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This fight will last forever.

< GLENN LIGON

"You have to be a bit outside of something to see it."

Oddly enough, I spent all day—ALL DAY—yesterday struggling to remember a word:

Exploitation.

I was writing a script for a gutter cleaning company and I devised a hilarious-to-me scenario where kids come back from summer and have to write an essay about what they did.

One kid talks about how gross and boring it was to hold the ladder for his father while he cleaned out gutters full of muck.

Another kid in the back of the class starts to heckle him.

“Your dad shoulda got [CLIENT NAME REDACTED], bro!”

Hilarious. To. Me.

I work with a producer/audio engineer named Lewis (HE IS THE BEST) to shape my bags of words into a powerful, audible magnet of consumerism and so I usually make production notes to help the final spot get as close to what’s in my head as possible.

I asked Lewis: hey, do we have access to child voice actors?

As if I was asking for a pencil.

His response, verbatim, was:

Ummmmmmm I personally don’t work with any child voice actors and generally don’t believe kids should be working in any capacity.

And so I forgot the word exploitation in my grossly absent-minded attempt to wield it upon children.

Like walking downhill. You think it’s the easy part, that you don’t have to think about it or put effort into it, and then suddenly you lose control of your own body and tumble forward.

This is how we got here.

The here that we are all dreading, avoiding, or for the more advanced—the here that we are grieving.

The here that is so filled with terror and chaos that we’ve begun to harden to the sounds of bombs and the blood of children. To revise our principles and negotiate our responsibilities.

To arrogantly believe that we can still lockpick our future.

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I ritually read Mariame Kaba’s newsletter (and anything else she writes) and recently she quoted Professor and Economist, Maria da Conceicao Tavares, who said:

“Maybe when you are 20 years old you can believe in revolution, socialism and even the resurrection of the flesh. But have no illusions; the struggle is permanent. I have fought for fifty years and I will continue fighting until I die. That is all I know how to do. And I hope you will join me.”

My whole life, I’ve been privileged to act as if I’m gonna fight, and then win.

And then end up somewhere that I can rest.

I think there are many of us who operate this way. That if we choose to fight, then naturally we’ll end up somewhere.

Somewhere, where we can “go back to normal.”

I don’t think so.

This fight is going to last our lifetime.

Our entire lifetime.

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(And of course, it took a Black woman to get that into my thick head.)

Angela Peoples holds a sign highlighting the issue of intersectionality within the feminist movement.

I always want to be a fighter. But I am not always a fighter.

Too often, I am corrupt, complicit, or cynical.

But I want to fight.

Even if I don’t know what it means, in the hypocritical terms of day-to-day logistics like paying bills, commuting to work, and signing up for soccer camp.

But if this fight takes a lifetime?

Then I’ve got time to figure it out. No excuses.

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So smoke 'em if you got 'em.