This piece was done with pencil and chalk on handmade paper.
Today started off okay. I met a new roommate briefly for the first time and she seems fine. Then I went to the coffee shop and managed to get a nice spot in the shade, sitting next to other cafe regulars. After half an hour I had to leave suddenly because this super creep arrived and sat down at our table. When I say creep, I mean sexual harasser who has messed with my friends and spoken admiringly of an outed pedophile to me. It's challenging to relax at the coffee shop when borderline predators like that guy are around.
Work was perfectly average. My neighbors were using loud landscaping equipment underneath my window, which wasn't ideal, but neither was it out of the ordinary. If I made the rules, gas powered leaf blowers would be outlawed. Then again, if I made the rules, the world would be a very different place indeed.
My perfect world would be a paradise for many. But some people would doubtless find my utopia as horrid as I find this idiocracy we presently inhabit. Flag waving racists and paternalistic conformity police would probably be equally unhappy in my perfect world. So would real estate and healthcare profiteers. And basically anyone else who currently derives income from harming the environment or exploiting those without power.
Sadly, this amounts to a hundred million people or more in this country who would fight and even kill to prevent my perfect world from ever manifesting. This group already preserves our current dystopian trajectory at all costs, making things progressively worse with every passing year. I find these people every bit as disagreeable as I find the coffee shop creep, but they're much more terrifying because their horrid behavior has been normalized by our sick society. This behavior actually constitutes the status quo.
Who would do well in my perfect world? Tree and plant lovers. The hardworking and the lazy. Artists. Scientists. Engineers. The creative and the literate. Healers. Gardeners and farmers. Food service workers. Prisoners. Custodians. Sex workers. Public servants. And the lower classes, generally.
If by some magic everyone woke up tomorrow motivated to create this utopia I speak of, it would probably take us forty or fifty years to get there. The first steps would involve some drastic measures. Universal healthcare. A universal basic income funded by a 5% wealth tax. The legalization of all drugs and commutation of most drug crime sentences. An independent safety review of all industrial and agricultural chemicals. A retooling of public education to prioritize critical thinking and emotional literacy over standardized test scores. A total moratorium on evictions, new pavement, and new fossil fuel infrastructure. The beginnings of dismantling the military industrial complex.
That's quite a list already and it's far from comprehensive. It really only covers some of the things that would have to happen in year one to manifest my utopia in fifty years. Sadly, as things stand, each of these items is socially and politically impossible. Instead of positive change, we get meaningless reforms that just keep making everything worse.
Maybe a better world is only possible in the imagination. The thing is, we're currently living in the world imagined into existence by powerful figures from history. So if society is a dystopia, it is one that began in human imaginations. Maybe imagining something better is the best that can be done right now. But that's not nothing.