I live in fear of being alive.

What will it take for us to get the mighty of the world to protect us against the existential threat to our survival?

Why are we still alive in these useless old bodies? This is a heartrending question to hear from old people who, in most other cultures of the world, would be the pride and joy of their communities, while in our own they are outcasts.

We all live under the constant threat of our own annihilation. Only by the most outrageous violation of ourselves have we achieved our capacity to live in relative adjustment to a civilization apparently driven to its own destruction.

We are living in a world that moves to extinction at a rapid pace, faster seemingly than we are able to organize against such self-destructive forces as the arms race. The threat of oncoming wars, possibly in Iran, the conflict in Afghanistan, and the U.S. financed intervention in Central America, etc., are a constant threat against which we need to mobilize our energies. Yet we are kept apart for crumbs.

We are facing an existential crisis... it will have a massive impact on our lives in the future, but also now, especially in vulnerable communities. And I think that we should wake up, and we should also try to wake the adults up, because they are the ones who — their generation is the ones who are mostly responsible for this crisis, and we need to hold them accountable.

Statistically the probability of any one of us being here is so small that you would think the mere fact of existence would keep us all in a contented dazzlement of surprise. We are alive against the stupendous odds of genetics, infinitely outnumbered by all the alternates who might, except for luck, be in our places.

I think I have a daily relationship with a sense of inadequacy. I've written about this in the past, but when you are a non-binary person in this country in this time, there's an imposter syndrome for being alive, because people don't think that we should exist. And so every day I have to remind myself they're wrong, because I'm breathing, they're wrong because I'm speaking. And so I have to remind myself not only am I enough, but the very system that has and weaponizes a criteria that would rather disappear me, that's not a system that will ever evaluate me again.