I want to see certain people dead. I
want them punished for thought crimes. I want them to feel the impact
of letting their blatantly destructive and psychopathic thoughts
provoke or inhibit their actions. We’re protected from our
potential to think in this country. We all get to wear the same
clothes and hide how little money we have. Wouldn’t want to let
troubling ideas about poverty in now would we? We get to go to
supermarkets and pick from an endless stream of food that will
certainly still be there next week. Who could be hungry with so much
abundance? We get “debates” about some of the most serious issues
facing our planet which help to confuse yet superficially involve us
just enough to feel “informed.”
I don’t want to die. This is my
starting point. Before I want a business, before I want to enable my
friends and be creative and spend my life blissfully unaware of how
many honey bees are left on the planet, I don’t want to die.
Whenever I learn just a tad bit more about some massive company or
environmental issue or, god forbid, a comment from a politician, I’m
depressingly reminded of how this may not be just a taken for granted
meager goal. Bad ideas, your ideas, can and will kill people. If I
have to force feed one idea into every person I meet, I want them to
appreciate that one.
I just got done watching Gasland and
Collapse. These are two documentaries about fracking and oil. I am
just floored at the amount of things that can be going wrong at any
one time. I wrote once that I wondered why people couldn’t just be
“fill in the blank” problem, but instead compounded their
stupidity with failure after failure really trying to convince you of
your naivety in befriending them. At least that terminates to just
being annoying or some fight. When a company is destroying the
planet, it isn’t like they just cut down a few trees or
accidentally squashed a rabbit with a tractor. They kill ALL the
trees, poison ALL the fish, contaminate the air, their employees, and
the animals that are destined to be your next burger.
You know when I say things like “this
isn’t my opinion” and “I think?” I should make a greater
effort to reference or link to the reports and documentaries so you
can maybe understand what I really mean is “the numbers say”
“common sense says” “so and so actual scientist points out”
and “you’re dumb if you try to argue against…”
Do you understand even the concept of
interconnectedness? There is no just doing one isolated thing. You
are jointly personally and collectively responsible for everything.
When you hold even one horrendous idea, it colors everything you
think and say. When you become so emotionally invested and
argumentatively entrenched in an idea, and absolutely refuse to
change or understand even one reason that you should, you’re the
kind of person I want to see dead. This is not the same as saying I’m
going to go out of my way to kill you. I just want you to experience
the consequences of your thoughts.
But let’s make this more pleasant. Oh
don’t worry; I’ll get back to dramatic in a minute. Let’s run
with dual personal and collective responsibility. If I’m to
understand my position in life correctly, much of my present
happiness relies on the unseen, untraceable, massively complex
interplay of the world at large. My food, shelter, entertainment, and
less I forget porn are practically handed to me on a silver platter.
Therefore, while I want to see bad ideas punished, I don’t want to
fall to my own edict by genuinely thinking that death always is or is
even necessarily the best method to go about fixing things. While it
can be effective, it doesn’t translate well as an acceptable
option.
So I can blog. I can learn. I can read
more, grow my fat pretentious head and struggle to contribute. Key
word there is struggle. Do we forget that people lie? They do it
comfortably, to our faces, to our congress, at the expense of
themselves and others all the time. It is these people that we are
struggling against. It’s when a scientist has to defend facts about
environmental impact against a lobbyist or hopelessly ignorant
politician. It’s when an investigative journalist gets threatened
or mocked by fanaticized media outlets. But it’s especially when we
don’t even voice how and why we support something or someone.
I read statuses all the time about
shitty days, forgetting phones, delicious food or some random comment
that you “probably had to be there” for it to be supremely funny.
I get maybe two or three friends who post about things they support
or people they respect. Does this mean you don’t care? Probably
not, but it does mean there is something going on culturally or
personally that is either distracting, fear inducing, or generating
what I think may be a dangerous level of apathy. I want you to be an
expert in something and flood facebook with what you think is most
relevant and most helpful. I would love for ideas about how and why
to share information to change.
I want things to change because I’m
capable of identifying problems. Something tells me you might have a
knack for it too. For example, is it a good thing to pollute drinking
water? No? Good answer. So when someone can light their water on fire
because of fracking in their backyard, we can agree a problem exists.
