[413] From Ear to Ear

I kind of hope this is the last time I ever have to talk about this. It strikes me that I've only ever really danced around or made weird jokes instead of digging in. I've just gone through another round of watching fucked up immediate and accidental death videos as well as a few beheadings.

When I say another round, I don't mean to suggest it's like a hobby. As with many things that garner my attention, these videos made it to the front page of reddit in a forum where someone explicitly asked for them. I think there's more of a “general fascination” with something so fucked up and foreign to our daily reality than people having secret killer fantasies and getting off or something. Nonetheless, I'm sensing a ton of things that also need to be said, at least by me.

First, the mess of comments. Someone will point out that “we all could be like them.” It's a version of this that usually follows a discussion of WWII and the Holocaust. Then there's the gung-ho types who are positively sure the “answer,” as perverse as that feels to type at the moment, is to meet violence with violence. I think what strikes me the most, is that no one speaks to how afraid they would be. What seems like the real driving force for what makes these videos so jarring barely gets a nod.

At some level, everything we engage with is a kind of illusion. You can only focus on a spot the size of your thumb on your outstretched arm. Your eyes black out every time they change direction. You can stir all form of emotions from characters, real or animated. You buy into ideas about education or government that fulfill a kind of need for structure and purpose where the kind of depravity in these videos essentially disappears. To some extent, the videos act as an illusion, keeping the violence “over there.”

Part of me feels like I should be, or am, really fucked up that I could watch this shit and then switch back to Bunheads once I get done writing this. To hear someone's final “Oh God!” as a building crashes down on top of them. To see the blood gushing from a man's face after he shoots himself in the head. To watch 100 people burn alive. But I feel my “entertainment” has been helping me cope with things like this my entire life. Worse than that though, I feel like death isn't the worst thing some of these people could be experiencing.

I think there's kind of a “dream” end goal. To die in a bed in your sleep, right? Old as shit, basically egging it on, after you've achieved your numerous goals and know you have a few grandkids. Not mid speech with your eyes rolling to the back of your head. Not because a waitress accidentally sets you on fire or a brick falls off a truck Final Destination style and instantly kills your wife after hurling through your windshield.

Maybe reality is too scary. Maybe it really is just way too much of a random shit show to justify anything less than the measures we have in place to play along like we'll all get the solemn and dignified death bed scene. I speak to ridiculing fear very often. Granted, I'm usually poking fun at your inability to do little things like ask someone out or change your shitty job, but to your body, to your mind, fear is fear. “Irrational” fear still has consequences.

Take recent news. Have you ever been a cop who's been afraid? They aren't supermen after all. I'm certainly not saying anything less than a rabid liberal would about gun violence, police training, or poor black kids, but I also know on average cops die sooner than most people just from stress. To look at the moment, or 6, he fires in that vacuum is to sort of absolve the overall culture and context. Justified? Answer reduces to opinion. Understandable? Predictable? Alterable? Questions that encompass more than what you think of the cop as a person.

I'm drifting a little too far.

I look at these videos and I don't think to myself “this is evil,” and obviously not for the accident ones. To me, the essence of evil lies. That's not an incomplete thought. It's to look at something like this and to deny the world that created it. Evil is patient. It lies in wait. It unfolds in every look the other direction. In every “I could never!” It's when you refuse to learn. Horrible shit happens for insanely foreseeable reasons. And every time you absolve yourself of a little or a lot of the responsibility for creation, you ensure the shit will keep coming.

I've expressed a number of times that you need to feel it. And, I'm beginning to think that's wrong. Because I feel it, barely, but what makes me concerned or guilty or sick is attempting to own it. And because no one can make you, I don't see “the world” becoming a better place. How many people want to be responsible for this random, violent, and terrifying chaos? I haven't talked myself out of the prospect, but fuck me for the amount of unbelievable shit I'd be getting myself into. Help?