Turning the native population & cultures into amorphous caricatures made it easier to spoon-feed the idea of Manifest Destiny being okay to us as kids instead of being honest about genocide.
I cannot overstate how fucked up I am today. I’m operating on almost no sleep and I’m pound for pound more fatigue than person. But we needed cat food.
So I went in and the worker did a little shudder as she’s finishing up with the last customer.
“I had one of those days yesterday,” I commiserated.
“No, it wasn’t them, I was just- it’s kinda heavy.”
I waited.
“My coworker just passed a way,” she admitted. “I just saw her name on a receipt, it hit me kinda hard.”
I nodded. I was painfully aware how little energy was in my tank, and empathy uses so much, but this is not the kind of thing I am capable of brushing off. “Have you ever read Terry Pratchett?”
She looked very confused by the apparent non sequitur. Shook her head.
“He’s a really famous fantasy author,” I told her. “Very funny. But in one of his books he has a system kind of like telegrams. And if someone dies while operating that system, their name is put into it. Their name goes back and forth across the line forever, and he posits that people aren’t really gone as long as we see echoes of them and remember their names.
“That’s what it’s like when you saw her name on that receipt, right? It’s her memory, still going.”
Her eyes got wider as I went on. When I finished she gave herself a little shake. “That’s. That’s really beautiful, thank you for that. I. Wow.”
