I’m trying to buy some fabric right now. Not a lot of it, just a couple of metres. I’m hoping I can get it secondhand or deadstock, for sustainability reasons, but I also have a very specific visual in mind, so one of these desires might have to give. Eventually. Not yet. Not while there are more buttons to click.
The thing about the internet, right, is there’s no end to it. If I were in a fabric shop, I’d eventually run out of fabrics to look at. I could either suck it up and pick one or go to another shop, but soon I’d run out of shops, too, and I really would need to just get something. But online, I can have a tab open for every fabric shop in the country and then some. There’s always another keyword to search. Always another filter to explore. Always a feeling that I haven’t exhausted every single option.
Beside all my fabric-browsing tabs are news sites. Al Jazeera. CTV News. CBC.ca. The BBC. The LA Times, leftover from my obsessive tracking of last month’s fires. Divorced from the confines of a printed newspaper, the news is equally unending. Did you know that the president of the United States nearly launched a trade war with Canada last weekend? Probably not, because there’s too much news. Canadians know, though. Canadians are pissed off.
I’m not looking at every fabric on the internet. I’m not looking at every news story either. We only get so much brain capacity, we have to limit our intake somehow. I have citizenship of two countries and live in a third. I physically cannot keep up with everything happening in all these places and in the rest of the world.
The US government alone is responsible for more news than I can follow. Maybe you know more about the president’s domestic havoc-wreaking than I do. I know of his horrific anti-trans policies and dismantling of food safety and public health organisations, but I haven’t followed those stories as closely as the foreign policy moves.
Maybe a trade war with a longtime ally doesn’t ring the same alarm bells as, say, his harrowing rhetoric about further displacing Gazans. That makes sense on multiple levels: despite the ceasefire, the humanitarian crisis in Gaza is immediate, and the threat of US-imposed (rather than, as it has been thus far, -funded) ethnic cleansing of Palestinians is a continuation of the near-constant stream of terror we have, through our screens, witnessed in Palestine for almost a year and a half.
I still find it deeply alarming. The outright suggestion that Canada should become the 51st state. The explicit threat of annexation by economic devastation. The similar schemes being laid for Greenland, for Panama. This government seeks both to isolate Americans from the rest of the world and to expand into other sovereign territories. As my partner pointed out, during this president’s first term, people rejected his opponents’ cries of fascism on the basis that fascism is expansionist, and he wasn’t. That defense no longer stands.
I still feel under-informed, even about the issues I’m following most closely. I open another tab, read another news story, click through another link to another perspective. I search another keyword and start the cycle over. I never reach the back page of the newspaper. And I still need time to buy fabric.
Photo by Ivann Schlosser on Unsplash
