30-May-2020 –
17-June-2020
I sit down to write a last essay.
I want to say in it all that I have to say. To empty myself out; to risk other people knowing me. To stop hiding my heart.
I write thousands of words. Most of them inadequate.
What you will read is what I can bear to give.
*
In the 1965 documentary A Time for Burning, Lutheran ministers and pastors in Nebraska try to persuade white people to visit and talk with Black Lutherans in their homes.
This proposal is unpopular.
The white pastor leading this effort is forced to resign. After he quits, one of his supporters, a white man named Ray, talks with his church’s ministers. Here’s a part of that conversation:
Minister: Well Ray, how many colored folks have you brought into the Church?
Ray: Me? I’m scared to death!
Minister: Why?
Ray: Why? I have but understood this problem but two short weeks. Two weeks. I am just such an infant that I know nothing other than the urgency that is every day.
Minister: Now you see the urgency, Ray. Now it behooves you to remember it took you so many years to get to this point. Other people have not reached this point. They’re not going to get to it overnight.
Ray: There isn’t many more nights left, the way I look at it.
*
Cops are poisoning, beating, maiming, and killing people in the streets.
This nation is cursed. It was organized by theft, murder, and hatred.
Bad trees cannot yield good fruit.
*
It feels impossible to say anything true.
Impossible, too, to change anyone’s mind.
*
I’ve been told there are two kinds of people: practical people and idealists.
Practical people understand reality. They know how to make, fix, and destroy things. They talk in compromise, in exchange, in what’s achievable.
Idealists want to solve problems because they believe problems can be solved once and for all.
Practical people think idealists are tyrannical children. Idealists think practical people are unimaginative mercenaries.
This is the story I’ve been told. It’s a really fucking boring story. Yet here’s my role in it: I’m an idealist. Because I think civilization isn’t worth our labor unless we love each other.
*
My ability to imagine has been attacked. Because of these attacks I find it so hard to understand reality. Because of these attacks I find it’s excruciating to describe it.
A weapon that has been used against me is euphemism.
“Medical Loss Ratio.” That’s a term used by health insurance executives and legislators. It means the portion of money a health insurance corporation spends to heal people versus money they spend on other shit.
Every euphemism hides a cruelty. Two beliefs compose this term’s cruelty:
1. Money spent to heal people is “lost.”
2. Money and caretaking are comparable.
It is one simple step away to believe some lives are worth ending.
*
Unless we reclaim our words, we can’t conceive freedom.
Political education is practicing your particular intolerance for euphemism.
*
Cops torture, maim, and kill people on the streets and I watch the videos. I watch them and feel cynicism and disgust.
I rewatch them and say this each time I see a person: I love you.
As a person gets shot: I love you.
As a cop raises his gun: I love you.
As another screams at the cop: I love you.
As the person recording shouts in shock: I love you.
I have to do this—acknowledge that I must love everyone—in order not to fail myself. Because—and I am still shocked to write this—I find myself in the valley of living Christendom.
*
I spent months trying on Christian ideas like new pieces of clothing. Does this fit? Does this make me look good?
I talked to friends who’d been agnostic or atheist then later Christian, Jewish, or Buddhist. I listened.
I read some books of arguments: believe this because X, Y, and Z. Critics are wrong because A, B, and C. We have faith because of this and that. I took some pleasure in these accounts.
During this phase I rarely felt anything.
Then I had a dream.
I’ll say only the dream’s principal feeling: peace. Total peace. I felt loved and accepted infinitely and forever. Awake enough to know my name, I wept.
The dream wasn’t mine; the dream wasn’t produced by my brain, my body. It was a gift from someone who knew me intimately. I was sure of this when I woke up. I’m still sure of it.
The one who gave me my dream was the God who made himself poor, weak, and simple. It was the person who chose to suffer and die so that others can heal.
*
When I think about the fact that I’m an American Christian, I feel pain. Because I’ve been instructed to love people who deny others dignity.
Questions in this pain: Why do Christians praise the rich? Why do they praise those who admire and order violence? Why do they listen to those who use words to hurt others? Why do they listen to those who sell opinions? Why do they loathe the poor?
Or: What is wrong with these people?
Or: What the fuck is wrong with me?
*
Scientific claims are probabilistic claims. I don’t know the truths of probability theory so I can’t judge the truth of scientific claims. I can’t structure my beliefs about what we should or shouldn’t do around scientific truths.
It feels impossible to know anything about the world.
What can I rely on?
*
I watch a video in which one man shoots another man. The person the bullet hits dies instantly. Then I learn that some people celebrate the man who sent the bullet. That celebration is a fact.
I need to structure my life around the facts which reveal spiritual truths.
The truth this fact reveals: the human heart is not yet healed.
*
People burn and destroy things because the world burns and destroys them. We imitate; we go where we are called.
How am I to judge another?
*
The political order of the United States is evil. Its Constitution is a pretense of freedom. I am a constituent of chaos, extortion, scorn, and murder.
*
No one should have the power to confine, torture, or kill another person. Every structure that maintains this power mocks us. Evil mocks us. Evil convinces us that love is impossible.
But I have known since I was born how to love. Love keeps me alive every second. I have proof of this: when I was very sick, suicidal with misery and illness, I knew the terror of turning away from love.
If we truly believed love impossible, we would murder each other and ourselves within the minute. Thus we know the structures of evil can be sundered.
*
It feels impossible to write anything that matters.
I want to destroy what confines my mind. No: I want to destroy what confines my heart.
I feel so weak.
*
I do not want anyone to hurt anyone or anything. To hurt another is to betray reality and the whole of what’s beyond.
This pacifism is a rare and punishable belief. I’m confident I’ll suffer for it. It seems only right to smile at the possibility.
