Nothing Ever Happens
I love being a zoo.
It's something that I've been thinking about a lot lately. There's something weird about it compared to the other things about myself that I'm generally happy about. For instance, I'm also bisexual, and I think that that's neat, I have an appreciation for it, I'm happy that I'm bi. But I don't love it. Not in the same way. And that's weird to me.
I have friends, typically ones that are a little bit older, who do really care about it. They're in every single pride event, with a full rainbow outfit and a huge flag. They're there from the start of the day well into the next. And while definitely it's fun for them, it's fun for me too, it just hits different. For them it means more. I always dismissed it as just some people being more into that kind of that thing than others, but I get the difference now.
This may seem like a tangent, but today I want to talk about the idea of "nothing ever happens" If you've never heard of this, it's a concept that's been around for a little while, but that I've been seeing pop up more and more recently. The base philosophy of "Nothing Ever Happens" is that the *idea* of something happening makes a lot of money. It's a chance to get donations or drum up support or whatever other number of things that are good for certain people. However, something actually happening is bad. If the thing actually occurs, it's a problem, and problems are general bad for morale and expensive to fix. I know this concept is really abstract, so let me try to break it down with an example.
Say that there's some kind of cold war between two countries. This doesn't need to be between the US and the USSR, the historical context works but it isn't necessary. Say these two countries are flirting with the idea of a little conflict. Their politicians are making inflammatory comments and they're upping their military power and things are getting riled up. Now, obviously war is bad, but what's actually happening during that cold war period? Well, people are scared. And scared is an emotion that's easily exploited. People are more tuned into the news cycle for instance. It's important to know whether or not you're at real war, and so everyone needs to be aware of what's going on 24/7, and that's a lot of ads those people are then watching. Similarly, in the age of social media, people need to be tuned in all the time for updates in order to know by the minute what the most recent updates are. Which is even more ads. It's not just media that profits from that though. The government is suddenly able to stop spending so much money on boring things like social services and divert it towards much cooler things like weapons and fancy new explosives. There's also the ability to fund more pipe-dream kinda things like how the real life cold war was used to fund NASA and get America into space. The list goes on and on, but you get the idea.
But imagine those two countries actually ended up going to war. Now, that's bad for business. Great for the Lockheed Martins of the world don't get me wrong, but the cost isn't worth the benefit. Nobody's happy with the government during wartime, people stop buying things because they're scared and/or dead, infrastructure gets damaged. It's a hassle.
Now obviously on a moral level, keeping people scared enough to keep spending is bad. But, also, capitalism is one hell of drug, and so while it's hard to imagine that there would be a mass effort made to keep people in a state of perfect anxiety where they feel like they need to be tuned in and support the right things, but not enough that it becomes real, at the same time it's not necessarily impossible to think.
This concept of "nothing ever happens" exists in the positive as well. Politicians in the US have been talking about health care reform, student loan debt forgiveness, a million different things for forever. Every politician promises that they're the path forwards to a better country, but on a tangible, individual level does the country ever really get better? Sure, politicians are battling back and forth (between their well paid breaks) about the "big issues" but to you working your 9-5 every day just trying to pay your rent, it may as well be a TV show at this point.
If you couldn't guess, this whole thing was born in the United States of America, which is important because it gets into one of the obvious critiques of the idea. And that's that objectively things *are* happening. The concept was born in the 2000s and early 2010s where there were weren't really active conflicts in the world. Nowadays, I'm pretty sure if you ask a Ukrainian or a Palestinian whether or not something's happening they'll be pretty sure that there's stuff going on. The natural response to this is that while yes there are things happening, they're in other parts of the world. The scope is reduced to nothing ever happens "here" Which is probably why any Europeans reading this have been much more confused than any North Americans.
And on one hand, I get it. The US is always a little bit at war, but it's not like, a real war. It's more like they're in another country that only kinda wants them there fighting some kind of threat that they created. It's also typically a skeleton crew that's there mostly to "keep the peace" as opposed to the typical warfronts and actual attacks. More about precision strikes than battlegrounds. To someone from North America the closest that they've ever been to war was Pearl Harbor, which was years ago, and even still was on an island that feels disconnected. Before that it was what, 1812 when Canada and the United States were lining up to fire muskets across a field at each other? And it's not just war. It's anything really. For the average person, it's very easy to close your eyes and experience the same day over and over again. Especially if you feel like the media is lying to you to keep you hyper aware, and so you decide to tune out of it. To Gary Davis the potato farmer from Idaho with a wife and two kids, the biggest thing bugging you day to day is inflation, a decidedly intangible threat.
