[1041] Amen

It's no grand achievement to destabilize someone.

Something you're not going to encounter or understand unless you're in the "social work world" is how on-the-edge people are really living. They can present as "normal" or "friendly" or "smart enough" or have many "supports," and with what seems like the slightest bit of wind, conjure a tornado that throws their whole life into chaos. It's a world of anxiety that's so high that becomes the normal working condition. It's filled with so many medications, you start to feel "wrong" if you haven't built taking "something" into your day. It's a world where the futility and actual consequences of performing verses working mean relapse, jail, or death.

In the broader context of American society, with the decades long concerted effort to cripple school, health care, safety, infrastructure, individual freedoms, or even basic notions of public decency or good, it wasn't hard. Everybody who can't empathize with living on as dramatic an edge feels like they did something right or are special. Why on Earth would you attempt to embody the lived experience of people who struggle the most? You might fall into their black hole and find yourself as devoid of an identity or direction as them.

The illness manifests in how the victims go about "solving" their problems. How fucked in the head do you have to be to have your child's head blown off, and then you start your begging of leadership to "do something," with, "As a gun owner!..." bending the knee to your psychosis before you appeal to the power avatar. "Raise the buying age to 21!" Because that's the problem, just like "fighting for $15" means anyone took heed of inflation.

The problems are infinite, but the ones we pretend to discuss are literally crafted by those in control and with much grander greedy agendas than anything to do with helping you or preserving and protecting a life worth living. The fact that anyone has anything to say about trans issues beyond individual trans people and their doctors is the largest and latest. We still discuss the "opioid crisis" and not the corruption and complicity and greed of those who facilitated it. No matter what happens to the planet, profit will always take priority in how a response, if a response, is crafted.

Addiction is an apt analogy to so much of our broken psychological landscape. We're so deep down different holes, we're not entirely sure we've ever heard of the sun. When the entire framework for your existence is built on, not just a mythological framework, but with the mechanisms to make it self-reinforcing with each new traumatizing or inconceivable absurdity, all you can do is twist until something breaks. It's an abusive partner dynamic. The only kind of "love" you've known is them. You've come to look forward to the beatings and emotional withdrawal. You know what sets them off and are gratified in the knowledge and security. You take pride in understanding things on your terms where no one else can. It transcends "cycle" and forms a kind of orgasmic pressure cooker you cheer and pray for it to explode.

I watch it manifest across nearly everyone I know. I see the pivots to distance from doing the harder things to change. I see the dozens of details routinely skipped over. I see the safely self-scrutinizing posture of someone who knows exactly how to craft an argument for doing precisely as they've always done. This is why "things" and "we" will never get better. We can't conceive of it. We couldn't see it if it was in front of us. We couldn't sell it. We couldn't work to maintain it. "It" doesn't exist. It's a poll of what "a majority of Americans agree on" manifested in the exact same place of power an individual has to call the cops on their love-of-their-life-and-also-a-cop abuser.

You don't get it. It's either break the whole paradigm, or play pretend. Every single societal trend in this country is astonishingly terrible. Every symbolic "win" an abject mockery. Prove me wrong. Show me we have a remote democracy. Show me greed isn't king. Show me we have a shared ideal or vision of the future that has all the fixin's of a decent and meaningful life. Show me how much better we're getting at educating, granting rights, protecting the environment, generating power, or living in a way that isn't desperate to fit in as many distractions and indulgences before the fall as possible. We are a society on the familiar edge of my clientele, but literally can't conceive of the inevitable consequences of continuing to play along. And when we can, the destruction feels both deserved and glorious.

I think my fight needs to shift. I need to be more selfish. I need to hunker down and insulate and try to protect me and mine long enough to ride out the era. The era may last another 50 years, or it might aggressively break and shift in the next 10, but either way, I'm in a war with one soldier against an infinitely diffuse, ignorant, and ambivalent set of forces. I should sit and read because there's only fires raging outside and the illiterates will only resent and attack. I should play games because clearly something something "god wills it." And you're god, and I'm god, and let us bask in our creation.