*
Many of my friends believe that the sacred is just a convention. Meaning they don’t believe that anything beyond reality whispers into reality.
These friends are backed up against the wall of history. They inherit this burden: save the oppressed and defeat the oppressor. And a warning: you fight alone.
They have no one, no other presence, to which they can turn. Only the wall.
I don’t know how to comfort them.
*
It feels impossible to feel anything intensely.
I can’t remember the last time I screamed in joy. Nor the last time I wept with passion. I can’t remember the last time I smiled for another so hard I hurt.
Part of this numbness is caused by my fear to feel. Part of it is the effect of a campaign of narcotization. We’ve been narcotized so that we’ll buy shit.
The great, terrible, and obvious secret of advertising is that if a person is happy they won’t buy anything. But if someone doesn’t feel anything at all, they can’t know they’re happy. Those who’ve amassed enough power to structure society know this, at least intuitively. They know that numbness reopens markets.
The enemy of that fundamental economic principle is the person who sits on the earth and weeps with joy.
*
Any American who has thousands of dollars stored in a bank’s computer system could use that money to save people from great pain and early death. Each day that American chooses not to is a mark of their cowardice.
I am a coward. My tally grows each day.
I am so afraid that protecting my friends and family in a culture of death is hemming me into failure.
*
The people assigned to represent reality—people who produce what’s called the news—do not fulfill their obligation. Instead they produce various pictures of carnage which will satisfy their viewers. The logic behind their work is the action of hatred.
When I can’t imagine a very different world I feel in some sense dead. I am dead like this for hours and hours every day.
*
There isn’t many more nights left, the way I look at it.
*
Human nature is not fixed. We are made in the image of the ineffable.
If you’re unsympathetic to those claims, please ask yourself: what are we? What were we? What might we become?
*
The fact of prejudice is the stupidest mistake. It takes less than an instant to recognize your fundamental similarity to every living thing. Our instinctive response to this recognition is to embrace the other, to give ourselves to them, to take them in, to feed them.
I am sick. I am sick from how much I’ve been taught to suppress this instinct. I’m sick from assenting to this teaching.
*
The surface of the Earth could be a paradise. I pray that you believe this possible. If you don’t, what convinced you it isn’t?
*
What people want is simple: we want a community to which we’re responsible and which helps us. We want to eat and sleep well. We want to give and receive gifts. We want to meaningfully labor. We want to heal when we’re sick.
American politicians cannot name these wants in plain language. To do so would be to admit the stupidity of their process, which turns wants into programs: affordable housing; diverse marketplaces; good-paying jobs; well-guarded neighborhoods; savings and investments; access to affordable health care. All euphemisms that mock the dignity of desire.
This country’s political process desiccates reality.
*
America: where people believed it just to electrocute to death a 14-year old child. His name was George Stinney.
I want us to let this bad tree die.
Yet I know I must forgive even the violence of fascism.
*
I want every day to condemn and refuse money. I also want to be tolerated; I want those I love not to hurt. How many families would be horrified by one of their own refusing money? How many would equate this refusal to suicide?
No one I deeply loves believes all that I believe. This loneliness is sometimes hell.
*
Doctors said that if I were to stop taking my medicine I would quickly be hospitalized with life-threatening symptoms. To afford this medicine I keep a job that offers me health insurance, because paying for it alone would bankrupt me. I don’t want to keep taking this medicine. I’m afraid to stop taking this medicine.
*
I look at a photograph of an Army Humvee in America’s capital. Duct tape on the vehicle’s door forms the sign of the cross. This is a new humiliation for me. Coming to be a Christian in this country and year is humiliating. My decision feels indefensible.
I don’t know how to be. I don’t know how else to be.
*
The joke is about the heart of an American child:
“You like the killing?” the adult asks the child.
“That’s what life’s all about!” the child answers.
*
I’m worried I won’t live long enough to see and feel peace among us. Yet I haven’t lived like so many here do. Which is at the edge of a knife.
Imagine looking out where the horizon is supposed to be and seeing nothing at all.
*
Another morning, another ten videos of cops trying to break people.
I have deputized so much hate in my life.
*
Here is the unnecessary logical argument. It’s unnecessary because we don’t need logic to know what’s wrong.
Police forces have existed for 250 years. Those who believe we need cops believe we need them for some reason: they prevent chaos; they preserve order; they save lives. Thus those who believe in this need believe we need an institution that’s 250 years old. Since our species survived without police forces for 315,000 years, those who believe we need cops must either believe that industrial society created a problem which only cops can solve, or that pre-industrial human life was deficient.
The second belief is stupid and cruel.
The first belief makes me ask: why shouldn’t we instead change society so that the problem which cops supposedly solve vanishes?
*
The rubber bullet is an emblem of political reform. We don’t need better bullets. We need to put down and destroy our weapons.
*
It’s plausible that elected officials fear abolishing their police departments because they’re afraid of what local cops might do to them. What might that fear prove?
*
Fred Hampton paraphrased by Fred Moten: “The coalition emerges out of your recognition that it’s fucked up for you, in the same way that we’ve already recognized that it’s fucked up for us. I don’t need your help. I just need you to recognize that this shit is killing you, too, however much more softly, you stupid motherfucker, you know?”
Fred Hampton was shot in the head in his sleep by cops and federal agents sworn “to protect the American people and uphold the Constitution of the United States.”
*
So many moralities rely on a lie called a fact: punishing a person—and habituating them to punish themselves—is the only way to make them better.
True morality is a fact called a lie: helping someone makes them better, and punishing them makes them worse.
If we accepted this truth we would have to reorganize society entirely.
*
I’m terrified my beliefs are not my own. Yet I’m convinced that no one owns anything: that everything is premised, made, and kept beyond itself.
So what am I afraid of? Whose hands am I in?