I think every problem we face is this simple. I would even invite the
exercise of breaking down moral questions and ideas into economic and
psychological terms. Our well-being absolutely rests on keeping a
balance between what we fuck up and what we do right. It depends on
us actually understanding and knowing the consequences. It’s not
how we feel about the subjects; it’s what we can show to be true.
The fundamental laws of nature are at play and will react.
What are your priorities? Is it just
getting out of school, or finding a job, or becoming the next leader
or member of some group? Do you want to resolve some conflict with
your boy/girlfriend or family member? Do you want to keep hidden some
secret? Do you care more about the injustice to Cambodian tree frogs
more than life itself? Are you concerned that maybe you haven’t
even sat down and prioritized what the hell it is you’re doing and
why? Would you still manage to respect yourself if you were honest
with what you would find and are currently finding to be answers?
I’m always asking because I’m
frequently shocked and dismayed by the answers. I get people who are
confident and comfortable telling me they want to be ignorant. I
don’t really care what the topic is, the capacity to feel
comfortably and confidently ignorant scares the living fuck out of
me. That’s my competition. I get people that just want to grow
balls enough to tell their parents about a tattoo. I get people who
are concerned about problems that I can’t even define because they
are so particular or nuanced it would take weeks or months of study
to find a clue. There’s the “kind-of-right” people who may hold
a view I can agree with or see some logic to, but have convoluted,
contradictory, or simply back-assed ways of arriving to their
position. “I’m an atheist because Mark chapter 5 conflicts with
Luke chapter 2, and because all Catholics are pedophiles.”….so
close.
I need help. I don’t have the
patience for scenarios like the example of above. I can’t learn
every detail about every problem alone. I need help drawing the
interconnectivity map so that we can isolate the specific problems
and actually change things. I want to stop hating everything and
everyone and be a part of something greater than any one hero’s
effort. I don’t want to see our food run out, water get rationed,
or the atmosphere disappear before you’ve found the motivation. If
you could maybe do me a courtesy as well and defriend me, tell me to
fuck off, and/or disappear if this is too hard or dramatic a
proposition for you.
We are a society that champions death.
How often are we collectively cheering for something? I don’t see
100 statuses hoping to usher in the new clean burning fuel into their
cars. I see cheers and hear fireworks for when 10 years of death and
economic strife “culminate” in the alleged death of a
“mastermind” who said, “use box cutters to run planes into
buildings.” Sending such a dramatic message about greed and
hypocrisy is worth noting beyond racist country songs and redneck
pronouncements of your target shooting proficiency. There are STILL
people who would deny or never care to know how we used to support
Osama amongst the myriad of other random thugs and dictators around
the world.
We don’t want peace. We want our
naïve ideas about peace. We want to be idealists and to simply state
our ever-lacking opinions. We want to leave everyone blind with an
eye for an eye. We want everyone to know how angry we are and for
them to play along like it isn’t a reflection of how sad we are. We
want to stop being bombarded with this seemingly endless stream of
problems and wait around for “them” “they” or “someone
smarter than me” to fix it. We want to be right beyond reason
because it makes us feel good. We want mommy and daddy to pick up
after us. We want to create personal drama to feel involved and
important. Fuck your feelings and fuck you.
I say death to America because America
is killing itself, and the rest of the world, with its bad ideas. The
country started for reasons. It lasted and progressed and became an
example by extending and fighting for freedom and equality. It used
to respect science and had its points where the environment mattered
as well. We currently get so caught up in buzz words and
catch-phrases that identifying, let alone solving issues, seems
non-existent. Obamacare, socialism, death-taxes, death-panels, and
drill baby drill are not acknowledging the failings of health care,
taxing the rich appropriately and preventing an economic collapse, or
protecting the environment. We don’t punish the liars or the
propaganda. We punish ourselves and the people we pretend to care
about.
I want to stop playing this kind of
game. I want to start from “Look, I know you’re an asshole,
ignorant, non-caring, lazy, afraid, and eventually going to kill me,
so these are the conditions you have to play under in order for that
not to happen.” Your “rights” are as valuable as money. They
exist when there is an illusion of control and order; it’s only
when enough people adopt a relative standard. Your quality of life is
up for grabs. More importantly, so is mine.
And clearly, I have no capacity to be a
diplomat, so I could use an expert in that as well.
