ones behind these crimes. Nothing is being done, and voices are being drowned.
I wake up, and all these things have broken my resolve. I stare at flames, embers, and color that flickers between red and orange and can’t help but wonder how I ever found comfort within it. Because now it’s all around me, not of my doing and not of my control. The world is burning as we know it, and I am clutching a bucket of water, not sure if it’s ethical to fill it up. Not daring to throw it into the fire, because a chatbot told me it might help, but when I was ten, I saw firemen showing me what it could do, if the fire was big enough.
Explosion pending, I remain petrified at the face of our world. And I wish I was being pessimistic, because maybe then these feelings and these things would be nothing more than an exaggeration on my part. But it’s not. These are facts and reality and society as we know it.
How do we stay functional in such conditions? I think that’s one of the things we wonder about the most. I am no professional, and sometimes my anger likes to lick at the flames of the outside. Those are the moments I take a break. I go outside and see that there are still parts bathed in green, blue, and colors that are not scary or wrong. Parts we should try and protect. I write, I listen to music that has transcended years, and I read beyond news: academic articles, books, and more. I try to stay present, to breathe a little, to wonder what I can do. Sometimes my small act of defiance, like not using any generative AI at all, is what helps — something small, perhaps, but enough to calm my heart when it gets too much.
The world is in flames, and I don’t even have a bucket of water. But fire isn’t eternal, and perhaps, between enough small acts, I will be able to fill it up.