Down, Down, Down We Go

It really is a wonder that children are as generally reasonable as they are considering what surrounds them. Adults have not only killed civility but we have pulled it apart, buried it, and then urinated on its grave. 

It would seem that as adults force children to grow up at a  younger and younger age we have swapped places with them and have taken to having public tantrums on a regular basis. 

It’s hard to take any party seriously that acts as if they are little more than excited chimps but here we are. I am not one to claim either party has any real high ground, both parties bought and paid for by corporations time and again, but when you have a party that acts as if they are spoiled children, loudly outraged by every word the President says, well, it’s time for the Republican party to call it a day. 

The ‘grand old party’ is a party of soccer mom madams and political fakes who have lied SO much that it’s to the point of being cartoonish. They have become the party of histrionics and temper tantrums. They don’t live in the same country I do but in a made up land where children act like animals, where bathrooms are the next political line in the sand, and where every immigrant who isn’t from a European or predominantly White country is out to kill you, rape you, steal from you, and sell you drugs. 

They live in a nightmare world where Russia is merely doing what needs to be done and the United States is cowardly both for not starting a half dozen wars and also too dangerous because we’re also not stopping another half dozen wars. 

Do you know how crazy you sound if you rail against diversity and equity?

YOU SOUND BATCRAP CRAZY because you are literally declaring that you are scared to death that children, YOUR CHILDREN will learn that White isn’t always right and that other types of people helped to make who and what we are.

Once, upon a time we were a nation that touted how we were a sort of quilt of many colors, now we want to be only one color, one religion, one belief system, and one world view.

It isn’t like these people don’t have supporters though. 

The January 6th insurrection has become a fairy tale that never really happened. 

Incels are simply just lonely guys looking for dates. 

White supremacists are just saying it how it is. 

Yup. 

It’s everyone else that is the problem, as we outlaw knowledge, outlaw learning, and outlaw everything that offers a broader view of the world than the narrow one that says only White folks have done memorable things in history. 

It isn’t like it’s wholly political though. 

How many more fights at children’s sporting events do we need to see to know we are culturally sick?

How many more mass shootings do we need?

How many more road rage incidents that lasted a moment but which changed lives forever when someone gives in to their rage do we need?

Where once we’d proclaim – you’re acting childish – it’s we who are the children. We are aging up our kids with every passing day. We want them on social media so we can show them off and track them. We want them in every sport and extracurricular out there so they’ll make us look good and maybe, somehow get into whatever school or career we already have picked out for them. We want them to get jobs when they don’t understand why. We want them to act more mature but yet chastise them for dressing inappropriately.
We want them to model good behavior but act as if we’re venal beasts that just want to rut with one another or bash each other over the head with bricks. 

The kids look to their elected officials or to figures of authority and see they are liars, thieves, and sometimes violently dangerous. 

This isn’t a We Need God situation, since even people of faith are behaving monstrously, no, it’s a We Need Maturity situation where we need to start acting as if we are all on this planet together. We need to give one another the very basic respect we’d expect. 

We need to consider repercussions for the love of Pete. 

Sure, I may want to kick you in the knee for doing something stupid but I realize that if I do that I can get punched out, get in trouble with the law, get filmed and lose my job, or just have to deal with the shame of having done something stupid. 

But what am I saying?

There is no shame any longer. 

We are shameless. 

We see people lie on camera every day, people elected to serve and why do they lie? Because the lie gives them power and authority. It keeps them in office. It makes them rich. 

When children lie we lecture them and shame them but when adults lie we get mad, maybe we call them out on it, but essentially they get to keep lying because what else can we do if others back that lie up. 

Heck, we were told over and over about THE BIG LIE not realizing that the big lie is in fact the idea of people just agreeing to tell the same lie over and over again until it becomes a sort of pseudo-reality. 

I don’t know that there is any great answer to any of it, that there’s anything to hope for because this is who we are now. 

Our social media, once akin to two tin cans held together with string that let us communicate with one another, has become a mirror where we simply just stare at ourselves and bask in our fun and sexy and exciting we are, hoping that others want to watch us watch ourselves. 

The sick thing is that others DO. 

We want to watch others AND ourselves, desperate to convince ourselves that no one else is as smart, or attractive, or as interesting as we are and jealous of anyone who is. 

And this is who we have become. 

Our children are becoming more violent, more dangerous, because we are the same way. We can’t even be bothered to hide our guns anymore, or make sure the kids don’t have access because we want them at the ready. 

We imagine our kids to be just as we are, innocent and free of the worries of the world but we have created a world where we are all desperately competing with one another for things we don’t even understand. 

We have made it easier for one madman to destroy the planet on a whim and expect our kids to behave and listen to us. 

What’s missing is empathy and compassion, twins that seem to have been thrown into the same pile as anything ‘woke’. Two things considered by too many to be weak. We’d prefer to announce people bootstrap their way to everything despite the fact that few of us had to do that, and many of us were afforded gains simply based on the color of our skin. 

We don’t want to believe that the person we are so angry at, that we are convinced we hate, is a person, a being of love, and pain, and fear, as we are. 

No, they are an enemy, and enemies must be snuffed out or put below us. 

We can be better than this because we have been better. 

We just have to want to be better. 

We have to work to be better. 

We have to be better. 

It’s not easy. 

It’s not easy to stop our anger and our frustration at a world that seems to have gone mad, but the more we give in to those base feelings the more we lose ourselves.
Sure, we get mad, we get angry, but it’s the constant need to fuel it and to let it consume us that kills the better part of us. 

We need to see that it matters, that this can change how we feel, and thus change how others feel, and that changes the world. 

We can still be civil and yet disagree. 

We don’t have to like one another to not hate each other. 

We don’t have to dehumanize each other to try to make our points. 

We will never like everyone. 

We will often disagree, even to the point of anger, but we can’t let that stoke hate in our hearts.
Sure, yeah, yeah, yeah, BUT, BUT, BUT cries someone and then points out the rage that this world fuels by its violence and injustice, and I appreciate that but warn that once you give in to the hate in your heart, once you let it take your heart over, then you lose sight of the love that the outrage stems from. You become just another soldier in an unending war and not a change agent. 

There is a reason this world is so dark and it’s because so few of us bother to raise a light any longer, preferring to keep that candle to ourselves as we hold a knife out against the dark. And in so doing we are letting those of us that still cling to love feel as if they are the only ones, moving about in that darkness.

Change isn’t friendly, and it isn’t always nice, but it doesn’t have to be hateful, and it doesn’t have to come at the end of a gun. 

But what do I know?

I’m just some jerk on the internet.