April 14, 2022: Everything Everywhere All At Once, For Real

What will you choose?

Yesterday, I did something I haven’t done in three years: I took myself to the movies. I had seen some exceptional raves about Everything Everywhere All at Once, and decided that I and my KN95 needed to go see it. It was late morning, I had the theater to myself, and oh my goodness– this film.

I’m not going to give anything away, because it is one of the best films, if not the best film, I’ve ever seen.

What I will say, though, is this: it requires the contemplation of what we would choose if we could choose to live every possibility that could ever exist for us.

The key debate, indeed the focal point of the film, is what to do when we have everything, feel everything. It becomes so overwhelming that checking out completely beckons to us. Do we choose that, or do we choose instead to have the one thing that serves all of us, with all its drama and imperfection and ups and downs and loss and communion– do we choose love? Do we choose to save our joy?

I left the theater so shattered that I had to collect myself. The film is so of this moment that it has to be seen to be understood.

Because here we sit, teetering on the edge of nihilism, but inherently capable of creating a world where we cultivate intimacy and care and love and principles of collective partnership and community, where optimism and hope could reign supreme, and yet there’s STILL, shockingly, a debate about which way humanity should go.

We have every possibility available to us, and yet we’re still careening toward destruction.

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This moment is a lot.

We are in another Covid surge right now that is basically being ignored. Disabled folks have been dismissed, left to fend for themselves, by all public policy. More than a million Americans have died in the last two years. We have no public grieving. We have no consecrated means of addressing that loss.

Atrocities in Ukraine are a daily occurrence. Fascism is plowing through the United States. Oklahoma banned abortion this week. Violence against LGBTQ+ folks and their families is on the rise. A shooting on the New York City subway has now become a leverage point for still more policing, when police don’t stop crime, rarely solve crime, and didn’t even catch the man who did it– a bodega worker did. 

And then yesterday, city officials in Grand Rapids, Michigan released a video of a white police officer shooting a Black man named Patrick Lyoya in the head while pinning him to the ground. The officer had pulled him over for a purported license plate issue, and turned off his bodycam before executing Lyoya at point blank range. It is enraging and grievous and disgusting, and all I can think about is Patrick Lyoya and his family.

That we are still here in the place where this all still happens is enough to make anyone give up hope.

But giving up is a choice to succumb to nihilism, and it’s not one I can make.

The choice to battle instead for something better, to fight for love and for joy and against systems of hatred and oppression, is the only one there is at moments like this. And choosing love and joy is not weakness– it’s actually the only way out. 

The risks that come with this path are serious. 

But why are we here if not to fight for the right of every person to be safe, to love and be loved, to live in joy and through the full spectrum of their existence with dignity, to be accepted and seen, to be protected and held, what are we doing if we’re not fighting for THAT?

In the face of everything everywhere all at once, what will we choose to do to guarantee that possibility?

Every next step can be a choice toward an end to this. Every next step can be a choice to fight for all of us to have what so few of us are guaranteed. Every next step can propel us toward reunion and humanity and dignity and love.

Today is a day to take the next step.