All the stories in my formative years were about people saving worlds. Alien worlds, this world, the future via time travel, the past to fix the present. My first forays into science fiction focused on world-ending disasters, too, because that was what you had to write, right? Only I found it hard, impossible. “How can one person really affect something as huge as the world?”
I went to college, and I majored in Environmental Geology – a new major that never caught on so I say “Geology” when people ask. I picked my college major to Save the World through environmental science. I hadn’t realized that no one was hiring anyone to save the world, and I wouldn’t be saving anything if I couldn’t pay rent. When the stark reality of my post-college options hit during my senior year, it plummeted me into a depression so bad I almost didn’t graduate.
Then I was working three minimum-wage jobs and all my money was gone at the end of the month with nothing to show for it and everything I tried to write seemed brainless and disorganized and plotless… forced thousand-word meanders in pencil on old school spiral notebooks, exhausted and uninspired, like treadmill runs, just trying to keep the muscles.
I remember fervently wishing aliens would attack. If aliens attacked the world, see, and the only way to defeat them was, say, a super proficiency at Tetris, I could do that. I could save the world, and my life would mean something.
“I must have no real problems if I’m wishing for that,” I wrote in my journal.
I got a decent job and then a good job and a better job. I finished paying off my student loans and started having savings and I started really writing again. (Devotees of the Starving Artist or You Have to Suffer myths don’t realize the cognitive load starving takes.) I was able to work on my craft. I started creating plots that fit my characters, challenges big enough to seem insurmountable but small enough to be within the character’s abilities to solve.
Yet still I wanted to save the world. I went to marches and volunteered for political campaigns. I went to park clean-ups and food drives. None of it seemed to add up to saving anything. In 2016, like many progressives, I vowed to devote as much energy as I had to social justice. I joined a new social justice initiative at my place of work… and our first three meetings were all about our mission statement and how many letters to include in “LGBTQA+”. I don’t know that the group ever ended up doing something, but I’d moved on before it did. I wrote post cards to voters and I donated to causes and I signed petitions and went to more marches and none of it seemed to end up mattering. I was a foot soldier desperate for instruction.
It’s Thanksgiving in the US, and my acquaintances are making jokes on social media about racist uncles and political arguments over the table. The fraught emotions of family. How can we unite our globe when we can’t even unite people who share a grandmother? How do I save the world when I can’t even save dinner?
I got into arguments, I tried to be the reasoned debater, I tried to change minds. I didn’t. How could I save the world when I couldn’t even convince my dad that asking for $15 an hour was not somehow completely unrelated to his own entire life committed to unions? Because the number looked big to him, and he was old and comfortable now and didn’t understand why people couldn’t be happy when he made $10 an hour as a union laborer. Bring up inflation and you get a rant, but no cognitive connection.
Because everyone knows that their opinions are reasoned and careful and yours are slapdash bunk you absorbed from some website. Everyone knows that “We” are better than “Them” and also there is no them, only us, one world with one environment and one increasingly-connected population on the brink of killing itself.
How do we save us from us? What can one middle-class character do? I donate blood and I donate food and still I feel I shouldn’t be enjoying my nice warm meal because there are others starving. Shouldn’t enjoy my safe house when others are homeless. Shouldn’t be telling others online what I think they should do when I don’t know what to do, myself. I make mistakes and I say all the wrong things and no matter how I try I can’t make words perfect. Words aren’t magic. Their only power is to transmit thoughts, and they do that through simplification and metaphor and errors are inherent.
And the news unspools with the exact scenarios my bloodthirsty high school history teacher told us would spark World War Three as he made us memorize ICBM payloads and the affects of fallout. There are still Mr. Lomasnys in the world, making mushroom clouds out of cotton balls and carefully crushing Monopoly houses for their dioramas, eager to be a survivor, to see countless strangers, even friends, destroyed for their glorious story.
I shudder in revulsion, then remember: This is his version of saving the world. To be the repopulator. The protector of a tiny group of “Good” people, in a world where people can be known to be good or bad. A world were people are one or the other, not like my world, where we are all a mess of both.
Lately, I think, all I can do is quietly remind ourselves to empathize. To be kind to the person you think doesn’t deserve kindness. To question your own opinions constantly, to hear out other opinions and let them know you are hearing them out. To tolerate diversity. To tolerate anything other than intolerance.
We’re told to be uncomfortable, to sit with our discomfort, but it’s hard. Some days I just want to talk to someone who agrees with me on everything. I’m ashamed of that, too.
In the past week, I saw social media posts complaining “American Liberals are silent on this issue!” and also “American Liberals should shut up about this issue!” … on the same issue. And I wanted to scream. But then I remembered… these people are both expressing from their point of view. It’s not about me, and social media is not my marching orders. They are seeing different parts of the diverse mass. Some are silent and some are too loud. Depends who is looking and who is hurt by which.
If my home was being bombed, if my loved one was held hostage, I would want random strangers to not just care but to drop what they were doing, to rush to help. And you should always treat others as you wish to be treated, so I drop everything and I …
I go to marches and make donations and feel I have done nothing at all.
Maybe social media won’t doom us. Maybe this is how we learn empathy at last? Because every message is seen by everyone, every side is listening in, and there will always be a new crop of young people with certainty in their hearts and a lack of tact to repeat the lesson.
How many stories do we read about saving the world without doing a thing to save our own? How many time-travel dramas about saving the present, when we are right now protagonists who can affect the future, can save it, with everything the time-traveler has but foresight and surety?
It takes an author to create surety. Real people have to work without it.
It takes a lot of set-up to create a situation where a character can save the world – the crisis has to bend around them. We talk a lot about the hope that science fiction can show a better way, but it’s awfully short on practical instruction for saving the world. Much easier to have your character rescue a child, save a precious memento. Something small, something that can be held.
I give blood and right the sign that has fallen in the wind. I pick up some other dog’s poop while walking mine. I feel a little better about myself. Maybe that’s all there is – small moments of doing something a little bit good, as many as you can.
I still wish those aliens would show up.
