I'd like to buy the world some coke

But I'm broke. So let's try honesty.

'“I'd like to buy the world a home
And furnish it with love
Grow apple trees and honey bees
And snow white turtle doves.”

- Coca-Cola commercial, 1971

Every morning, I wake up with the same question.

How much more messed up has the world gotten while I was sleeping?

I scan a few headlines, and a few more questions — the usual suspects — come to mind.

Like how did a hate-mongering man-child become the most powerful human on Earth? How did a neo-Nazi techno-nihilist become the richest? Why are we poisoning the air and water and terrorizing our own planet?

Then I step downstairs and watch the doves and squirrels eating the walnuts and seeds my mom scatters in the garden every morning.

My mom has the same questions. It’s a mad world, we conclude. Or is it only a hurting world? Maybe there’s just a lot of hurting people.

Think about it. Have you ever met someone who’s just too much? Like, a real drama merchant. Sucks the oxygen out of every room. Demands everything, all the time. Just gives you a headache to be around. Odds are they’re wounded, bandaging themselves in self-delusion and lies.

My mom thinks you have to love those people even more. A test of one’s compassion, she says. I think you just have to get the fuck away from them.

Even better, as I tell her sometimes, “Everyone should just get high.” It saves me from having to do so just so I can deal with them.

Honestly, it might get people to chill a little. Maybe even not start wars on flimsy pretexts in order to distract people from the possibility that you might have done terrible things to girls in the company of a convicted pedophile. We’d all be doing a lot better if the U.S. president was on crack.

But the fact is the awful people in our lives do awful things not because they’re particularly nefarious. They just won’t own up to their trauma. They suck it all back and trudge on in life, refusing to have an honest reckoning with themselves.

That’s a cultural thing too.

Think about what white settlers did to Indigenous peoples — what Western culture still does to marginalized communities today. It’s an ongoing atrocity. But as a society, we suck it up and go on with living. Let’s pretend they’re bygones and let them be gone. Western culture will never come clean for the sins of its past. So they infect the present.

Now, try to imagine me. Maybe a couple of years ago. What trauma did I suppress — what darkness was I trying to keep down in my belly, without actually having the courage to confront? Whatever. I figured the past is the past. Except it seeped into every pore of the present. Refusing to confront my damage made me an awful human.

Violence begets violence. Trauma begets trauma. And hurting people hurt other people.

I think that’s why our house is currently on fire. Our collective culture can’t come clean. We treat our history of racialized violence, genocide, inequality and injustice as just that. History. Only it makes us wounded people today — people who can’t help but wound others.

We’re burning down the planet because we can’t reckon with ourselves. I set my house ablaze too. Because I couldn’t deal with my own trauma.

Though it’s all too easy to despair of the world, it isn’t hopeless. If an old addict like me can come clean, so can you. So can the world.

Maybe then we can all start tending to this garden and watching the doves and squirrels together. We can make it the brightest, greenest, cleanest place you could imagine.

And no one would have to smoke crack just so they can forget themselves.