I think the biggest issue with society as a whole, especially in America, isn’t the division — which is a massive, massive, problem. But the issue I think that leads to that is just how lost and unhappy everyone is. And for a lot of people I think it’s the first time they might have ever felt that way. And no one knows where to focus that unhappiness, so it comes out usually as rage, and it’s usually directed at any ‘other.’ Anyone that is different. It doesn’t have to be skin color, or gender, or political party. It can be any ‘other’ there is.
Now division is something we’ve always struggled with. And I mean that as…I don’t know what? I don’t want to say race, because it’s much bigger than that. As an existence? Like since the dawn of life we’ve divided each other. Tribes, Clans, Nations, etc. It’s stuff that’s talked about in the Bible so it goes back to the actual start of recorded time, whether it’s oral history or written. So this isn’t new. But it seems amplified right?
And I don’t want to blame anyone, because it’s a collective. I personally find it with older people the most, and again, not to blame them at all. I think it’s just as millennials (I hate being called that, when I was younger I think we were called Gen Y maybe. Then we got lumped together with people older and younger, and now we’re just called millennials) — but the truth of it is that people of this age, the millennials, we were sold a bill of lies, right? Go to college so you don’t have to break your back. Everyone said that. Parents, Uncles, Grandparents, Teachers, everyone. Then it was well if you didn’t want debt you shouldn’t have gone to college. …but you told us to, you said that was the next step? We were told we needed a bachelors degree to get good pay, but what is happening now? Master’s degrees are the new bachelors and bachelors are now the new high school diploma. We have been alive through pretty constant war. One after the other. 9/11. Recessions. Epidemics. Coups. And because of having no other option we just kept moving forward, grinding it out. But because of that we’re not really fazed by much. Or we are, but silly stuff. — like answering the phone. But other things are just another log on the fire that is this current shit show.
But I think the older generation had it much easier, and they catered society to their needs, saying all the while it’s for their kids to have a better life…then having a better life is held against us, rather than that generation feeling pride in getting us there. But I think they aren’t used to the discomfort as much as we are. I don’t know what generation I mean, I know the joke is ‘Okay Boomer’ but in reality my dad was a Boomer because he was born in 1948. That’s not who that is about now. But it’s that generation that encompasses part of Gen X and then the group above them.
Again, this isn’t a blame thing, it’s me thinking out loud to see if my mind is wrapping around this okay.
But even little things, like they didn’t want to deal with sad kids that lost sports, so they, as the parents, fought to get all kids trophies so no one was sad. So the parents didn’t have to deal. Then what happened? We started hearing things like ‘this generation is so soft, this what happens when you give everyone a trophy.’ But…it’s like…we didn’t give them to ourselves. We didn’t even ask for them. We participated and the adults gave us these trophies. So why are you holding it against us? Why is going to college and getting an education held against us? What is happening.
I think every generation has their trials and tribulations, but I think that upper group, should we call them Pre-Boomer? I don’t even like that because it’s a label. But for clarification we’ll tentatively refer to them like that, if needed, in this post. I think they had it a bit easier, maybe? So, now that times, on a societal level and a country level, are getting rough and rougher they can’t take it on the chin as much as we can. It’s old hat for us, but new for them.
And I think that is where a lot of this unhappiness and rage comes from. It’s why everyone is losing their cool. Why everyone seems to be almost giving up.
Because that’s what it feels like right. This weird vibe throughout everyone almost like we’re just biding our time for something. But for what? It really feels to me like everyone is just waiting for the Titanic to sink. This country hit the iceberg and all the powers that be are telling everyone ‘everything is okay, just a slight bump, go back to your cabins. And band, keep playing and don’t stop.’ But as a society we’re looking around and the water is rising and the deck is sinking and so everyone is just like fuck it, we’re sinking, nothing matters more. All the while the corporations and politicians are running to the dining room to loot all the good china and silver before the whole thing goes under, so they can have money on the lifeboat.
And while they are doing that they are tricking us all into fighting with each other over what color the iceberg should be — red or blue.
That’s what it feels like to me. A collective giving up. A collective nothing matters.
But as a society I don’t think we know what to do with this feeling, so we rage and blame and yell and hate.
