[1169] Chugga Chugga

I don’t know if I’ll ever feel satiated in reflecting on the dumpster fire that is my country, but in the meantime, the thoughts continue to flow.

I see a lot of parallels in my daily life map onto the broader culture. I’m someone who pursued his dreams. I did so while engaged in conversations with people who never intended to, but said otherwise. When my friend group got drunk together in college and talked about trying to build off grid or how we would respond to an economy that was not hiring nor paying adequately, I saved the money to buy the land. I didn’t know how much I was taking for granted, for years, as I entertained the idea of a future where we would work together, stay close, and certainly drink less, but keep the good times rolling.

The first thing I took for granted was that people meant what they said. I’ve often maintained something of an outsider status, usually as an outgrowth of my “blunt” assessments, comments, or expressively shared perspective. I genuinely thought I had a tribe for the first time in my life. I thought, “Oh, this is how normal people get together and accomplish things or support each other.” I thought what made us friends initially, kept us partying together each weekend, or what ensured it was cool to wander between our houses or apartments without knocking was robust and reliable.

I don’t know that there was any way to really grasp how far down a “words don’t mean anything” rabbit hole we existed at culturally during that time. My cohort discovered and was bored by 4chan by sophomore year. There’s no way to measure the amount of insincere detached irony that I suspect must have glazed everything. Sophomore year was the first year we were introduced to Sarah Palin, who I’ve always considered a harbinger of doom and too-telling about the nature of the country.

As relationships got strained, and the frequency with which you had to prevent yourself from gagging when someone said “adulting” increased, it became easier to feel how things were breaking down. Each event or invitation was either sparsely attended or turned down. “Secret” conversations and resentments built up. “Real life” was kicking in, I guess, and all of the workshopping and noticing during college resulted in unnecessary suffering of the ongoing consequences. Most people found under-skilled roles, rented overpriced places, used pets as surrogate children, and stopped even pretending to care about what you were up to.

I’ve listened to my dad talk about his sense of community growing up in the harbor and East Chicago. Neighbors helped each other and talked all the time. My grandparents supported single mothers, sent the kids to do chores, and bonded through the church. I’ll listen to older comedians and actors allude to their upbringings that ring similar bells of community, consistency, and support. It seems that anyone who’s gotten somewhere appreciable had a village.

Almost everyone my age that I knew had divorced parents. Almost everyone was tens of thousands in debt in order to go to school. Almost everyone waited until their 30s to have kids.

Let’s not skimp on parallels. There’s a reticence to actually solve problems. When you have an issue with someone, gossip, don’t bring it to them. Don’t weigh evidence. Go to the extremes of your emotion, assume, and carry on in self-righteous indignation for the bogeyman you’ve built.

I witness a “silent majority” all the time. It’s a majority of people who are too afraid to unionize. It’s a majority who throw up their arms and say “it is what it is.” It’s a majority who are literally silent upon every invitation to share their actual truth about how someone or something is hurting them. The majority believes in the performance. The majority wants to “help,” by virtue of saying, no, seriously, just how much they really really do. We are fundamentally not accountable, dishonest, and in denial about how much we hate and aren’t helping - at all.

I’ve talked endlessly about how many things I hate. I don’t do it blindly. I pick hate for things I think are worthy of hate. “Hate” is an approximate word and sensibility that combines a lot of negativity towards things that destroy my sense of self, ownership, potential, and dignity. I hate getting paid so little. I hate when people who profess to be friendly or truthful disappear or tear me down and take advantage. I hate excuses. I hate people who will, always and forever without irony, use demonstrably untrue and ignorant examples in their dance to justify their own hatred. That is, I don’t need to pretend or make anything up about the things I would point to to hate.

