Sunday

I’ve never liked Sunday. It’s the worst day of the week. It’s an imposter, shamelessly riding Saturday’s coattails, campaigning on the promise of freedom when it knows it will soon bring that freedom to an end. Saturday asks us what we want to be. Sunday tells us who we are.

Today is a Sunday. The first day of the first full week of the year. Renewal is meant to be in the air. The days are getting longer. The sun is shining. But I have financial and health things to attend to, the mechanisms surrounding which are opaque and arcane, systems to be gamed by a priveleged few. And the people who could do something about that have an uphill battle, owing to the structure of the U.S. Senate and the Electoral College and gerrymandering and dark money and voters convinced that the American dream is a zero sum game.

Oh, and Australia is on fire. And democracy is in danger. And we’re making new provocations in the Middle East, a region historically troubled by religious fundamentalism and outsize fossil fuel reserves. And our reliance on those reserves contributes to the region’s instability and makes the planet warmer. And that instability and eventually the warming both drive mass migration, which stokes nativism and xenophobia, which is exploited by populist autocrats, who fete religious fundamentalists, further endanger democracy, and tell themselves that Australia is burning for any reason other than the real one.

These aren’t insoluble problems. Saturday invited me to look beyond them, to make space for joy and imagine a future where joy has a larger presence in more people’s lives, a future that won’t be perfect but will at least be a little closer to equilibrium, harmony, justice.

Sunday tells me to stop dreaming. Fuck Sunday.