Of course in 2016 there was a shift. And really, sincerely, I don’t want to play the blame game. It’s foolish of me to act like one man or one party did all of this. As the band AJJ put it: He's a symptom and a weapon of the evil men/Who really run the show/The ones who melt down human beings into money/Like a cruel Sorcerer's Stone
We might come back to that song later on in this post because I think it encompasses this feeling I have very well.
Okay, sorry where was I? I was just ordering DoorDash Greek food and I lost my place.
Oh yes, 2016. A symptom and a weapon. But what that did usher in was this new and amplified us vs them. And it’s crazy now. It ushered in an era of feeling constantly attacked so people are always on the defensive so that makes everyone selfish. I don’t say that as almost a slang or anything. I’m not calling someone selfish. But this feeling of being attacked is making everyone go ‘I need to just worry about me. I need to protect my family. I need to focus on myself.’ Not as a way of me first gimme gimme gimme but in a way that feels justified and necessary. A way that feels more caring than it is selfish…but maybe that’s just an illusion.
And to me it’s all collapsing because of that. Because the money makers thrive on disfunction and the notion of the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Because that’s sort of what’s happening with both sides right. We each see how much the other side hates the government so we go ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’ — and that’s how we have both sides hating each other, but defending the actual people that hate them the most. The people that melt down human being into money.
Sorry, again, this isn’t even an anti-government post. It might dip in there now and then because it’s stream of consciousness, but that’s not the intention.
What I’m trying to do is set the stage for what I think is happening. And that is the misfiring of nostalgia. The misdirection of it. The feeling is as old as time, but the aim of it is off, the focus. And I think that is because of how things are in society. This electricity in the air that feels like everyone just rubbed their socks on the carpet and now have to walk through a room of gunpowder. But it just feels like that all the time in every place you are.
Nostalgia has all of our numbers. We find stuff at a very developmental time and that becomes our home. Our safe space. It becomes the soundtrack of our thoughts, the settings of our dreams. When we create it’s where we pull inspiration from. It’s why my dad never listened to any music after 1979, almost. Not quite but still it was close. And that’s allowing him to have a growing music taste as an adult. Really all his music he would have been late teens, early 20s during it. And it’s what I am like now.
I love so much music, mostly sitting the most comfortably with anything indie/punk adjacent. But I love jazz and classical. I love lo-fi and also hip-hop. But mostly I have a home in rock. And if you were to ask me my favorite punk rock album of all time I would say, without hesitation
MxPx — Life in General.
Why?
Is it good? Is it better than Static Age by The Misfits? No. But why?
Because I heard it when I was 13. It was the first punk rock anything I ever heard. And the first MxPx I ever heard. So, it’s the best and it’s my favorite. But if that album was replaced in the timeline of my life with say Fifteen — Lucky, then I’d say that was my favorite punk album. Because it’s not the album, it’s everything the album is that it doesn’t know it is.
It’s self discovery, it’s friendships. It’s that first hint of complete freedom from adults because they weren’t at local shows. It’s that feeling of warmth in our chest when we hear it. It was the way our minds melted and blown hearing it all for the first time.
We all have it. The Beatles, from a historic stand point are probably the greatest rock band, or maybe any band ever. But why don’t people think that anymore? Because they aren’t hearing it when they are 13. They aren’t growing up with them. My mom once asked me why Citizen Kane is considered the greatest movie of all time, because it didn’t seem special to her. But it’s because everything we see in movies now stems from that movie. It was the first to do it. It was the one that set all the rules in the future by not following any rules of it’s present. The Beatles are like that, but a 20 year old hearing them for the first time today it doesn’t grab them and they don’t get it. It’s old people music. And it’s all sounds and techniques they’ve heard before from other bands.
So their favorite music is whatever they heard when they were 13.
We’re all cut from the same cloth when it comes from nostalgia. Also because we find these life altering bands or movies at a time when we also have no responsibilities. We have zero idea of the real world and real world problems. From our point of view all adults are acting like mature adults, all we know about the government is it’s the best in the world and it’s for the people, we don’t know sadness, or bills, or work. No heartbreak. Endless energy and an understanding of TV and movies that is so basic and fundamental that we just love everything we see. No discernment really. Certainly not like it is today for us.
Now, we take that nostalgia we all have — what makes us look longingly to the past, and we add all this misplaced rage and anger we feel today, then back then feels all that much better too. Better than it ever really was. And add to that all the devils in our ears that are saying ‘They, over there, the others…they are why society sucks now. They are ruining it. They are why you can’t have any of the stuff that used to make you happy.’
