No, it's not supposed to be easy

I was sixteen years old and working my first job at the good old Alpha Beta, a long-dead supermarket chain in Los Angeles. I... did not like it. My boss was a martinet, my stuttering didn't allow me to do the job properly, and I just wasn't ready for the regimentation of work on top of the regimentation of school.

One day I just up and quit. My parents weren't upset with me. But my uncle took me aside a couple of days later. He told me, "Look, this job didn't work out for you. I'm not saying you should have stuck it out. But just remember: it's called 'work' for a reason. It's not supposed to be easy."

Forty years later and that's stuck with me all this time.

It's not supposed to be easy. That describes life in a nutshell. Our mythologies are filled with origin stories of humanity falling from a life of paradisiacal ease to one of toil and labor. Most of them posit these stories as humanity's fault. But, really, they're explanations for why we have to toil to draw sustenance from a harsh world. Why we can't have paradise. Why the gods created a place of struggle and strife.

It isn't our fault. We did not transgress against the divine. We were never in a prelapsarian paradise. From the time of the earliest hominins, humans have had to struggle to survive in a universe designed to kill them. From wild beasts to disease to famine to other humans, paradise has never existed. We tell ourselves these fairytales of a lost paradise—whether it be Eden or Atlantis—to accentuate and explain our fall from grace. But grace is not something from which we fell; grace is within all of us, and what the stories tell is how often we reject that grace. Paradise is within us, and the stories explain how we routinely dismiss its possibility. 

Every day we make the choice: will we act with grace, or will we reject it? Will we work towards paradise, or will we repudiate it? God doesn't enter into the equation; this is the human condition.

Yesterday, many of us were apoplectic when it seemed that Donald Trump was again getting special consideration for his crimes. "Aha!", many of us—myself included—exclaimed. "He'll never face justice!"

I'm here to tell you: Yes, he will face justice. As our Victor is wont to say, "Fatso Fuckface" is heading for the big reckoning. He will not escape sanction. Between the courts and his own mortality, he will pay the bill. 

But it will not be the easy road we all hope for. It will not be the simulacrum of that fallen-away paradise for which we all yearn. For that paradise does not, and never has, existed. I often say that this is a fallen world; but it isn't. It's simply the way things are. Eight billion humans cause permutations which not even a quantum computer could calculate. Things happen, and that's just the way it is. Sometimes things go our way, and sometimes they don't.

What we all have in our power to effect is how we react when we encounter a momentary blip. We will win battles and lose battles. How we react and cope with the tides of war is everything. Victory goes to those who keep a cool head and maintain focus. Yes, we can shake our heads. But that doesn't negate the necessity of, as they used to say, keeping our eyes on the prize. We can't get despondent. We can't throw up our hands. We have to stay in the fight, and outlast our opponents. Because believe me, they feel the same feelings we do. But we have something they don't: a purpose. We work to bend the moral arc of the universe towards justice. And when you do that, you win.

So, as that Armenian queen said: Snap out of it. This goes for me especially. Again, as I say, we have a world to save. That's not for the fainthearted. Touch grass. Listen to music. Recharge. Then get back in the fight.

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