[1216] Prove Me Wrong

I’m what you might consider a “shit, or get off the pot” kind of person. I don’t like waiting around for the “inevitable,” positively or negatively charged. I’d rather watch every good and bad installment of my favorite franchises today than wait years in between. I’d rather the “modern civil war” take place and we move on to reconstruction, saving the “debates” entirely.

A certain kind of person is going to hear this idea very superficially. They’re going to think I don’t believe in conversation. They’re going to think I’m an entitled and impatient child who wants to be appeased and indulgent. They’re not going to catch the wisdom in goal-orientation and properly-aligned priorities. The state of nature is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short, especially if you’re Charlie Kirk.

It’s natural, the “conservative.” I wish this would sink in to our modern discourse. It’s natural to be hateful, violent, and disingenuously concocting “arguments” to complete your internal narrative and sense of self-assuredness. It’s the most natural thing in the world to be perfectly proudly stupid and righteous, making whatever noises you can to enrich yourself, get attention, or fuck.

But “natural,” has nothing to do with “moral” or “right” or “reasonable.” Those are all the wretched “human” things that, theoretically, distinguish us from mere animals.

I arrived at a question earlier today. Is it worse to think that someone does, in fact, deeply care about the same things you do and won’t or can’t do something about them? Or is it worse that they don’t care at all? The classic is school shootings. You know who doesn’t care about school shootings? My cats. They care, every day, about the same handful of things, none of which are about who is dying or under what circumstances.

Wouldn’t it be crazy if they had the power to meow in a particular way that prevented school shootings? That’d be nuts, right? We’d maybe struggle with the idea that cats don’t give a fuck if we knew they had that kind of power.

Yet, across the whole of “political” discourse, we carry on like there’s “two sides” to everything. We act as though we must “tolerate” those who are perfectly capable and hell bent on killing us. Every single moment of every single day that you treat one of your fascist friends or neighbors like an innocent little kitty spells our collective demise.

So, yes, when a Kirk dies, an angel named “karma” or “common sense” gets its wings. I can’t say I believe in either nor am religious, but we literally had to kill thousands of Nazis and Japanese before we could start to have a prayer at what passes for peace. That wasn’t that long ago. The same animalistic haterade is what we’re born with today as we were back then. We need a long-term active solution for that sucker born every minute ready to tear at the fabric of everything we care about. A process supercharged by myopic solopsy-inducing algorithm.

You’d be foolish to think it’s about “you” and to don the kind of invincibility cloak the fascists have been parading under for way too long. You’d be even more foolish to look at those loud and proud in their behavior and not think your own version of it is preventing you from taking the kind of responsibility you must to account for them. You actually do have to speak up, be consistent, hold yourself and others accountable, and own fuck ups in a real way. You actually do have to pay attention. You have to step outside of what you think you already know and confront the nature of the problem you’ve yet to articulate or visualize properly.

I don’t rejoice in “death.” I rejoice in the visceral experience of necessary consequences. It lets us move the story along. The bowels are compacted. I want to shit. I get confused about people who think we must debate how, why, and whether we must, in fact, shit. I get more confused and viscerally upset by those who think we must quibble about the smell, size, shape, and nature of shit. It’s been so shitty for so long, you’d think we were a society based around finding ways to interject shit into every possible area it does not belong.

I would love more than anything to just take a shit, flush it away, and not have to genuinely worry that over half of the people I pass that day are itching to find the turd and shove it down my throat while remaining deeply skeptical about anyone who tells them it’s not “just like eating a carrot. ” Maybe if I did my research about all the nutrients left behind I could wake up and join the other patriots.

This has been the level of discourse since, at least, Sarah Palin. Probably fueled initially by Newt Gingrich, but there’s historical analogues everywhere, see Heather Cox Richardson for a proper education there. Somewhere, we didn’t just lose the plot, we burned the whole goddamn book and started divining the rules as though by magic. We’ve poisoned ourselves, destroyed the ecosystem, kept people poor, sick, and stupid, and what does that fuel? Religious, compulsive coping narratives. The narcissism and immaturity of self-righteous pride. Animalistic sin. The arbitrary wilderness dictating the rules, the language, and the increasingly inevitable consequences.

As a conscious agent, again, I don’t want to wait. I don’t need another 37 years on the planet to be persuaded of the depth and danger of ideological capture. I don’t need a series of brilliant TED talks about the consequences of short-sighted “sinful” behavior. I don’t need persuaded and cajoled over pedantically argued words which were never respected as meaning anything by your combatant in the first place.

Prove me wrong?

I have no concept of proof! Proof is what I think, always. Proof fits my definition and God’s! Proof makes me feel good, so if you don’t make me feel good you haven’t even entered the realm of proving anything! Me? I am anything! I am everything! I am humble and graceful and righteous and correct! You might dare to try to prove me wrong, but that goes to show how small-minded and simple you are that you can’t even recognize what I am! Wrong? WRONG? You think I’m going to even bother opening my mouth about something unless I was already convinced and knew how right it was?

I think the shooter knew he needed a new hole to try and say something worthwhile from. I think if we’re “shocked” and “horrified” by such things, we need to act like it every day by saying and doing the right things so often it renders the impact of the Kirks, Trumps, Shapiros, McConnells, Thomases, ists, isms, ologues, etc. moot. It’s your fault. It was your fault then, and it’s your fault now, and if/when things stay compacted and explode later, that’ll be your fault too. It’ll be your fault that you have this much to say, and have every day, and waiting to accidentally find me to say it.

It’s on all of us, all the time, every day. Not to play along and posture, but to tell the truth. Truths like, I’m happy he’s dead. I’m happy at least one is down. I don’t want to be happy, because I’m human. But I am happy, because that animal, and animals like him, would rather us die as randomly and arbitrarily as he did than live peacefully together.

I don’t, actually, want anyone to die. That’s not why I wake up every day. I don’t think to myself how nice and what a relief it would be. I think that if they don’t die, they’re coming for me first. I don’t wake up and look for a gun, a place to rob, or a policy to pass that strips people of food, healthcare, or an ability to pay for a modern existence. They do. I don’t argue about how we should up our danger quotient by flooding the zone with lies and weapons. They do. I don’t sit with a smug self-satisfied mocking tone looking for provocative things to say for attention and money at the expense of those who can’t figure out what I’m doing. They do.

They aren’t on the “other side,” they’re on the pre-human plane we all have to cross if we’re going to have a prayer of sustaining a collective existence. We’re not going to fix anything if we allow ourselves to remain stuck, in the exact same manner in which they are stuck, about the nature of the problem.