The new year is approaching, and as humans live in cycles, a lot of people are thinking of the new resolutions they’d like to make. I am wondering about the new years revolutions which may or may not occur.

Watching the new Bob Dylan biopic, while reminding me of his prowess as a songwriter and lyricist as well as deep assholish tendencies, drew me into the revolutions going on at the time – and rekindled my interest in the stories of Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, and the musicians who were a part of the movements of the time. The scene of the Chelsea Hotel brought on memories of the book “Just Kids” by Patti Smith, in which she describes the actions and ideas being pushed at the time, as well as the weighted frivolities that occupied many artists.

It’s hard to fully realize that there has never been a moment of complete peace, equality, and stability in this world – it’s really just how sheltered can you be from the horrors of humanity. As a child, around age 6-7, I remember first becoming aware of the injustices of oppression and poverty, class and cultural injustices upon hearing family spit vitriol against the black families in my neighborhoods – even as I saw their circumstances matching mine. After all, us kids were all destined to take the same bus to the same run-down schools together in our hand-me-down clothes full of holes. Then I arrived at school, and found both black and white people of all ages spat vitriol at me. I am neither white or black.

At home, I listened to my mother tell detailed stories of the violence and poverty she grew up in, and dealt with her abuses – many of them likely born from the horrors of her childhood. In my child’s mind, and until much too old an age, I was convinced that the solution to escaping the depressing, traumatic, deeply torn confines of my family and the place I lived was to leave – and find people and places that, I was convinced, were ready for a revolution of the mind. Rather than pain and exploitation, vitriol and judgement, it would be one of camaraderie and empathy, community and revolution with a new way of approaching life.

What I have found, over and over again, is utter disappointment in the people who I had thought would be the anti-establishment I sought. The artists and musicians I met, especially the ones who lounged at artist warehouses and cafes and wore the raggediest clothes, were often trust fund children cosplaying poverty and hardship, who then escaped to luxurious homes and large TVs with cotton blankets when the going got too tough. There were radicals at rallies who spent days in bed bemoaning the horrors they encountered with police at protests, calling out of work because their parents’ large bank accounts would cover their rent that month (and the next, and the next, and the next).

However, the biggest disappointments were also in myself. How do I reconcile the poverty I grew up with, with the fact that in the last four years of my high school our fortunes had changed (due largely to immense hard work by my parents) that they paid my college tuition? I can say to myself all day that I worked multiple jobs at once to pay my own living expenses and took extra classes on top of that to finish in three years instead of four, but that still doesn’t change the fact that I don’t have student loans – a huge privilege. How do I reconcile the fact that I experienced both verbal and violent racism growing up, but I still did not grow up with the generational violence of redlining, lynching, slavery, jim crow, and more that created ugly legacies that black americans deal with to this day? How do I reconcile the education, nuance, science, and critical thinking that I hold dear and have been my biggest anchors with the fact that those things do not often create catch phrases that a large population can rally behind? I see, with each new disappointment, that I am getting more angry and vengeful, more callous and cold. I always thought I was strong enough to come back to the belief that all people deserve forgiveness and compassion, and yet here I am still struggling with the rage I feel at those who voted for violence, or stayed home, to stoke their egos and signal their virtue in a competition of peacocks, even as that is the quickest way for everything to burn. But really – is there any quicker way to change things than to burn it all down? And how can I be sure I’m not peacocking just as much as the next?

Perhaps my biggest failures was not being able to take my own eyes off the most brilliant of those peacocks to turn to those who were just quietly getting by. But a lot of those people also sure are quiet – and take pride in being so.

As I go into this new year, and I think about the revolutions that I feel must take place in order for the world to be more tenable – I also realize that the world has always been messy, chaotic, and painful. The true privilege is the ability to turn a blind eye to that chaos, or to pontificate about it from a distance while remaining relatively untouched by it. Then, when a person like Luigi comes along, to call upon the most punitive and violent forces of society to return things to order – where the privileged can once again ignore the suffering of the peasants. I know my endless railings about the despair I feel is grating on those who managed to listen in the first place, and here I am now on the internet, because I know I’m on thin ice with those in my life but I see nowhere to put my despair because, for some reason, I need someone – SOMEONE – out there to see it. That in itself is ego.

So with this new year, how does one reconcile the humanity of it all? Revolution both as window dressing and a romantic tale, with people who can’t help but create paper deities, while also filled with sincerity. People are both violent and kind, vengeful and generous, thoughtful and reactionary. What does that mean for how each one of us moves forward? Was my biggest mistake to have unrealistic expectations of what humanity had to offer, and just because they didn’t meet them, start dismissing them entirely? Or is that just another way to excuse the bullies and say it’s the standards that need to be lowered, and not the poeple more encouraged to meet them? Certainly, I don’t have the answers.