And then, boom, we have a direction for our rage. And a desire to make our present great and feel like that, and people to blame for ruining it.
So whereas we used to say things like ‘man, music was so much better when I was younger.’ — that’s a phrase we all say, or have said. And we know now it’s not, we know it’s just our nostalgia. But on top of that it’s not just ‘music was so much better’ or ‘they don’t make music like that anymore’ now it’s ‘you can’t make music like that anymore.’ ‘You could never do that on TV now.’
It’s getting a bit ridiculous. You have people like Jerry Seinfeld say you could never make Seinfeld these days because everyone gets too offended. Or even Steve Carrell, who I love, said the same thing about The Office. But we know this isn’t true because they are still in syndication. They still play repeatedly on multiple channels. So, it could be made today because it still actively plays today. We have It’s Always Sunny, South Park, Family Guy, Curb Your Enthusiasm, in the first episode of Game of Thrones we actively see a brother consensually having sex with his sister then throw a child out of a window. So, where is this coming from? What is this mystical thing Seinfeld did or the Office did that can’t be made today?
Part of it I’m sure is because every generation likes the feel like the most edgy. But I think people take the natural shifting of society personally.
Or they want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Because people don’t want you making fun of someone’s weight or skin or orientation, they go ‘you can’t say anything anymore!’ But you can…You can say everything except for like 10 words. And hateful words. Why are the 10 words so important that you feel like your whole life is robbed because as a white person you can’t quote Blazing Saddles in public as freely as you used to? I would argue you never should have been able to, it’s just now people speak up instead of just taking it on the chin for the lack of confrontation.
You can’t even joke with people anymore…Sure you can, just make jokes that aren’t at their expense. Don’t make jokes about their weight, or orientation. Those jokes were never appropriate, we just laughed to not keep it going. I have family that growing up I was the punchline to all their jokes. And since they were older, and I was expected to just take it on the chin, I did. But it was never funny. It always hurt. It always made me feel bad and have to hide my pain and embarrassment for the sake of protecting the family get together. But finally when we find our voice and speak up because we don’t want it to keep up, we don’t want to be a punchline for other people…then it’s our fault we can’t take a joke.
Men can’t flirt with women anymore…Sure you can, just actually flirt. Saying ‘Damn I’d like to cum on those tits,’ is indeed NOT flirting. And most (maybe all) women don’t like it when it’s uninvited or used to embarrass them for our machismo. Just because they didn’t speak up out of fear of fallout, doesn’t mean they used to like it but now they don’t.
Feelings didn’t change. People just feel like they can speak up now.
Sidenote, please take this all with a grain of salt because movies like Blazing Saddles, and Airplane and even Spaceballs I never liked or saw as funny. So the idea of them never getting made sounds fine to me. Full disclosure. Because I don’t think that humor was ever funny. I’m not a spoof guy. Sorry! (But actually not that sorry??)
And societies change, right? We used to call things gay or our friends an f-bomb because they, like, I dunno, stopped to tie their shoes or wore a hat in the rain. And yes we never meant it the way it sounded, but society shifted and we adjust and right all the things that were wrong. Why is this bad? Why is it bad to limit words so they don’t hurt people. Why is kindness a weakness?
3 things spurred this post: First, was a comment a co-worker made about the band Dr. Hook. One was a leader in my company trying to convince me not to be kind to someone. And lastly, naturally, was what happened on Monday Night RAW a few days ago.
The place I work at is chock full of people saying that everything is woke, and you can’t make shows/movies/songs anymore. I hear it from someone anytime anything new comes out. It’s insane. And the problem is people just say it, but I don’t think they know what they are saying because they are just raging in real-time and not thinking about the details.
People at work are complaining about the new Star Wars show being too woke. Woke is a word I hate because it means nothing? And everything? Like anything that isn’t strictly straight white males is woke. Why? Because woke is an easy all encompassing word that people adopted for things they don’t like and things that don’t fit with their thoughts. It’s a name to put to their fears.
