This is your fault, too.
This medium, this way of laying out thought. The keyboard does some of what those fidget-gadgets that were the rage in, what, 2016, did for people; continuous tactile sensation distracting, in a sense, the distractor. It doesn’t work for very long, but at least it remains, waiting for the return of the hands to the task.
I don’t write because I want to. I write because I have to; one, because if I don’t I go crazier and crazier; two, because it’s the only decent way I have of getting the attention, approval, and validation I crave, that same drive that makes all humans move; three, if I’m not already around the bend and too cracked to be comprehensible, the task I gave my brain when I was a small child is still proceeding, largely of its own will, and pretty soon I’ll have a solid simulation of the actual world around me running in my head. I’ll know what reality is; the ground that surrounds us, the matter and motion that makes us and what we walk through; and if I know that, I’ll have a responsibility to share it before I die.
I still won’t know much of anything about the world of humans.
Look, if we make people’s shitty opinions grounds to cut them off entirely, if we don’t take them head-on as grounds for debate and careful, loving action, we leave them absolutely no room to get out of them. We stick them in there, unable to admit that they hold the opinion, much less admit that it’s wrong.
The problem isn’t some group of people you can pick out just by looking at them. The issue isn’t the blacks, or the whites, the Jews or Muslims or Christians or atheists (or the Satanists, for that matter). Hell, even the Buddhists have armed gangs now. You can’t just click a button and have a list of all the predatory people on the basis of one box checked in a database somewhere, or ten, or any number of factors. They’re individuals. One human brain is one human brain; each develops its total of inputs, including other brain’s output. A group of individuals is like an echo chamber, if nobody ever travels group-to-group.
You can’t spot them by eye, you can’t find them by the language they speak, they’re not a conspiracy. In fact, you can’t see any but one of the predators upon humanity. You’ll only ever, really, find one of them. You’ll only ever defeat one of them, either. Look inside yourself. You contributed to this problem. You did this. You helped injure civilization. You’ve got a lot of work to do.
I don’t write because I want to. I write because I have to; one, because if I don’t I go crazier and crazier; two, because it’s the only decent way I have of getting the attention, approval, and validation I crave, that same drive that makes all humans move; three, if I’m not already around the bend and too cracked to be comprehensible, the task I gave my brain when I was a small child is still proceeding, largely of its own will, and pretty soon I’ll have a solid simulation of the actual world around me running in my head. I’ll know what reality is; the ground that surrounds us, the matter and motion that makes us and what we walk through; and if I know that, I’ll have a responsibility to share it before I die.
I still won’t know much of anything about the world of humans.
Look, if we make people’s shitty opinions grounds to cut them off entirely, if we don’t take them head-on as grounds for debate and careful, loving action, we leave them absolutely no room to get out of them. We stick them in there, unable to admit that they hold the opinion, much less admit that it’s wrong.
The problem isn’t some group of people you can pick out just by looking at them. The issue isn’t the blacks, or the whites, the Jews or Muslims or Christians or atheists (or the Satanists, for that matter). Hell, even the Buddhists have armed gangs now. You can’t just click a button and have a list of all the predatory people on the basis of one box checked in a database somewhere, or ten, or any number of factors. They’re individuals. One human brain is one human brain; each develops its total of inputs, including other brain’s output. A group of individuals is like an echo chamber, if nobody ever travels group-to-group.
You can’t spot them by eye, you can’t find them by the language they speak, they’re not a conspiracy. In fact, you can’t see any but one of the predators upon humanity. You’ll only ever, really, find one of them. You’ll only ever defeat one of them, either. Look inside yourself. You contributed to this problem. You did this. You helped injure civilization. You’ve got a lot of work to do.
*
Comments
Post a Comment