You’re going to be punished.
When you opt to express an ideal, generally, all that will be available to you is a kind of painful fallout.
Let’s consider race relations. It’s hard enough for a comfy white person to really think or attempt to embody what it means to live under stop and frisk. It’s damn near impossible to think about doing things 3 times as good to register as ½ as good in the mind of the person you’re working for. All you’re looking at is an opportunity to look like you’re mocking perpetual pain and indentured servitude.
I think empathy is so exceedingly hard because, at base, it involves not wearing someone’s shoes, but falling asleep with a kind of fear and despair that you’ve literally never hinted at knowing. I’m a 6’ 2” 220lb white male who’s never once thought a shot was going to enter my windshield upon being pulled over. Most of my life has seen argument and strife trickle out before it ever reaches my ears. Why? Because there’s an implied threat of violence that belays our interactions. Not only can I fuck you up, I can get away with it. Not like I plan to, but it’s a kind of implicit cultural sensibility.
How many men of my position and stature go to sleep with that thought in mind? Hazarding a guess, probably not enough. At the same time, I don’t think this lets other people off the hook for not attempting to empathize with me.
Consider the Mississippi racist. Born and raised a Confederate flag loving died in the wool Klansman who’s been fed every piece of propaganda that exists about the evil negro. What modern person wouldn’t feel absolutely sick in trying to empathize with such a person? Is the obligation to any less real? If anyone in this situation is expected to try and learn or make the best of it, is it not you? They’re the living embodiment of the consequences of arresting your perspective, so why pretend you can impose upon them an obligation to become more accepting or informed?
Empathy isn’t agreement. Understanding isn’t granting concession. I understand the position of a small girl who’s been assaulted who wants to carry a gun. I retain my general dissatisfaction with our levels of gun ownership and know the statistics for fucking yourself up with your own weapon. I’m not telling her she shouldn’t have one, I’m telling all of us to figure out why the fuck she needs to rely on one. The fruitless game of pitting her fear and experience against cold statistics betrays both sides.
I suppose you look terribly unsympathetic. That’s the point of emotional appeals, after all. The other side has to look emboldened and heartless. How could you want to live in fear and endanger your family? How could you not understand the plight that each of us is at the mercy of lunatics with weapons? Where is your basic human decency that doesn’t claim your right to defend yourself?
And of course, always and forever, in the moment it feels like wisdom from on high. Fear the outsider. Lock and load. Prepare for battle.
Still, there’s a large portion of us who are burdened by the lessons from history. Problems arise when you attempt to introduce this history to parties who are otherwise inflamed or “just trying to vent.” There is truly no good in an explanatory or exploratory mindset in this moment. Shut up and go along for the ride.
The war of ideas isn’t fought in terms of what is or isn’t correct. You’re forced to a perception of dispositions. To win hearts and minds is to swallow, not regurgitate, not blend to perfection, and not to shuffle under your plate until dessert. It’s a heart-puncturing admission. I feel nauseated in relaying the fact of the circumstance.
It’s soul-crushing to embody that intentions do not matter. We basically identify ourselves as a relation towards our intentioned “seemingly positive” selves as they play out in the world at large. But you’re rooted in absurdity. Your intention is a figment of the naive imagination. In exercises to “expand your consciousness” or “gain perspective,” what you’re fundamentally doing is growing comfortable with coping mechanisms.
Think about it. A guru wants you to slow down and ask questions. They ask you to recognize. Ultimately, you’re supposed to settle with a sentiment that relies on an idea that there’s always time, and it’s now, or that the best ideas reside at the end of your illusions about what’s currently happening. You’re to examine your relational existence, not defend character flaws and insecurities. As if living ever asked for a justification. As if you deserve to understand your existence in the first place, let alone care to explain why you die.
I feel my disposition growing complacent. Not in the way that I don’t seek to achieve things or build more representative environments of what I consider healthy, informed or fun, but even if I never manage to, I don’t think I’m going to give a shit. Perhaps it’s just the particular nature of the corner’s I’ve been poking around in from Alan Watts to Joseph Campbell, but lately, the constant take-away is to “just be.” It’s all good and bad. The past and future are now. Stop offering yourself up to be punished for your “best intentions,” and roll with all the people wildly swinging at you.
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