But I argue if you were to sit down with the VAST majority of people that complain like that and asked them: “So, every new movie and show needs to be all white, with an all white cast?” They would be offended by that. They would resent the implication that they are racist, and I think they would mean it, too. Because I don’t think it’s that. I don’t think every single conservative is racist or some secret white nationalist, at all. I think it’s just studios aren’t making media for their specific tastes and they take that personally. Because they would be offended, and disagree…
But then every time something new comes out that gives the center stage to another race, or gender, they are offended. So they hate it, but also don’t want it to be all white everything, so where is this coming from? Why is the rage getting pointed this way?
Not every piece of media is made for everyone to like and for everyone as their audience. When I write, I am focused on writing to the best of my abilities, to tell the best story with the best characters. I don’t write trying to make an audience for every possible person that might read it. If you don’t like it then odds are it wasn’t meant for you anyway.
I think too that people interject morals when really it’s money. I don’t think Disney or Sony or Nintendo is making moral stances, I think they are trying to reach their untapped markets. I think that’s what shows and commercials do too. As lovely as it would be to think they actually care and want to make a difference, I just think they go ‘Money is in diversity these days, so do what you need to make us that money.’
So when you have that happening, and all this misfiring nostalgia AND the devils in our ears telling us everyone that is different than us is our enemy and out to get us — That’s why we’re in the state we’re in.
So, yes, Dr. Hook.
I have a co-worker that is my moms age. He likes all the music my dad liked, so often times we talk music. And I told him recently I’ve been getting into Dr. Hook and hearing how good the writing is in it. He agreed and said: “That song, Sharing the Night Together…you could never make that song today.”
And I don’t want to take pot-shots at this guy, but here are the lyrics to that song.
You're looking kinda lonely girl/Would you like someone new to talk to/Ah-yeah, alright/I'm feeling kinda lonely too/If you don't mind, can I sit down here beside you
Ah-yeah, alright/If I seem to come on too strong/I hope that you will understand
I say these things 'cause I'd like to know/If you're as lonely as I am and if you mind/Sharing the night together/We could bring in the morning, girl/If you want to go that far/And if tomorrow find us together/Right here the way we are, would you mind/Sharing the night together, oh, yeah/Would you like to dance with me and hold me/You know I want to be holding you/Ah-yeah, alright/'Cause I like feeling like I do/And I see in your eyes that you're liking it, I'm liking it too/Ah yeah, alright/Like to get to know you better/Is there a place where we can go/Where we can be alone together/And turn the lights down low/And start sharing the night together, oh, yeah
Those are the lyrics to the song you could never make today. Were you expecting something way more? Probably, right? Why? Because we all know the music we hear today.
Here are the lyrics to a song that is made today and on mainstream radio.
Whores in this house/There's some whores in this house/I said certified freak, seven days a week/Wet ass pussy, make that pullout game weak, woo! (Ah)/Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah/Yeah, you fucking with some wet ass pussy/Bring a bucket and a mop for this wet ass pussy/Give me everything you got for this wet ass pussy/Beat it up, n***a, catch a charge/Extra large, and extra hard/Put this pussy right in yo' face/Swipe your nose like a credit card/Hop on top, I want a ride/I do a kegel while it's inside/Spit in my mouth, look at my eyes/This pussy is wet, come take a dive…
And the song goes on from there. So…What is the deal with that? What is being missed today? Why do people think such a tame song could never be written today in a time where Wet Ass Pussy is a mainstream pop song. What is this legendary nostalgia that people have that makes their music so edgy and a time you would get ‘canceled’ if you tried to make that again these days?
This week on RAW Uncle Howdy came back. Uncle Howdy is a very Devil’s Rejects/The Strangers type of character. Horror through and through. And Monday was the big return. And the return was dope as fuck. It was 5 minutes of actual horror. And maybe some of it might have seen/felt cheesy in fleeting moments, but overall to remember that this was on USA Network, a cable channel that comes free with cable. And on live TV, it was really dope.
And in the off chance you don’t want to watch the video in the link below I’ll just sum it up. It’s one long take, about 5 minutes and the camera wanders around backstage and everyone backstage is knocked out on the ground, blood on the walls. It looks like a crime scene. Bodies and blood. Real horror stuff. Each room the camera travels to is another character from Uncle Howdy’s gang and their slew of bodies they attacked all knocked out. It was awesome.