Hopefully me playing devils advocate here for a couple paragraphs hasn't actually convinced anyone, because to be clear this concept is absolutely bullshit. Even for Americans. Most people on social media, and therefore the people that we hear from most, tend to be either wealthy or left leaning. As such, when Roe v Wade was overturned, it was awful yes, but it didn't actually have a tangible effect on the lives of most people. Even women themselves. And for the women that it did effect, a lot of them were either supporters of the movement, or aren't talking about it in the same places that most people are looking. But that doesn't mean that it's not affecting them. There are women out there that are forced to carry pregnancies to term that they don't want and/or aren't capable of caring for. And that's horrible.
The heart of this movement is apathy. Apathy is defined as "A lack of interest, enthusiasm, or concern." It's not that you're necessarily lazy, or that you don't care. You're just.. Apathetic. If you're walking down the road and you see a moth caught in a spiderweb, it's not like you make some kind of judgement call on whether you prefer the life of a moth vs the meal of a spider in terms of whether or not you choose to intervene. It's just not relevant to your day to day. It is what it is. Hell, most of the time you probably wont even notice.
And, in a way, here's where I actually agree with "Nothing Ever Happens" I do think that we live in a society where we're constantly bombarded with news as loud and aggressively as possible in order to farm engagement. But, I think that in a lot of ways there's been unintended consequences to that. Yes people are generally tuned in to the world around them, but with so much noise all the time catastrophizing everything that's all it is. Noise. It loses its tangibility. It's like the boy who cried wolf. When every single story is presented as an emergency, you stop believing that it ever is. It's interesting, but it's not a real concern so much as it's something to talk about at work, or at the dinner table. When everything a politician said is promoted as "campaign promises" and yet when they're actually elected they aren't held accountable for doing any of the things they said, the important part becomes how big a promise they can make (without offending too many people), vs what they're actually doing.
But, to bring this back to the start, some people have lived through seeing things happen. In the queer community, mostly amongst younger folks, apathy has settled in pretty hard. Sure, sometimes your parents aren't super chill about you coming out as gay, or trans. But the experience of unsupportive parents has almost become part of the narrative in a way where it's a joke. You can just say "I had the queer experience growing up." and a lot of people are already going to understand what that means, at least to some degree. Sure, in the past couple years more than a couple countries have made homosexuality illegal, but it's not happening here. It's not happening to us.
And yet, queer rights aren't actually that old in America. Gays only got the right to marry federally in 2015. A lot of trans people still face discrimination daily for being themselves, but it's become part of the experience at this point. It sucks, but it is what it is. But not for those old school queers. The ones who were born before 2003 who lived in a world without the legal protections that exist today. People had to actively fight for the rights that we now have. People went to jail, had their lives destroyed, their families torn apart. People lost everything for us to be able to have those parades.
And so, when those people get to actually be in said parades. When they can express their gayness in a loud and public way, it's not just to celebrate being gay, it's to celebrate the victory over oppression that they won. It's an act of defiance.
And I think that's why I feel differently about being a zoo as opposed to being bisexual. I'm appreciative of being able to date either a guy or a girl, and be able to do so without serious repercussions. But outside of a few little homophobias I experienced here and there, that's just been my experience since day one. Nothing has changed. It's something that you could say that I take for granted.
My zoosexuality on the other hand is a whole different matter entirely. I face discrimination against that pretty much non-stop. Socially and legally, it's something that I have to think about all the time. And that pressure makes me care. It's hard to be apathetic to something that's happening to *you*. I mean, this magazine only exists because of zoophobia. If everything was great for us, I would never have had the motivation to spend all this time and energy running a project like this. I certainly have never in my life felt the desire to start the number one bisexuality lifestyle and advocacy magazine.
Bisexuality is something I have, Zoosexuality is something I have to fight for. I wake up thinking about the best way to help out other zoos and I fall asleep to dream about a better future. I am bisexual, but I AM zoosexual.
Apathy is powerful. And the idea that nothing ever happens is easy to fall into. But things do happen. Things are always happening. It might be hard to imagine a way where zoosexuality is even in the place that homosexuality is. But it can be. We can get there. But it's not going to be easy. It's so much easier to throw up your hands and say that change is impossible. But it's not. It's happened before, and it's happened again. It happens when enough motivated people care enough to make it happen.
And that's the message that I want to leave you with. Apathy is a thief. It's so easy to fall into complacency. To assume the way that things are are the way things that they'll always be. But it's not true. You have the power to change your life, and you have the power to change the world. If you want to learn a new skill and quit that job you hate to do something else, you can start today. If you want to get back into shape, you can start right now. If you want to create a society where zoo acceptance is normal, you can.
I love my zoosexuality, which is why I'm going to refuse to get apathetic and fight for it with everything I have. I'm going to be the change. And you can too.
