White Flag

As you may gauge – given the chasm of time since I last posted anything – I don’t write much anymore.  In fact, beyond working (part-time), reading and ‘making’ things, I don’t do much of anything anymore.  For me and mine, life has settled into a tightly-curled huddle infused by a thick layer of horrified incredulity.  But even that is running out of fuel.  Being constantly appalled by an inexhaustive supply of human atrocity is kinda like being repeatedly slapped in the face.  After a while, the flinch dies because the senses have dulled and the skin is numb.  In other words, something in you breaks.

Well, I broke.  I tried every positive, uplifting thing I could think of to drag myself up; optimism, meditation, prayer, volunteerism, intelligence, understanding, forgiveness, rationalism, resilience.  Be the change.  Live by example.  Repeatedly.  Not anymore.  The sides of the pit are too steep and there are too many people lobbing not-really-helpful crap down the hole. (Given I live in what has become the land of White, Right & Tight that’s about all anyone is willing to contribute to another human being here.  And even that tends to have a price tag.)  Between family, friends, acquaintances, and people I don’t even know, it became too much.

Somewhere inside I still believe in the things I believed in before the ground gave way; the validity of truth, compassion, kindness, open-heartedness, and open-mindedness.  But I watched these things starve and wither until what remained were hollow, unobtainable, outdated ideals and, sadly, it stopped hurting.  Now, it just is.

I guess on some level this anesthetization should have frightened me, galvanized me – something…

It didn’t.  It settled around my shoulders like weighted inevitability.  Too heavy to shrug off and in some strange way, oddly comforting.  Because it verified the birth prangs of the misanthrope struggling to be born inside me.  (The labor was lengthy and gory, but I had a ton of help so the babe is thriving.  Thanks for asking.)   And that, my tribe, has given ground to something vastly more worrisome than apathy.  It has put a tap on my rage and opened it wide.

Why you may ask?  Why has the “One-Tribe” believer turned so deeply dark?  Simple.  Because we are One Tribe and this is where we go.  Always.  No matter where we set out from, what plan or route we have in mind, this is where we go.  Every-fucking-time.  This, people, is the fruition of us.  Human beings being anything but humane. 

History bears this out.  Time and time again, we wind up here.  In the land of “Us! Us! Us!   With the rotting fear of “Other” seething in our lizard-brains eventually eating its way towards our faces where else could we go?  Weak, terrified critters that we are, it’s so much easier to look outward for what pollutes than it is to face the self.  It’s easier to allow our stupidities and insecurities to fester until they overwhelm the system and erupt in corrupt pustules on our underutilized brains than it is to fight our way towards being something other than animal.

And it’s not enough that we poison our own lives.  We must find ways to spread the disease.  In short, we are infectious.  We pass our shit around like microbes in a pit toilet.  Making sure in subtle and not so subtle ways to smear our toxins on those who pass by us.  Because we’re too cowardly to stand alone.  (God forbid!  How ever could we defend the ‘rightness’ of attacking the ‘other’ if we’re the only warrior!?)  We need an ‘Us’ to sink into, a tribe to scream safely from the midst of, a protective horde to attack from the middle of.   

Fortunately, it’s not too difficult to locate solitary members of our detestable clan of ‘right-minded folks’.  When alone, we’re like tomcats spraying door jams with an odiferous message of supremacy and ownership.  We lean over and mutter hate out of the corner of our mouth.  Or lift our eyebrows when the wrong ideology walks into our gym or grocery store.  Or purse our lips when we hear an accent on the other end of the phone.  In a solitary state, we leave little trails of stink to hang almost invisible in the air waiting for the right nose to inhale them.

And – boom – we now have a comrade in arms.  They, too, mutter out of the side of their face.  They, too, lift their eyebrows.  They, too, purse their lips.  Validator!  Friend!  Battle-buddy!  Us!  Let’s unwrap our prejudices and ignorance and strap them across our breasts like banners proclaiming our vile disease and goose-step this army of half-brained, zombie minions off to create a world better suited to reflect our ‘Us-ness’!

And so it goes…
Over and over again…
Throughout human history…
Forever and ever.  Amen.

So, now you can see why I have stopped writing.  Blogs, short-stories, novels, poems, emails.  Anything.  Because my own poison leeches into the words I put together.  I’ve reached a point where I even worry about signing birthday cards.  Because I’m pissed.  I’m pissed at my tribe.  And I’m pissed at myself.  Because somewhere, somehow I, too, gave a home to the infection.  There was enough unexplored fear in my own lizard-brain to allow the contagion to find a foothold and flourish.

It doesn’t matter that this toxin is aimed at the greedy, the thoughtless, the inhumane, the bigots, racists, and misogynists.  It’s an unsettling and disheartening realization for me.  To find myself the cradler of such rage against the ‘Other’.  Hell, it hurts to realize in my head there even is an ‘Other”.  But there is.  I guess it has always been there.  Festering and overlooked.

In the long run, it doesn’t matter how or why just the fact of it is enough to break something inside.  Because this is why we go where we are every time.  It’s easier to cultivate the ‘otherness’ of another human being than it is too look inside and treat the origin of the disease which will destroy, scar and fracture so much of our tribe.

For the time being, I have stopped looking up towards the edge of this hole I’m in.  There is no blue sky up there.  No inviting sunshine.  No puffy-white clouds gracefully drifting by.   The future is up there and all I can see is the smoke from a thousand fires and the bloody stench of what is coming.  It is my hope – if I stay tightly curled around this infection and force it to remain in here with me – I won’t add to the approaching horror of ‘Us’ against ‘Other’.  Because, right now, given the chance, I could be the moron with the hammer happily beating my ideals of ‘right’ into the skull of an ‘Other’.