Then of course you log onto Instagram and what do you see? “Oh my God, what have they done to wrestling?” — as if WWE is ruining their sacred product. And all the comments are along those lines like ‘This is so dumb, I miss the Attitude Era/Ruthless Aggression!” But the thing is in those Eras there was a whole story line in which HHH and Kane are feuding and HHH digs up a story of how Kane killed his old girlfriend Katie Vick in a car accident. Then HHH says ‘I have footage’ and that footage is HHH wearing a Kane mask in a funeral home, who goes up to the casket of Katie Vick, with her dead inside. He climbs in, undresses her, and starts fucking the corpse. No joke. You see HHH’s ass grinding away in the coffin. Then when he’s done he picks up his hands and is holding a bunch of brains and goes ‘Katie, I screwed your brains out.’
So…how is that the good ol’ days and Uncle Howdy is corny and dumb? It makes no sense to me. And I don’t think it makes sense to the people complaining either. I just think they have misfiring nostalgia and are raging because we’re all so angry and don’t know where to point it. So, since the things we love now (Star Wars, Marvel, WWE, etc.) are doing things slightly different and adjusting to our modern times, people take it personally, because of all the devils in our ears telling us it’s personal. And so they don’t think, they just rage.
Because we used to not think like this, right? It’s why in 2024 people are getting upset with Rage Against the Machine for being woke. …My dude, who did you think they were raging against this whole time? But no one took it personally because we weren’t all told all the time that we’re at constant war with the ‘others’ as we are today.
I don’t watch The Boys, but I hear that’s what’s happening in that show too. I think what happens is we’re always sort of programmed to feel/root for the protagonist, and relate to them in some way, and we project our thoughts and feelings onto them and the creators. Then we see something that was always there but we were blind to before, and then it seems like a glaring attack. But people doing this is old hat. Scarface is a cautionary tale, not a heroes journey. American Psycho isn’t a heroes journey. Raging Bull. So there’s a danger in making those characters heroes. Because when we’re shown the mirror we gasp and act like the rugs been pulled out from under us, but really we just were missing the point the whole time.
It’s tricky because as a creator you shouldn’t ever judge your characters. As the writer/creator you are down the middle. If you have a horrible character, for that character to be successful and the work to be successful, you can’t write that character with any judgement. You have to write them as if they don’t think they are doing anything wrong. They aren’t as self-aware as you are as the creator. But when you don’t hold peoples hands, the risk of that is the audience getting the wrong idea. But it’s high risk, high reward. You have to risk that in order to create the magic.
Oh great, now even Spiderman has to be black! …But Miles Morales was always black.
Oh great, now Nintendo is gone woke and you can’t play as Link anymore you have to be Zelda! …there have been like 30 Legend of Zelda games since 1986 and only in one of them do you play as Zelda...isn’t 29 games enough Link? Almost 40 years of exclusively him, and we complain about 1 game in which you play as Zelda, to save HER kingdom? Isn’t Nintendo and the Zelda properties Japanese? And you think they are crafting their games on USA’s current political climate? Is it possible that the creators wanted to do something different? Challenge themselves? Open up new possibilities? Was there this outcry when Luigi started taking centerstage? Or when Peach was a playable character back in Super Mario 2? Why are you taking it that Link is gone forever, and not just this one game?
Why is it all seen as so purposeful and malicious now?
Is it just direction for our rage that is building but with no direction or release?
I don’t know when I’ll ever consider myself a writer, I have to figure out when I feel I’ll have achieved that, so until then I always call myself an aspiring writer. But as an aspiring writer I can say I want to write diverse characters. That is the agenda there, no morals, no stance, just the craft. I want to tell stories! I want complex and relatable characters! I don’t want to always have to write straight characters, or white characters. I want to write strong female characters, I want to write queer characters. I want to break stereotypes. Because it’s the world I want to craft. I think almost all writers want that. THAT is the agenda. Creativity. Story. So, it definitely gets frustrating that anytime a person of color or a queer character is written it’s woke propaganda to infect people’s minds. Or is it just…the character in my story.
I have one character I was writing and they had no orientation at all because it wasn’t part of the story. Then I started to play with the idea of wanting this character to be in the worst, most uncomfortable situation I could put him in. So in the scene I turned on the heat, I broke the A/C, I added an arguing married couple that fought in front of him. I added drugs. But I needed more. And I was like hmm, what if this character was gay, and the guy talking to him was a male chauvinist who just kept talking in derogatory and vulgar ways about screwing women. Then kept asking the main character if he agreed. But in vulgar bro-talk. That would really be the worst if I was in that room with the heat in the summer and the broken A/C and the fighting couple on drugs. To have that on top of it would make my skin crawl. So that’s what I did. And that is why the character is gay. And it worked great and unlocked a whole new avenue of potential for the character and spun off into stories I didn’t even have ideas for until that change.
