Beaten Down
This planet disgusts the shit out of me some days. Actually, my country disgusts the shit out of me on most days. I have to think to myself that if there is a God, and He did make us in His divine image, then either the folks who wrote His book seriously fucked up their interpretation of Him, or He’s sitting on his throne in Heaven, watching this shit, sorely disappointed in all of us.
Literally billions of years of evolution, or, if you so desire, intelligent design, has brought us to diet fads that destroy the health of our women, and entire world society and economical policy based solely on a finite resource, a video game that ten-year-olds play where you get your life points back by picking up a hooker and get your money back by beating her ass after you’re done with her, cancer-causing agents in everything from the food we eat to the air we breathe, the cult of victimization, movies built out of so much trash and sex . . . I could go on, and on. How have we managed to come to this and still survive?
I think I’m mostly talking about America, here, because I think that many of these attitudes originated right here at home, and were only exported out to the rest of the world.
My country is sick, ailing, rotting from the inside out. Tell me I’m wrong. Tell me that decent, intelligent human beings, well-possesed of a healthy amount of common sense, are not deeply out-numbered here in America. ‘Cause I sure feel outnumbered.
I’ve said it before: I always considered myself to be of average intelligence. Not the brightest crayon in the box, but neither the dullest. My whole life, I figured that I was about average, and that the majority of the people could keep up with me easily enough. I might be a little more well-read and/or educated than some, but that’s a matter of luck, or money, not ability.
As I get older, though, and spend more and more time in the service sector, I begin to realize that I’m actually above average, and beginning to suspect that I’m well above average. I deal with dumb people every day, and more of them than bright people. A lot more.
For example: I was ringing out a customer the other day. She handed me the paper money for her bill, then proceeded to root around in her purse, looking for change. Smiling, I said, “Are you giving me the change for the bill?”
“No.” She snaps rudely, while quite obviously picking out the sixteen cents for the bill.
I watch this with some confusion. Finally, hesitantly, “Um, are you giving me the change for the bill?”
“No! I’m giving you the sixteen cents!” She rolls her eyes at my obvious stupidity while dumping the change on the counter.
Um . . . isn’t that what I asked? Are you giving me the fucking change for the fucking bill? Hello? Okay, okay, maybe I should have said “exact change”, or even “sixteen cents”, but good god, I think I made it a clear enough question!
The London Bombings.
Read or heard a quote — tough to remember where, as I’ve seen and heard and read so much about the bombings the last few days, but it was an old fellow, I think, who said something to the effect of, “We had the Blitz. We had the IRA. We’ve been bombed by professionals! These people are small peanuts.”
Saw a British business man on TV, being interviewed about the bombings. He was injured — appeared to have a bit of cloth sticking out of an actual hole or serious dent in his head. He’d straitened and brushed off his clothes, and had his newspaper folded neatly and tucked under his arm. His face was bloody, and his hair was sticking up from the blood in it, but otherwise, he was neat, trim, and unruffled. He’d prepared to have his wound administered to by unbuttoning only the top button of his shirt collar, and ever so slightly loosening his tie. He was giving a calm and coherant interview, and appeared only slightly embarrassed at having been caught a bit disheveled on TV.
Not horrified. Not panicked. In fact, planning on hurrying to catch the next bus so he could get to fucking work.
What the fuck has happened to us Americans? I ask you! What the fuck happened to the John Wayne American who was not upset, not worried, not concerned with a bit of blood, who didn’t have time to bleed, for Jesus sake? When did we become such a bunch of pussies and sheep? When did the idea that god blesses us and only us ever come into vogue? What the fuck is worng with us?!
People, listen, for fuck’s sake. We are not kings of the world. Eating fast food constantly makes you fat. If you do so, the appropriate response is to cut back on the fucking Big Macs and get on a damn bike, not sue the hell out of McDonalds. Smoking gives you cancer. Stop smoking. Don’t sue. God does not love us above all other peoples. Stop thinking he does. God does not want us to bomb innocent people into fucking oblivion, and call it “liberation”. And for Jesus fucking sake, God sure the fuck did not hand select George Fucking McChimpy W. Bush to lead the free world. Get off your goddamned high horse, grow some balls, get your helmet, and start coping with real fucking life. Stop being assholes. That’s the entirety of the Bible, kids. It says so. First Commandment, I think — God says don’t be an asshole. It’s in there somewhere.
We had 9/11. The vast majority of us survived it. Terrible tragedy, etc and so forth. Now move on! The appropriate response to 9/11 was not to stock up on plastic sheeting and fucking duck tape! It was not to surrender our civil liberties to a corporate-owned government! It was not, for the love of whatever you hold holy, to give ourselves and our government over to our very own special Krazy Kristian Konservative version of the fucking Taliban! The appropriate response was to go and catch the fucking douchebag responsible for 9/11, and get the hell on with our lives.
Getting along in life is incredibly easy. Okay? You don’t like how I do things, you are free to ignore them. I don’t believe in certain things, but I do not have the right to tell you that you can’t do them, either. I fucking hate Jessica Simpson and Britney Spears, but that doesn’t mean I can force you not to listen to them. I’m a dirty little agnostic, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have the right to believe in God, or whatever. You think abortion is sin, but that doesn’t mean you get to tell the rest of us we can’t have them! You think smoking will kill me, but that doesn’t mean you get to force me to stop. You hate gays, fine, but you don’t get to persecute them because of that! You think all gays are going to hell because you’re one of the intolerant, nutjob Kristians that are giving the rest of the group a bad name? Fine. But Jesus taught to love the sinner and hate the sin, and that basically means you get to shut the fuck up and leave the poor gay folks alone. Let them get married! It harms no one. You don’t have to like it. In fact, you don’t even have to perform the ceremony. Let them have a civil service, or get married in a liberal church. It’s not your church, and it’s not your problem. Go water your roses and move on with your own life. You don’t like a song or a tv show, don’t watch it. You don’t like violent movies, don’t take your kids to see them. It is just that fucking simple. Get on with your own life, and let the rest of us get on with ours.
Good Sweet God.
I have always believed that perception is reality. By percieving the world, we create reality for ourselves. This is our world, this is the world we imagined and built for ourselves, all of us, me, you, that guy over there. And it kind of turns my stomach that this is the best we could do for ourselves.
Given the chance, we built a world full of hatred and intolerance, full of stupidity and assholery. This is the world we’re turning over to our kids, and this is the way we raised our kids, and we didn’t even give them a chance to build anything better for themselves. We didn’t even equip them to do any different than we did. We handed them a world full of fuckery, and raised them to believe that the fuckery was proper.
We built a world based on a finite resource — oil — and then gleefully stuck our collective heads in the sand and refused to believe that the resource will ever run out.
Every day, I take my saddened, embittered, jaded self out into the world, and I do my goddamn level best to do something, anything, to improve things. I write my useless fucking congressmen. I preach at the ignorant. I smile at people. I do nice things for people. I try to sow a seed of happiness and kindness. I tend it. I hope it will grow and spread. I want that shit to grow like kudzu.
It’s my way of fighting the shithole we built for ourselves. It’s my way of clicking my ruby red heels (or, battered black combat boot heels, as it were), and saying, there’s no place like home, there’s no place like home, please God, if you’re really there, and you really exist, there’s no place like home, and there’s a better world than this to live in. Please. There’s just got to be. Whether you believe in a god or you don’t, whether you think we’re divinely invested, or just an amazing one-in-a-million evolutionary chance, we’ve got to be able to do better than this.
We’ve just got to.
