Fortnite in the Jungle

I live in the jungle, in a remote village in Costa Rica. And even here, where the parrots outnumber the people, in a country with no army, the same hauntings from our culture of violence invade the minds of our kids. My eleven year old son Teja has been ostracised at his school—a school which seeks to teach kids to connect with their deeper humanity—because he doesn't play Fortnite. We have traveled the world in search of a school that will hold our kids the way we want them to be held, the way all kids should be held, and yet the industrial marketing of video games that teach kids to be killers is not stopped by a mission statement. It's not the school's fault, maybe not even the parents'— nothing is harder than setting boundaries that go against the madness deemed normal in a civilization founded on and perpetuated by aggression.

Maybe it's not even the fault of the video game manufacturers, or the scientists they hire to maximize the addictiveness of their products. They’re all just doing their jobs, right? And nothing makes a profit like addiction, whether to sugar or opiates, alchohol or tobacco, video games or digital devices or the action of consumerism itself. We're all casualties of capitalism’s unending attack on our souls and planet. We’re all doing our best. And we all know that as long as we pay taxes to the empire and fail to resist its campaigns to capture us with every atom of our beings, we are complicit.

Our kid is not asking to play yet, but the violence of those games seeps into the way kids who play treat him, and infects the atmosphere of school with tones of chronic cruelty that crush his confidence. He comes home collapsed, dissociated, rude to us and angry with his brother over any little thing. This is the consequence of our abduction from the villages and lineages we belong in; the result of our severance from cultures that knew how to meet adolescence with initiation. We have taken our kids away from the fires they need and replaced them with first person shooter games. At a time when our kids should be walking into an emerald forest under the singing stars, at a time when their maturity depends on their journeying into the depths of themselves to find who they really are, and return with those jewels to the benefit of their community, we sedate them and sit them in front of screens. The cost of this cop-out may well be incalculable. The survival of the biosphere may well depend on whether or not we shepherd this generation through its meeting with the mystery that illuminates alternatives to the ecocidal status quo, whether or not we rescue them from their enslavement to distraction and provide them with opportunities to discover the cosmic context to their adolescent anguish, whether or not we mentor them across the thresholds and into the liminal states they seek, like our ancestors did for ninety nine percent of human history, right up until the anomoly of industrial culture.

How can we find out who we are when we feel so alone? How can we manifest our necessary offerings without our community of human and more than human kin? We are relational animals and our epidemics of suffering are symptoms of the fact that we have been cut off from the rituals that connect us with each other and nature. How can we become the medicine the world needs in this wasteland of concrete, without the old trees and rocks and rivers and wind that shaped us human? How can we make a shelter for the sanity of our children in a world that invades our brains every time we look at our phones? Perhaps we could start by giving them rites of passage that empower them instead of video games that hypnotize them. We can't stop the bombs, but we can plant seeds in the rubble. Who would the next generation become, if we agreed to say no to the numbing habits that turn us and our children into zombies? Maybe they would become bringers of peace, gardeners of love, revolutionaries of justice, soul healers, agents of transformation, and leaders committed to kindness, instead of pill-popping cogs of capitalism, and soldiers sent to the front lines by psychopaths, and drones working for a boss selling eight flavors of popcorn at the apocalypse.

But I am not hopeless, because last night the power went out. And every time that happens I am astonished by how our family shifts. How my noisy kids suddenly soften, become quiet, reverent, curious. I burned palo santo and sang songs and then my eleven year old offered to help clean the kitchen. We washed the dishes together by candlelight. This is what stitches me to what's real. This is what I am reminding myself of, in this note I had no plans to write. May I remember to light the candles with my kids, and build an altar at the center of my family that no screens can suck us away from. May I be committed to the inner work it takes to be awake, and to become the peace I want for my world and all our children. Because sooner or later the power will go out, and we’ll find out what power really is when we face that darkest night with only the light inside us.