No agenda, no angle, no hidden meaning. Just wanting to add more complexity and possibility to a scene. And it’s been so great. The character went from a passing character to a main character. Not because he’s queer, but because it unlocked so much in my mid with that change. It snowballed. So, if that was ever to be classified as woke I would lose my mind because none of that agenda is there at all.
And I think that is the case for certain things. Sometimes it’s money, and hey, maybe sometimes it is agenda or virtue signaling. Or sometimes it’s creators creating. Challenging themselves. Curing their boredom of the same ol’ media. Sometimes it’s someone that was effected by the one queer character they found in media that helped them, so they want to do that to others. Sometimes the intention and motivation is just simply love and wanting to help others not feel alone.
But what we have is people without queer friends telling everyone of a queer agenda. People without friends of color telling us the agenda for people of color. But where are they getting this information if not from the source, not from their friends and loved ones that actually fall into this category? And why is it given so much weight when it’s coming from a source with no credentials?
I love Gambit from X-Men, always have, always will, ever since Jonny drew me a picture of him in 4th grade and we became lifelong friends. He’s a metalhead from the south. No one ever thought of anything about how he dressed. Then in X-Men ‘97 he’s wearing a crop top sweatshirt because it’s 1997 and he’s working out. So he’s dressed like Rocky and Apollo, he’s dressed like Sean Astin in 50 First Dates and Toy Soldiers, Like Josh Brolin in Goonies, like the volleyball scene in Top Gun. All of this movies never got comments about being woke. But because it’s 2024 and there is this invisible agenda in everything now he’s woke? If you have him listening to Guns N’ Roses it would fit and be awesome, but you dress him like Axl Rose and it’s woke?
No, it’s not like that. X-Men didn’t go ‘woke’ X-Men was literally always about civil rights. They just replaced skin color with mutants and humans. Professor X is modeled after MLK and Magneto is modeled after Malcom X. That was the actual inspiration. But no one cared before, they just accepted the story. But now because everything is portrayed and malicious and ill-intended. We’re told that they’re out to get us and this is their whole secret agenda, and it fits with the rage we feel but finally gives us a direction to point it, we jump on it!
The scary thing about this all is how well it’s working because it all feeds into the screaming into the void that we all do today. All this anger that is building up at people in power and the fear it gives us about uncertain and changing times, and so people see it as a matter of survival. Everyone feels alone, and persecuted so they latch onto others that feel the same way. But they need a direction to blame, and so they do it for the people that are coming to ruin their nostalgia. And since they are under attack they defend themselves…and we all do this as a country and that’s how we’re at a point of constant anger and seeing kindness as a weakness.
I was sat down once, at a lunch meeting at work, and told by a higher up in the company that I was wrong to extend kindness to someone. To someone I don’t actually like all that much, but I try as hard as I can to not let my personal feelings dictate my behavior, when I can help it at least. Because if I only as kind to people I like…oh boy, that’s like what? 10-15 people, maybe 20?
I said it in another post, I feel I am kind, but not the nicest. I’ll bend over backwards to help people, but I’ll be annoyed doing it. But I’ll do it all the same.
So you can see the danger in me only being kind to people I like, or people that are kind to me. So to be told I shouldn’t be kind to this person because they don’t deserve it and wouldn’t do the same for me, is…it just melted my mind. And a leader saying this to me, almost like a teachable moment. I couldn’t believe it. I never looked at that leader the same at all. I don’t see leadership in them now, just a title that I need to respect even though I don’t respect the person anymore.
My only response to that was the only response I could think of that made sense.
Kindness is always appropriate.
Because it is.
At least I think so.
If there is a Heaven and a Hell and I get sent to Hell for being too kind to people that didn’t deserve it, then is Hell full of kind people? Full of people that loved even when told to hate? Does that make any sense?
Use discernment though. Don’t put yourself in danger by being kind. If a man in an arm cast asks you to help him put a couch into a windowless van…use your judgement, kindness is always appropriate but maybe kindly apologize and keep walking, but on the other side of the street.
