Stuck in a crisis

So here we are.

Stuck in a traffic jam.

It seems wrong, somehow, to be here in Manila.

And just write about a traffic jam.

But that's how it is here:

You spend a quarter of your life in traffic jams.

And I ask how can you bear it

You deal with it. You build your life around it.

You try to avoid the rush-hour.

But what if every hour becomes rush-hour?

And rush hour means we are stuck and can't go anywhere at all?

But we don't think about that.

We look at our phones.

But I can't do that, some weird thing about data roaming in the Philippines,

So I try to look out the world instead.

An amazing world,

Impossibly crowded,

People trying to walk along the impossibly narrow & precarious pavements.

People going in and out the market

That market that utterly intrigues me

And that I know I will never get out to see.

Because we’re in a bubble,

An amazingly privileged air conditioned bubble,

While out there,

While out there people are struggling to survive

In the stifling heat and the choking, poisoned air.

And I know if I could look into my phone.

I'd see stock markets collapsing,

And futures markets going down,

Down and down

As the value of the future diminishes.

And the price of gold is rising:

Gold

That ancient curse and cause of so much warfare and bloodshed.

As we all allow ourselves to be led back into a nightmare past

Because we’re frightened of the present

And don’t have the courage to truly imagine a different future.

So we're stuck here, all of us, stuck.

With our energy blocked

And our creativity stifled.

Knowing something must be done,

Has to be done,

But what

What?

And Manila is sinking.

And sea levels are rising, and just

And just at that moment when everything is becoming unbearable

There's a green light ahead somewhere

And slowly, painfully slowly,

We move on

We move on.