Back to the Future
Is this why living feels so hard?
Michael J Fox has a lot to answer for. Those Back to the Future films fed an optimism that ultimately brain-washed us into believing that if we could just go back—adjust a few things—we would return to a better version of what was ahead. I was the gullible kid that believed that greed and power would eventually die-off because injustice couldn’t sustain itself forever. I harnessed girl guide fervor in the belief that Good always wins over Evil.
When I was growing up, Year 8 teachers told us to imagine a future we would want. A future that built something new—something we might look forward to. It was the 80s, and there was a belief that through the power of our imaginations alone we would find our way toward something better and that progress was inevitable.
It has taken me a long time to realise that we don’t move in a straight line like that. Not a straight line, at least, that travels back and forth from a past to a future. Instead, we circle.
We return time and time again, to the lives we thought we had outgrown. We repeat the same lessons, the same insights, the same declarations—it will never be this bad again.
And yet, here we are.
Perhaps the idea of progress belongs most comfortably to those who don’t feel the full force of history when it returns. For those who have been buffered from the full outcome of this repetition and who can afford to believe in this naive concept of evolution, it feels so much more comfortable to believe that we have grown. But this ensures that we remain ignorant to the racism that is alive and well and living next door with two miniature poodles and a massive TV.
But those who have lived under racism, colonial violence, patriarchy, imperial power— they know something else entirely. They know the pattern. They know that we don’t move forward and instead, we are line-dancing through time —one step forward, two steps back.
Leadership, here in the country – that now reflects leadership across the expanse of this world – is frightening because it is frightened. We know how this fear works its dark magic when we feel it in our own lives. When we are scared we protect ourselves by shrinking the world around us. And a leadership that is threatened by difference, by change, by a future in which they see themselves as no longer centred, leads with fear and shoots at every shadow.
Like Narcissus, political leaders have become captivated by their own reflection— convinced that their image must be preserved at all costs.
My fourteen-year-old wakes up each day and points to the absurdity of it all. He sees it clearly. The contradictions. The repetition. The way this moment echoes something from a history he has only read about, but can smell as the rancid aromoa that it is. There’s a kind of clarity that comes with being fourteen and relatively new to the world when you can see it all so much more clearly - before you’ve been worn down into accepting what shouldn’t be acceptable.
The fact that this country still responds to the dog whistle of racism—that it can be summoned so easily— should not be surprising. And yet, it is.
Maybe that’s the problem. Not that history repeats, but that some of us are still surprised when it does.
What would Marty McFly make of it all? No hover boards but instead, a whole lot of Biff Tannens wrecking the joint and being rewarded for it. It is heartbreaking to think that we are living Back to the Future II’s dystopian vision of a Crapsack World. A world that was once beautiful but reuined by greed and desire and the receipt of a world almanac that confirmed a future, that really never existed.
But, now what? Are we too worn by the repetition of history? Are we tired with the realisation the while we might get rid of the rats on Monday, there are always more to take their place on Wednesday? Have we lost the Back to the Future moral fortitude that was sadly built on falsehoods, that believed the world would find its way back, and to see itself in this future anew.
We are lost, that is clear. Finding our way home might need to wait til next week when Daniel will write some words to make it all make sense. Until then, can we get over our desire to ignore our past, creating mythology in its place so that we might easily recognise that when it repeats, as Split Enz tried to trick us into denying, it might only be stopped if we wake up and stop dreaming.
If you frightened Me.
I will frighten You.
And only then, might we be able to control the world.