Pretend the Fire is Rain
The planet is fine. The people are fucked.
- George Carlin
Around dusk, I drink wine around my fire pit while the genocides unfold. It’s not like I want people to die in their apartment buildings or anything. I know they have been huddled there a while now. I would push the DO NOT KILL button if there was one/ and someone in charge asked me to pick which button to hit. I can’t make sense of it. A few months back it was kids at a rave huddled in the scrub brush, shaking like leaves, terrified of boogie men emerging from the tree lines. People getting stomped, man. People getting their brains shellac’d all over the ground, all over the cool tile floors or the dark basement of bombed-out hospitals. People being gassed in the chambers where they thought they were hitting the communal showers. People screaming in the streets, people horrified to the point of desperation. People chucking rocks through store fronts in the name of ephemeral peace. People kneeling on the neck of the wish that has never come true.
No part of this world has ever been all that good. No part of this life has ever been just or decent.
Every tranquil meadow has blood at the roots.
Every mini-market pit stop is kinda pissing in the well.
Every song we stream is highway robbery.
Every eyebrow we raise is a killing machine.
Every cave drawing is a motherfucking dogwhistle.
_____
There is a choice we make when it comes to righteousness. We either believe we are good or we believe we know better. Humanity, by it’s very definition, is contradictory in a way.
A quick Googling tells me that “Humanity is the human race, which includes everyone on Earth. It's also a word for the qualities that make us human, such as the ability to love and have compassion, be creative, and not be a robot or alien.”
So two things at once. It’s each of us as a part of a collective: all the people alive and the story the dead have written before us. Not a team, mind you, but a collective, I’d say. I think that gets confusing for a lot of folks/ this idea that we are all somehow in this together and that the only reason we aren’t a well-oiled team is because ‘those assholes over there don’t get it.’ You will be hard-pressed to show me the scientific data (or even the murky mythology) that indicates a time or a place when humanity was a team.
Hell, truth is, humanity actually means the opposite of something unifying. I mean, beyond the fact that we all have to eat and drink and piss and shit and that a lot of us need to fuck or we get mental, when or where or how has humanity ever, ever, ever given us even the slightest indication that things are about to click in the ‘teamwork’ department?