Let Us Join the Chorus

We write this from our couch on the day after Mother's Day. Mom is doing okay, thanks for asking. She's been holed up in an assisted living facility going on four years now and they haven't managed to kill her yet. We imagine that once her personal finances are exhausted they may just poison her to make room for their next victim. But we digress, our mother is not the issue here. What we want to talk about is our attempt, thus far, to cling to the periphery of humanity. We should probably be indicted for the institutionalization of our mother, first and foremost, though ostensibly we've done this for her own good. We've tried to be good children, but are to blame for seeking assistance from industry, pawning off our responsibilities to a third party “caregiver”. Our humanity is diminished by this behavior, and though we've tried consoling ourselves with rationalizations from our cultural playbook we can't help feeling guilty and at the same time powerless.

We are both victim and perpetrator in this cruel game we call modern life. Our only true power is the ability to metabolize violence; we step over a dead body as we enter the Trader Joe's to look for snacks, we committ our elderly to the mill to be grist in an ever-churning death/money machine, we send our children into a hail of bullets to be indoctrinated into the regime of our greatness, we perpetually look away as our representative self, our country, performs violence in our names. Rape we deny and turn it's victims into the cause. Race we ignore and accept a false narrative of merit. We know that Justice is blind, yet we allow the furniture to be rearranged, and refuse to see a thumb on her scale. We fret and fume over the number of unhoused, blaming them for their existence. We rip up the Earth and tear out her guts for our Model S. We displace our furry neighbors, bulldoze their homes, run them down in our cars, imprison them, enslave them, and march them down our gullets with out even a whisper of thanks.

So many crimes against our basic human instincts are committed in one afternoon, on Mother's Day no less, that we begin to doubt this thing called “humanity”. Are we living a lie? Should we just give up this farce and become the craven maniacs this realization seems to suggest we already are? We hope this isn't our only alternative. It would be nice to think that all of the centuries of self reflection and asperation that we humans have engaged in can't simply be nullified in one afternoon. How will we explain to our grandchildren, if we aren't just barbequing them by then, that their great grandmother, this nice 80 year old woman, a victim herself of a cruel and indifferent modern world, believed that the Palestinians all deserved to die for electing Hamas? She is no academic titan of world history, or political science, mind you, she is just your average MSNBC and CNN consumer. A person who allows their world views to be formed by the media apparatus, a person who's ideology is not an aberration, who believes that they are good, that their political persuasion is righteous and just. In short, a person who is a Democrat, a life long liberal. A person who is suddenly no more or less distinguishable from a German grandmother during the time of the Reich, or an American settler during the Western expansion, or a Hutu mother cheering on the Tutsi slaughter, or a Turk vilifying the Armenians, the list could go on and on. One holocaust after another, nothing particularly special or deserving of note in each instance other than the fact of general indifference and an abiding desire for one's own comfort, security and presumption of innocence.

Are we innocent? Doubtful. Is this an act of absolution or more blind self aggrandizement? Yelling into this echo chamber, screaming along with a choir of screamers seems pathetic and false. We can sit here on our couch, wearing our fuzzy slippers, eating chocolate covered mini pretzels and drinking coffee while the Amazon is deforested, while children starve and live in fear, while the ocean warms and is polluted, while bombs fall on people who are no more guilty of terrorism than your average participant in democracy, while a thousand devastating attacks are made against this idea of humanity and it's chances of survival. What should we do? Whip out our dicks and get into a pissing contest over who was first to condemn the atrocity? Maybe flex our outrage muscles together; the first person to have an aneurysm wins! It's not useful, but it is also the only refuge of the powerless, divided as we are, we fall alone.

Will we and can we rise together? If we proclaim our humanity and are not resolved to mere performance or nihilism, can we break out, can we destroy these forces aligned against us? And must it be destruction? Will the legacy of freedom, of human flourishing, of magnanimity and grace rest on this inheritance of violence? How can we exercise this super power of metabolization when it comes to denying the rights and lives of other's yet cling so desperately to this doctrine of transformation through peace? Was Ghandi’s vision realized? Martin Luther King's? No, we don't think so. Yet we are troubled by unleashing this force. Our intention can not be to meet genocide with genocide. Our order must be disciplined and well planned. We can't simply attack all those we deem culpable because this would be suicidal. The object has always been to make the enemy internal, to turn us into a weapon to be used against ourselves. Sadly, there is an us, and a them. Can we come to a consensus on who they are that are holding the rest of us down; immiserating, extracting, enslaving, belittling our basic cries for sanity? That's what we believe the project must be. If not violence then a credible threat, a loud and strategic pronouncement that we will prevail, or else.