I live in one of the shittiest states, Indiana. I’ve watched them close schools and healthcare options. I’ve watched hundreds of clients who need life-saving care get neglected and saddled with impossible scenario after impossible scenario year after year. There’s “jokes” about how polluted The White River is. Our “senator” was part of the fascist coup and just became governor. We have incredibly shitty roads, almost no public transportation, were the poster-children for meth (although, so many states compete for that title), we’re a right-to-work state, we have the attorney general who wanted to criminally pursue the doctor who helped abort for the raped little girl who came from Ohio.

I submit that any and all horror stories going forward are blips in the sea of the poisoned ocean of our cultural zeitgeist. We don’t get better until we actually get better, or enough of us die that something new can grow. The ambivalence is also a symptom. The fact that you can say, proudly, always so proudly, that your vote doesn’t matter, that you don’t care, or that it doesn’t concern you tells someone like me that the game was over long ago. There is no “persuadable” battle because you’ve converted into a religious hopeless ideologue. You preach a certain gospel of complicit absurdity.

Every for-profit healthcare and addiction counseling company does not care about you. They care about keeping your insurance tied to their automatic billing. Thousands and thousands of people will tell you otherwise. You, desperate, lonely, addicted, exhausted, will burst through the doors and testify to how a company like Groups Recover Together “saved your life” by teaching you how to depend on them and Suboxone instead of heroin. You’ll be alive, but will you? You’ll say the things you’re supposed to say, but will they mean anything? How do you “reduce harm” for someone actively on fire where a discussion of water doesn’t exist?

This is the failing of government. Mitch McConnell, Newt Gingrich, NAFTA, Citizen’s United, The Supreme Court capture. The actual solutions to these things have only been flirted with by Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and a few members of “The Squad” when they’re not busy apologizing for religious zealotry. You don’t combat the proud seizing of power by “debate” and “negotiation.” The Nazis and the Japanese needed to be bombed into oblivion at the time. You are currently up next to suffer similarly if you refuse to understand why.

When you’re “fighting for $15” when the wage should be $25, you’re a fucking moron. When you’re wallowing in despair, instead you should be organizing a learn-party who tries to grasp what it means to be at the mercy of religious conviction that would march for 50 years until it could overturn Roe v. Wade. When you feel yourself getting smug and dismissive, it’s your first clue you’re missing a piece of the perspective puzzle that will unlock a way to meaningfully change something in a better direction.

I’m as annoyed by If Books Could Kill’s treatment of Sam Harris and Steven Pinker as I am Peter Boghossian of caricatured leftists. I think Bill Maher cozying up to hateful ignorance has the same downstream effect as Tony Hinchcliffe and Andrew Schulz normalizing the facade of “we’re all friends here” and “both sides.” We all pretend we’re as rich and famous as these people who will, in no way, suffer the reality of the decisions. You think the vast majority of celebrities and “intellectuals” weren’t the first ones out of Europe as war loomed?

We’re not all friends. It’s not what we should be normalizing. We don’t all have the same standards, or any standard at all. You’re not speaking to who you think and they don’t understand what it takes to preserve and protect and celebrate. The disconnect is as real and wide as it could possibly get. We’re in a sea of fanatics with their own isolationist infantile grasp of the playing field. Even if they’ll never choose to accept or understand that, they’re all smug. They’re all proud. They’re all hyperbolic in their language. You can adopt the heuristic that remains extremely skeptical and on guard when you meet people who are performing that act.

I don’t know how much has to die. It certainly feels like so much, but perhaps it’s not too much. Perhaps it’s just a necessary conclusion on the road of infinite revolutions. Maybe the water needs to be so poisoned the only ones who live will be those who choose an AI-generated inoculator. Maybe a third of the population needs to grow up in their parent’s basement, sexless, tiki-torched and decked out in camo before you’ll discover how to fire back. Maybe your best friend or sister has to die during perfectly preventable pregnancy complications. I don’t think any of it will work to clue you in, because it’s not about any given perfectly foreseeable atrocity. It’s about you, and you’re perfect just the way you are.