Oof, I don’t know how to wrap this up. What am I trying to say? Anything? Am I just rambling?
I guess what I want to say is that everyone is angry because everyone is confused. Everyone feels just as lost as we do. But because of circumstances, peers, upbringing, and surroundings we portray that all differently. Not everyone who fears ‘wokeism’ is a racist nationalist. Some are just scared, some are feeling like their nostalgia is being criticized. Their safe space. Their warm childhood memories. So they are in fight or flight and all of their peers are telling them to fight, because they are maliciously under attack. Some are feeling old and having crises and lash out because they feel the things they love slipping away and they can’t stop it. They hate that society is moving in a way that makes them feel guilty or evil for laughing at Blazing Saddles, so they lash out. They see everything as an attack so they attack back.
Some people are just assholes though. Not everyone is misunderstood. Some just suck and they hate ‘woke’ things because of all the reasons you think.
I guess it’s just that there is no ‘one way’ things are. People are all grey, but told to think in black and white terms only. If you’re not with us you’re against us. All of these thoughts. Because divided people are more malleable and if we keep getting hammered we’ll go numb, and numbness helps everyone that wants to melt us down for money.
Just because someone is on the other side of the coin doesn’t make them enemies. If our details are different, the feelings we have about those details are the same, and can’t we relate to each other in that way? Screw the details! See the people. See ourselves in them. Relate to what they are feeling even if you can’t agree on the specifics, you know the feeling. Or at least try. Because the anger and the numbness is what’s doing us in. Not the orientation of cartoon characters, but the anger we’re told to have about it. The maliciousness we’re told was put into the idea.
I just want us all to see each other as ourselves, and not the other. I guess that’s where this is coming from. I am just as guilty, so I need posts like this to talk to myself out loud to snap me out of it too.
No on is coming to unify us, because there is no money in that. So we have to do that. We have to be that change. We have to take it on ourselves. And to do that we have to find all the ways we’re similar and focus on that. Give thoughts to other peoples comfort. Read the room.
The Apostle Paul says he eats meat with no guilt. But he won’t eat meat in front of people he knows would be offended by it. He didn’t take is as they were coming for his meat. Or oh great, so now I can’t eat meat? Instead he just read the room and acted accordingly. You want to quote Blazing Saddles with your friends? Do it. But maybe don’t quote it verbatim in the open at work where maybe people don’t want to hear the N-word at all, especially with the hard R at the end of it. It doesn’t mean they’re coming for your movie. Just we don’t want to have to hear ugly words out loud in public uninvited.
These are such little hurdles but they trip us up so much. Look at me a 30 minute rant over the course of 2 days? Why? Because I’m offended that someone said you can’t make a Dr. Hook song today. That tripped me up so bad that I needed to get it out. Over something so small and meaningless. We’re better than this!
We are!
We just have to be better. We have to be the better that we know we are. They, the powers that divide us, are banking on us turning numb and just accepting it. Only seeing enemies and ill-intentions. They don’t want us to succeed they want us numb.
We’re better than this!
I’m tapping out. I’m tagging in someone smarter than me that doesn’t need 30 mins to say all of this. So, AJJ, bring it home.
I can feel my brain a-changin', acclimating to the madness
I can feel my outrage shift into a dull, despondent sadness
I can feel a crust growing over my eyes like a falcon hood
I've got the normalization blues
This isn't normal, this isn't goodI'm detached and I'm distracted
All keyed up but unproductive
Vacillating between being all excited and disgusted
And then dozing lackadaisically in this bubble
Where I've made my mental home
Connection's more important now than it ever was
But I'd rather be aloneAnd when we talk about the president
We're either pissed off or we're giggling
About an atrocity he's committing
Or some stupid shit he's tweeting
He's a symptom and a weapon of the evil men
Who really run the show
The ones who melt down human beings into money
Like a cruel Sorcerer's StoneThey try to divide us
And largely they're succeeding
'Cause they've undermined our confidence
In the news that we are reading
And they make us fight each other
With our faces buried deep inside our phones
Rest in peace to the Information Age
Those days are now long dead and goneI can see the weather changing
And I can feel the soul decaying
I'm observing drastic changes
In the way we're all behaving
I can see the sooth they're saying
Furthermore I could believe it to be true
Connection's more important now than it ever was
Buddy, what are you gonna do
I LOVED EVERY WORD OF THIS