[1241] Cut It Out

My brain has been packed. I’ll be lucky to put a paragraph together for what feels like a dozen different subjects. My head no less compiling and looking for the patterns.

They killed an average, normal, sparkling white woman. Just now. Just NOW people are arriving at, “It could be me!” Not people who pay attention. Not people who read history. The people who can’t be bothered or can’t handle what it takes to be enmeshed in the political landscape. And who can blame them? It’s one impossible, unprecedented, and seemingly intractable problem after the next every single day. They’ve already killed innocent Americans. They’ve been Nazis all along.

We fought world wars over this shit. It wasn’t that long ago. My grandpa killed Nazis. We established a world order to try and avoid ending up like 100 million people who had to die because hatred and a desire for power ran amok. I’ve been asking for years, how bad does it need to get? How many people have to die for the worst reasons imaginable before we’re back at some iteration of a world war footing? How many lies are we not going to call lies? How often are we gonna play the “both sides” game? How many criminals are we going to pardon and reward?

At a certain point, you have to stop blaming “the algorithm” and recognize the nature of the manipulation. There’s not a single sentence on my feed that isn’t highlighted if not for its capacity to sound like the craziest thing anyone has ever said about what would otherwise be shared reality. If it’s a picture of a red square, the first comment with 1,500 “likes” says something like, “You’re ignoring Green squares because you know Jews deserve what they get.” What? Doesn’t matter, must be “refuted” and batted around indefinitely for engagement.

Increasingly, it feels like “the culture war” is literally addiction. It’s one of the reasons I struggle with the idea of calling addiction a “disease.” I get the argument in the broadest stretch of the word and what you can measure between some addictive brains versus not. But all things being equal, if I was sitting here with cancer, I can’t choose to recognize that cancer in any other way than as the thing that’s going to eventually kill me if I don’t correctly identify and eradicate it. The angry and hateful/irrational/bot-driven words can’t eat you if you don’t let them.

Nor do any series of “crazy,” “gaslighting,” or “powerfully framed rhetoric.” I’m so utterly confused by people who can’t see through words that are expressly meant to radicalize. I can’t tell you how many parrots I hear pretending to “argue” things they explicitly learn nothing about in service to their mouthpiece act. I don’t care how many times the lie is told, it’s not persuasive to someone like me. It’s not compelling. It’s not something I’m eager to repeat. But that’s only because I care about the distinction between the truth and a lie.

Why? Why do I care about that distinction? Lying makes you money. Lying gives you so much power you can kill by the thousands and face no real consequences. Lying makes you famous. Lying helps you fit in. It’s a one-stop shop of solutions to the biggest problems we face as lonely desperate animals. So, again, why? Why not play along? What’s it matter to you?

It’s a selfish impulse I have. If I felt as good lying as I do living truthfully, maybe I’d be able to lie like them. I like being able to see through lies. I like being able to accurately predict what’s going to happen. I like the result of consistent work and building upon a foundation I don’t have to worry when everything around it is burning down. Most of the most stressful and ridiculous things I have to navigate personally and professionally boil down to lying. Whatever the person, or organization thinks is being protected by doing so is the same naive pretense that puts the smug condescending tone behind the vitriol of those in power now.

I don’t think anyone is genuinely afraid of, “What goes around, comes around.” Plenty of Nazis didn’t get tried at The Hague. Plenty of people spend a large portion of their day carrying out physical and verbal abuses towards vulnerable people and animals they’ll also claim to love. Occasionally, someone bites back, but most cower, defeated, praying the person will get theirs in Hell. Or, and I think this is key, they don’t want them to end up in Hell; they’re so nice and so forgiving it becomes a kind of noble self-delusion to suffer indefinitely and perhaps even think you deserve it.

Is that where we are as a species? We deserve this? I’ve certainly felt that. We’ve neglected so much for so long. We’ve stopped caring, at all, about the big picture or about the obvious consequences. We stopped insisting on the rules that literally a hundred million people had to die to get established.

I’ve started TikToking. It’s a desperate act. It’s not a performance. I’m not a “content creator,” nor “influencer.” I’m not trying to make “reaction” videos. I’m not trying to speak from some kind of righteous indignant authority beyond the place of common sense and experiences I genuinely feel. I’m not a comedian. I’m not a philosopher. I’m trying to scream more into the world in the way that the 60% of Americans who can’t read at a 6th grade level might understand. I know they aren’t reading blog posts.

Anyone and anything has the potential to break through like a bullet through a suburban mom’s windshield. “We” have an infinitely better chance of breaking things through by exercising our voices. You have to be real. You have to state the obvious so many times that we work it back into our collective memory and behavior. I don’t need another world war to have learned many lessons from it. Masked private police with SS tattoos is a non-starter. 85-ish years ago my grandfather would have, literally, slit that person’s throat. My job might be to find the non-violent means of rendering the same result, but it’s also to keep saying, proudly, what my grandpa accomplished.

These big problems make small problems feel so… misplaced? Misaligned? Whether it’s my difficulty doing menial jobs, broken water, itchy toes, debt, or concerns about my car or house, it’s like, didn’t the Vice President just say they’re gonna go door-to-door? So they’re gonna shoot people in their own homes because there will be more stuffed animals to spray blood on? Because this keeps us safe? I’m, it must be “impressed,” that the collective hasn’t started shooting back. It’s an incredible amount of strength and resilience. The Nazis never gave up, and the Japanese only broke when the most dangerous thing ever invented was dropped on them twice.

Resolve goes both ways. It just feels like we need to speed things along. We need consequences faster than fascism operates. We need people who are criminally exercising their power punished here and now, not, “When we get power, hopefully, one day.” We should be stripping Supreme Court judges of their positions. We should be investigating people who slow-walked insurrection activity. We should be imprisoning people who have destroyed our institutions in service to their greed and conspiracies. And we should be doing it today, tomorrow, and every single day until we can breathe again.

Every single time you’re drawn into a “debate” over things we figured out as pre-humans, they win. Just don’t. Just don’t respond. Don’t bother. Don’t feed the trolls and bots. Identify an action move, like with Stacey Abrams’ podcast, and do something suggested there. Write. Do this. Explain, in detail, how you’re not crazy and things you observe are wrong or right for thoughtful reasons. Identify the people who are playing the wrong game. The liars. The gamesmen. The ones who shift and play to the rabble in their bid for the kind of power other fascists believe is worthwhile and sustainable. That’s the “only” way out. Literally every one of us doing the smallest bit, every day, in service to each other, not the errant barking of the puppy killers, convicted rapists, and proud.