[1032] Bullseye

 Again! I am quite tired, but less so than when I last tried to write. I think what put me over the edge for writing this time was watching the combat footage of the Nashville police clearing the school and shooting the shooter.

Power.

If you can conceive of it as a fluid instead of a solid, you won’t trap yourself under the same conversational patterns. Is the population capable of enacting laws to stop school shootings? It, like every question begging the reflexive and same responses, is framed incorrectly. It’s rooted in abstraction and obscurity. Those who ask what “we” or “people” can do aren’t wrestling with reality.

Do you have power?

I do. I prove it to myself every day. I have the power to write and speak the truth of what’s on my mind. I have the power to make myself feel better by doing so, going to shows, and recasting the things I do to occupy my time as opportunities more than financial or guilt-ridden burden. I call my Nazi Senator Braun a Nazi regularly. I vote, regardless of my “belief” about its efficacy, I know definitely not doing so is of worse consequence holistically. I create and build relationships. I listen to people testify to my good advice and encouragement. I feel capable of destroying at least as much as I might create.

I feel it. I practice it. I speak to it. I brag about it. I lay it bare to be scrutinized (ignored). I recognize when I’m hesitant to gain too much of it, and I watch as it shapes, most often for the worse, people I’ve admired. The conversation around power, in my observation, isn’t happening. Power is something relegated to the de facto consequences of Christo-fascist nationalism, ignorance, and fear.

I talk to 100 or more people regularly every week about the things they feel powerless to control. That doesn’t mean they don’t work. That doesn’t mean they don’t have dozens of things I’m excited and proud to hear about and discuss. Not a single person has used the word “powerful” to describe how they feel in service to their recovery or achieving goals. It’s not on their mind or tongue. It’s, of course, powerful to maintain goals, fight, take care of your family, honestly get a deeper handle on how your brain works and what the words you’re using are doing to you. But do they claim it? Do they feel it deep enough to celebrate and speak to it?

We’re culturally addicted, and it’s not to drugs. We’re addicted to abstract notions of how power manifests and how it can be used. We swing between extremes in self-serving narratives about abstract enemies while the knife in our heart continues to turn. Any sentence that starts with “guns” isn’t talking about guns. It’s a nonsense abstraction about “tyranny” or “rights.” It’s a fear for the killing potential, often realized regularly upon children, minorities, or the sad. You don’t know how to deal with your fear of guns or a fascist’s fear of everything. So, from either perspective, it’s all crazy, must be condemned, and no amount of violent coercive demonstration or law, let alone statistic, will be persuasive nor account for the broken heart of the issue.

To recognize the amount of power you have is to court madness. I’ve never been closer to empathizing with religious believers and why they need a god than the more I saw the impact of my power. If you don’t have a rooted “why” for your behavior, it defaults to “because I can.” You can lie, because to you, the ”greater truth” often becomes manifest in a more obvious and consequential way than you, or anyone you’ve been lying to, is going to bother to recognize. Is Trump in prison? Are any insurrectionist Senators being removed? Don’t you “keep the peace” and “pay the bills” by lying a thousand times a day about things big and small? Isn’t it “easier” to pretend that you have simple one-off feelings that aren’t important or “that big a deal” and aren’t worth exploring? You have the power to deny you exist at all.

Every kid will die. There’s literally a war this moment in which the rampant shelling of civilians in schools, hospitals, and homes is the strategy. It’s creeping up into “debatable” to some in the abstraction that is “The West” whether we should bother caring about all that, what with our clear and present series of errant death scenarios playing out at home. Don’t you see? Those in that conversation don’t care anymore about a concrete expression and demonstration of values in service to Ukraine than they do children here. The dance is the point. There’s nothing to win, only an obligation to perform, even as a ragged and exhausted zombie as every other voice collapses around you.

You don’t have power. I do. How’s that make you feel? Angry? Empty? You gonna “argue” with me about it? Your power is memes. Your power is silence. Your power is finding secret nobility in being a self-righteous exhausted do-gooder in service to your extremely personal ethic and cultivated awareness. Your power is to treat yourself as an abstraction at the whims of people like me. You can’t be my cheerleader when we don’t operate the same means of power. I can’t take your advice when your window to the world is coated in sticky fingerprints and stuck open just wide enough to fit a whisper through. I can’t trust and respect what you can’t recognize about yourself with regard to chaos or control. That’s why I have power, and you don’t.

School shooters are the visceral example of the thought process depicted above. You can’t encourage and empathize with their plight because you don’t operate within the horrid reality where they know how “obvious” and “easy” it is to exercise their destructive power, but you act, speak, and legislate otherwise. Those capable and willing to speak honestly about how fucked things are aren’t whispering and still never get heard. They’re screaming, pleading, and arguing articulately indefinitely, and you’re calling them “just the wind.” What is an “innocent child” in a psychological world that can’t acknowledge what a gun is? What is a world that can’t reckon with its fear and lack of control the gun represents?

Everyone has to die until all who are left no longer wish to continue killing themselves. That’s what we’re doing, always. That’s my opposition to the death penalty. It’s not because I can’t or won’t kill someone, it’s because I feel, deeply, just how many I could get a taste for killing. There are many things about me that could stand to die, but my hesitation to destroy someone forever shouldn’t be at the top of my list.

I have power and you don’t because I don’t rely on you as the primary sources of my power. I work to discover and recognize what I need. I maintain my license. You wait for me to act so you can perform a reaction. You look forward to what I have to say, right or wrong, because you’re not engaging with me; you have a fantasy where what I say and do gets situated for you to ogle like an expensive piece of art. Somewhere, you know “my” power isn’t mine at all. My work ethic demonstrates a matter-of-fact set of consequences, obligations, responsibilities, and points of awareness that you believe would drive you mad. You’re too busy. You’re too tired. You have too much on your mind. You’re barely keeping it together, and you don’t really know why or for whom, but you’re absolutely certain whatever it is I’m talking about certainly has nothing to do with “you.”

It's not that you or I have too much or too little power. You either don’t have any, or you have all of it, and the examples you set as a result of either condition dictate the ongoing landscape. I assert again you don’t have any power because your meme is not your voice. I say loud and proud that you do not have power because you don’t do ANYTHING that isn’t on the back of someone else. The celebrity gives you license. The work environment sets the rules. The habit courts justification. You’ll “try” and “hope” and “would like to” and “it’d be nice” and “we’ll see” and “one day” or “I’m waitin’ on” or “if I could just” as if you’ve lived a singularly just day your entire life.

You don’t care and can’t cope. You’re not brave enough to admit it, too lazy to explore what happens after you do, and too guilty and ashamed to account for the consequences of operating that way for so long. So keep watching the kids die, every day. Watch the despots grow in power as your silence and complicity become all-consuming. The nature of your power is as obvious as a bullet through a child’s brain, and yet only shooters seem capable of figuring that out.