by Jessica Walters
As I walked along the sidewalk up the hill to my mailbox one winter evening, a pickup truck was driving down the hill. The driver must have noticed me because he dimmed his high-beam headlights. It was such a small act, nearly insignificant, and yet it communicated an awareness that tipped over into kindness.
It’s these kindnesses, however small, that mean much to me, even as my attention is drawn to ever-larger escalating crises. Indeed, political crises with their ensuing chaos constantly vie for attention. Collins Dictionary chose permacrisis as the word of the year in 2022. While Collins defines the word as “an extended period of instability and insecurity, especially one resulting from a series of catastrophic events,” the BBC puts this slant on it, defining the word as, “the feeling of living through a period of war, inflation, and political instability.” The addition of the word “feeling” is an interesting choice. Because there’s a sense in which (some) of us know we have it pretty good, that we are educated and well fed beyond our grandparents’ wildest dreams. Still, there is a pervasive feeling that all is not well, and this feeling can render us passive and immobilize us to do or change anything.
The feeling of permacrisis has even invaded commercials. While watching the Stanley Cup Playoffs I noticed that several commercials depict people doing basic tasks like shopping for groceries, going out for dinner, or cooking. These tasks are seen to be overwhelming and unmanageable before going terribly wrong. In one Skip-the-Dishes commercial, a young family man cooks for his friends on the lawn but the BBQ suddenly bursts into flames. Luckily, Jon Hamm best known for Mad Men, enters with a fire extinguisher and says, “Shoulda Skipped it.” The message is that cooking leads to disaster and ordering out is always the better option.
The most insidious aspect of these commercials isn’t just that they further the feeling of permacrisis but that they portray common daily tasks and our very touch, as poisonous. The subtext is that everything we lay a hand to only adds to mounting crisis. The remedy, as proposed by these commercials, is to leave every perceived difficulty to the professionals. Yet if we scale this idea up, it can inform how we engage (or disengage) with politics and sounds like, “The country may not be going in a direction that I like, but surely someone will fix it, someone with more power or expertise than me.”
But large problems are very rarely fixed by employing large solutions and we need only look at vaccine and mask mandates in both the US and Canada to see how well large-scale solutions were received.
So, what do we do? Most solutions to large problems start with the tedious and loving work of our hands. Meaning, any large-scale change first begins with small-scale choices changes. For example, I cannot solve the problem of climate change, but I can volunteer for invasive weed pulls with my local environmental group. I cannot solve the problem of loneliness, but I can visit my housebound friend. I cannot solve the problem of malnutrition, but I can bake an extra loaf of bread for a neighbor. Yes, these acts are so small as to seem insignificant, but what’s the alternative? If we wait for someone to do something, we miss the opportunity to participate in creative solutions by the work of our hands. And this is a great loss indeed.
Jessica Walters has an MFA in Creative Writing. Her work has been published in Mockingbird, Foreshadow, Ormsby Review, Still, Scintilla, Solum, and her short story “Glass Jars” was shortlisted for the Mitchell Prize for Faith and Writing. Jessica is also the Fiction Editor for Radix Magazine.