We spent weeks learning about what to expect while sitting next to a stranger in the active stages of dying. We intrepid hospice volunteers, taking copious notes on a cold February night under the fluorescents — as if having an annotated text of death at our fingertips will be any comfort when we’re in those deeply intimate moments.
They will stop requesting food and water, their organs no longer requiring nourishment as their body slowly turns off all the lights in preparation to leave. They’ll begin hallucinating, seeing people who aren’t there, talking to you as someone they’ve known forever, and who they possibly miss — a child, an old lover, a parent — and they’ll sometimes even sob dry tears as they mourn memories slowly crowding in from the dark corners of the room.
But that is all leading up to the Big Moment. When that arrives, we’re told that we shouldn’t expect the calm, blissful slipping away that is often depicted in movies. Rather, the final death throes are somewhat violent, painful to watch, and can even be disturbing. We do not actually go gentle into that good night. Those final, ravaging moments feature a soundtrack of rasping, seemingly tortured breath, a low and painful hum, the rattle. Sometimes, there can be convulsing. Always there is a deep sigh of relief at the final second, and then a full muscular release, and any shit and piss we’ve held also leaves us.
When I look at the current state of reality, all of the pearl-clutching and the fears, the warnings and prognostications of genocide and economic depression and erasure of hard-won human rights, that is all I see: Death throes. But not of the systems or constructs that we have come to treasure and revere so deeply; not the death of democracy or equality or liberation.
I see the death of the patriarchy.
Specifically: The pale-skinned, heterosexual, and largely Christian male population that has engaged in a brutal, hegemonic regime for the better part of 2,000 years.
I see all of this brutality and cruelty, all of these forceful attempts to erase anyone who doesn’t look and think like them for exactly what they are: Temper tantrums; demonstrations of sheer terror, fear, and horror at the unthinkable.
What if we don’t run the show anymore?
Resistance to cruelty and brutality is always necessary, but I am left looking back at a hundred and fifty-odd years of resistance in primarily systemically-sound ways, and yet we have ended up at this inflection point anyway. I also don’t know if resistance, which implies the desire to defend, protect, and maintain a particular way of being, is applicable any longer. What are we resisting? Why are we trying to slow down the dismantling of systems designed primarily to oppress us? Are the small gains we’ve made worth saving?
Might we instead marshal our resources, our creativity, our inspiration to envision a different way of being?
I don’t have a great love for the U.S. nor any imperialist empire, and I have always believed that our out-sized influence post World War II has been more damaging, on a global, human level, than anything else. Over 8 billion people have been adversely impacted by the recent choice of 78 million to put an authoritarian regime into power in the U.S.
Ridiculously, less than 1% of the current human population has prioritized their own (primarily) short-sighted and (often) self-absorbed perspective over everyone and everything else. We should not be cool with that.
Since January 20th, 2025, I have seen so much ink spilled and breathlessness over the horrors that this authoritarian regime will bring upon all of us who do not adhere to their specific worldview of patriarchal white supremacy. And the fear is not lost on me; it reminds me of when Trump was last elected, or when Baby Bush was elected — all these refrains of “We survived Reagan, so we can survive this, too!” Except so many people did not survive Reagan. So I know that the existential horror is well-founded and well-earned.
Thousands of years of this same goddamn cycle, of power and greed literally Trumping everything, and for what? To be teetering on the abyss of a technological black hole of our own making? To see sickness take root in each of our bodies as we do our best to navigate and survive a polluted world constructed of stressors designed to inspire us to take refuge in something — anything — to give us relief? We are killing ourselves as a species, we are making our only home uninhabitable (for us — the cephalopods are waiting in the wings!) and we are doing whatever we can to distract ourselves from the terror of it all.
To me, this seems like the perfect time to do something different. The global underclasses have never had as much interconnection and ability to organize at any other time in history, so let’s do something with it. If the white supremacist patriarchal hegemony wishes to tear everything back to the studs because they’re terrified of the renovations we’ve made over the past century or so, then let them.
But we all know that it is much, much easier to destroy than it is to create. And we, the underclasses, are blessed with a diversity of thought, perspective, and experience that fuels creation. What does a liberated, multicultural world look like? How do we collaborate and create while still respecting and celebrating our differences? How do we take the innate beauty in each of us and transform it into interconnected global systems that prioritize health over wealth?
We can build parallel communities of care, systems that function alongside the crumbling vestiges of the past. There are far more of us than those who want to subjugate us, and they’re ultimately terrified that we will realize a core truth of their power: They only have what we have given to them. Their “wealth” is largely optics, and they are just cowrie shell rich. Once we move to devalue their “wealth,” their power is lost, and their wealth is just scattered across the sands.
And they know that. It is precisely why they are going around and breaking things.
Like ill-tempered toddlers, they are flailing about, kicking and screaming and desperately trying to control the situation. These are not the actions of people secure in their power; this is not strength. They know that their grip is loose and fragile, and they’re just hoping that we stay so wrapped up in their tantrums that we buy into their bullshit and continue to believe that they are the ones in control.
These are the death rattles. These are the hallucinations. These are the jerks and tremors and farts. Their hegemony is dying and they are so high on their own supply, they cannot see beyond the tiny little world that they have created for themselves.
But we can. So, let’s get to it.
Image credit: Double Death Strike by Shadow696
