Part II - Now More Than Ever

I suppose we could have predicted this….but there are now four Wednesdays left in 2025 [gregorian calendar? I barely know ‘er……..lol couldn’t resist.]

As previously stated, in homage to Toni Cade Bambara, I am Working At It In Five Parts. 1 The ‘It’ in question is the it that is on, freedom also known as love, love also known as freedom, also known as what I/we do it for. This subject cannot be contained within notes nor within weeks; it is a subject of lifetimes. It is a group thing. No matter. This is a jump off, which is a continuation. If you missed last week, here’s Part I.

I’ll confess that every time I hear people say Now More Than Ever I have to stop my eyes from rolling all the way to the back of my head. The compassionate part of me understands that we are in a moment of bewildering rupture, to the point that we don’t really have the words to convey the intensity or urgency we feel.

Another part of me feels like polycrisis2 or not this phrase is kind of a-historical. Many of the conditions that we are facing in these united-only-in-name states have been faced by people all over the world, or have been faced by our predecessors on these very lands, recently even. Many of the conditions are extensions of the fundamental wounds from which this nation-state sprang.

I bristle because what does it really mean? It feels myopic. By the way, for much of this ‘ever’ the people uttering the phrase were not alive. How could we know? We do not actually know how now compares to ever.

Dr. Robin DG Kelley aptly notes that the left is “saddled by a theological tradition of prefiguration that imagines a liberated future as the fulfillment of a radical practice.”3 I felt knocked over the first time I read this. I didn’t realize that I had relegated freedom to some future, some other time. I didn’t necessarily learn this anywhere explicitly, but this posture had seeped into me. I had decided that freedom was happening some other time, hopefully soon.

I need horizons, certainly. I need aspirations. And, the saddling to me comes from the way that this prefiguration tricks me into procrastination, tricks me into thinking that there is another time for action, drastic choices, that is a little further down the road.

So, I turn the odious now more than ever over in my hand, behold it from another angle, it becomes useful. The it that is on is on now more than ever, not in reference to the past or the future, but because now is the only access I have to agency, to participation, to choice, to change. It is being with what is right here instead of reacting. Now, more, as ever.