04.28.06
Been a long week….
There in your limousine of indifference, ensconced in the deep, plush seat in the back, you pretend to care. It’s an effort that rather tires you, and one that you are less and less convinced you’ve any reason to make. Nowadays, that old religious notion of “being aware of your fellow man” — the one trotted out on Sundays or on occasions when someone needed to feel pious, or maybe even was actually pious — has become, conveniently, “being on the lookout for him”. It’s the difference between “looking out” for a loved one and “looking out” for falling rocks. A so-called smile, one as self-centered as a black hole and sharing many of the same frightful properties, slides up your usually somewhat slack face like the sort of disease that causes a sudden rigor in otherwise healthy people, momentarily rendering your usually slack countenance nearly mawkish in its demeanor (were such an illusion not so easily overcome by the permanently etched lines of your face’s usual expression of lazy sarcasm and bourgeois distaste for the world “out there”). Things are going well for you and your kind, and, almost soon enough, you’ll finally be able to drop the whole “caring” pretense, which for so long has led you into any number of uncomfortable situations involving “sympathy” and the morality of “good people everywhere”… and, you think, forcing the smile to swell like an infected wound, good riddance to that crap!
Knowing that (as you might put it) some utter idiot, some total fuckwit, some addle-minded yahoo, some inexcusable mouth-breather of a retard somewhere will bring it up, you retort to no-one in earshot (though they’d better know you’d absolutely do it in public!), “God’s not on your side, assholes! God’s on my side! Look at you! Look at me! Ha! No contest there, you stupid fucktards; all your whining and hand wringing has got you nothing, whereas my good sense has gotten me everything!” It doesn’t matter that “everything” is all the usual crap that “everyone” buys, nor does it matter that you, yourself, actually live in the typically lower-middle-class suburbs, scraping by just like your neighbors do and waxing apoplectic over the same right-wing punditry on Fox or sniggering over the fuck-knucklery of those “brain dead criminals” caught with their pants down by the Cops camera crew. You even miss all the same jokes at your expense.
There, in the cozy-comfy confines of your limousine of indifference, unpleasant thoughts (or self-reflection) need never intrude. As you lecture your obese (borderline diabetic), apathetic, disaffected kids on the great Christian virtures of gun ownership and capital punishment, as you yell “faggot!” at someone who cuts you off as you take your kids to school, as you explain to them that you’re just upset over abortion because it’s only an excuse for lowlifes to have sex irresponsibly, you feel calm in the knowledge that you’re on the side of the angels and the “American forefathers’ Christian values”. You feel calm because, really, were you to honestly consider it, you don’t really care at all; you haven’t the requisite depth of character, the intelligence, nor the heart. You are most content when you can just ape whatever party lines insure you against the hardest work in life: becoming a fully healthy, educated, well-balanced, self-actualized , instrospective, imaginative, thoughtful, caring human being. And, FYI, as it so happens, the party lines you ape are not new, not a product of this age, but are likely as old as the Bronze Age or even pastoralism. There’s nothing new under the sun where the likes of you are concerned, unless it’s in the fact that your kind are now better equipped to ruin everything that caring people care about — are, in fact, ruining everything one day at a time. When the rat people ride their cockroach steeds into the excavation pit of our ruined civilization, they will marvel at our epic short-sightedness, our mean spirited self-glorification, our inecological ways and the ur-hubris that doomed us….
Or whatever.
What pisses me off most is that they’ll think “us” when in fact it’s pretty much all you. I know this because I see you wherever I go, here in the ultra-rich, white bread U.S. of A. You are fleas feeding on the dog, and you are so greedy and agressive that you feed on each other just as readily.
But some of you are protesting the content of this little rant of mine. You’re saying, “I’m nothing like how you’re making me out to be! Nothing at all like that!” I pause: Okay, then; tell me what you’re like. You tell me that you’re just like everyone else, and you’re proud to be an American, and you’re proud of your church (if you happen to attend one — which a lot of you who call yourselves “Christian” don’t, and not because you feel “God within you” but because you don’t want to make an effort to go), and you’re trying to get by in the world despite all the trouble with… whoever it is causing trouble. You’re insulted by my caricature of you and yours. But, see, I’m insulted by you. I have to listen to you every day I go to work. I have to see you every time I watch TV for over 10 minutes. I have to deal with your cacophonous clamoring over queer rights, abortion rights, women’s rights, racial and ethnic equality, welfare, warfare, — and it’s unfair to me and mine. I listen to you, and what you tell me is that the vast amount of work by well educated scientists is hokum and bunk because some old Abrahamic collection of texts tells you that, contrary to all evidence, your “God” made the world in under six days just six thousand or so years ago, or you try to fob me off with your unfalsifiable crap about an (nudge, nudge, wink, wink) intelligent designer. And meanwhile, you can’t even show a scrap of the compassion your so-called savior called for. I listen to you, and you make fun of strippers, gays, — “outsiders” of all kinds. You don’t complain about sexism any more than classism, or homophobia any more than insitutionalized racism. You’d no sooner love such a social leper than invite one to dinner and welcome her or him into your family. You’re the one who does the diagnosis, and it’s based solely on your opinion which is grossly uninformed and shallow. So in the long run I find it very difficult to sympathize with you, let alone empathize. Your astonishing lack of education, of culture, of finesse, of nuance, gives me a headache….
But there you go, now. The window has risen and closed, and all I can see is my sad, fatigued expression in the midnight pane of the dully reflective, tinted glass. You pull away from me in your limousine of indifference, slightly ruffled but already calming down, forgetting about it in the gentle neon glow of the interior space within which you reassure yourself daily that, in the end, it doesn’t matter. You think that whatever you think is all right because you think it, and anyone who deviates from or otherwise disagrees with your worldview is some sort of totally annoying nitwit. You’re relieved when you can get back to your daily routine of obliviousness. It’s like you never even heard me or anyone like me. And as for me, well, I’m the one who pays in tension headaches as you slowly ruin everything, even your own life, in your rush to be satisfied and undisturbed.
I stand on the curb as you pull away. Next to me stand, side by side, an immigrant worker with a bag of oranges, a runaway teen ashamed of his homosexuality, a black woman struggling her life away against oppression that comes from all sides, a homeless man who can’t find his way up from the bottom of coldly judgemental society; I stand with them, and those like them; those in the same boat, those in prisons both real and metaphorical, those for whom the name of home is almost never spoken through the lips of a joyful smile. I am, to your way of thinking, an atheist. I am a secular humanist. I am concerned with rationalism and science and finding the best way for our multi-cultural multi-versity to grow the best future possible. And I am very, very tired. You drain me daily. You make me sad. And it is only through great good luck that I have found a love to sustain me. Were it only so for all in need.
