An Opinion

“If someone isn’t what others want them to be, the others become angry. Everyone seems to have a clear idea of how other people should lead their lives, but none about his or her own.”  – Paulo Coelho

So who am I? What gives me the two sense to even dig into an opinions? Maybe it’s just an idea, a thing observed slowly manifesting into something substantive. I wouldn’t foray explaining anything if i didn’t have a little insight, and I wouldn’t try to feign understanding. That ain’t my style, words without backing or facts equate to mere shit talking. I wanted to be an educator once, even have three degrees, one in English, another in Philosophy and the last in American Studies. There is something sacred to the facts. Emotive responses rather than facts have become the primary language of most discussions and friendly exchanges. It is a good day if those exchanges remain friendly.

I guess I too want to express my opinions. I might not have the proper credentials. I certainly don’t have the professional expertise that journalists, researchers, and people who’ve devoted their lives to their craft might have. Still, I am not grounded in their politics, subject to their employers’ agendas, and certainly have no vested interest in a specific narrative at all. Wait! That’s false, I am vested in my own narrative and the narratives of the people I see everyday. I am not just talking about my family, my neighbors, those individuals I call loved ones and friends. No, i mean I have a vested interest in communities and the people that comprise my everyday.

The family man that works at the gas station, or the single mother that works two restaurant jobs to provide for her family. Shit I am even talking about the lawyer that owns two boats docked in the harbor, and she has a Range Rover to boot. I see these individuals every morning and every night, fine, well-respecting and hardworking decent folk just navigating their worlds. We meet at the intersections and small moments; moments at times too fleeting to notice but that push our days forward for better or worse. How did we learn to harbor so much hate towards one another? Seething resentments, of things immaterial and forming on the channels of the internet, taking life and floating above the common decency called basic sense, these things seem to be the wood shards of a sunken ship.

How did we get to this point? I suspect it has to do with the rise of a new type of American Nationalism, the advent of uncertainty that arrived with COVID, as well as the superfluous stream of information that seems to engender an unnatural fear in the minds of people. It is usually an outside force that frightens the American psyche. This forms in a seething existential threat often attributing the problem to something that is not the problem at all. It could be undocumented immigrants seeking refuge.

If you’ve read anything about the influx of Haitians arriving at the border, turned away because of a narrative, you understand how easily we forget humanity even though it seems to be the song of the choir. Human rights violations are always the trigger-finger word, ever pulled by both Puppeteers with lesser details for actions and outcomes than is required of the shady drug dealer I met last week. Details are described in perfect abstraction, the same abstact language in which we all describe our many gods. Texas has risen its banner in the fight against abortion. They call it an outrage, a defense for the “sanctity of life.” Those same Texas borders harbor 12,000 hungry and desperate souls, children among them, in a perpetual state of uncertainty. I supposed heaven is only for Christians and American ones at that. At least asylum seekers have their Purgatory, but better than us, they at least live with hope.

Fear too plays out through the antithesis of “our” American way of life, the narrative painting in singular fashion a mysterious other. This other could be Afghan refugees or Iraqi immigrants, or as we saw since the arrival of COVID, the Chinese and any other Asian that someone might confuse for being Chinese. Still the Other remains the other, and fear stirs the racial divisions that teether in the cyber air like broken seams of an old baker’s tattered apron. The problem of COVID has unfurled itself, giving rise to conspiracies that bloom like a thousand dancing fools drunk in their muddled and outrageous conversations. I still imagine their feet dragging through the floor, one fool drops as the others begin to collapse. The pile gets higher as everyone keeps getting in each other’s way. Many if not all are rooted in the often unspoken insecurities of both entitlements and privileges. When we drink our emotions uncork themselves and the ego becomes near unbearable.

We drink the Koolaid everyday, social media the powder that mixes itself with our life water. More than the information highway, where there aren’t any traffic jams but still an endless amount of collisions, information crashes from above with the strength of waterfalls. We have become hyperselves ever projecting. Whether real or not, our persona becomes both gatekeeper and vanguard of what is socially acceptable and what is not. Through this we have isolated into circles and clicks, into camps of this or that, a politics of self. The Personal is political, an adage and phrase long since repeated since Carol Hansch said it decades ago. This statement is given new context because we represent ourselves with each post and picture. A larger story is being fabricated but a human craving to be woven into a larger tale has become our strongest impulse. We are fighting for our rights and our kids, for our lives and our futures, and for the search of ourselves and still our own autonomy. With each representation of ourselves we make that plight known, we say this is who I am.

We like making these declarations as a response to a social disease. It is the outcome of self alienation, our alienation from each others, and our search for truth amid the many cardboard cutouts that constantly deceive us. Reality seems to be more real if it is hardwired into our artificial companions, you know the ones with the mark of God’s secret wisdom or that ubiquitous S. The middle class shrinks as we contend and glorify an upper echelon of wealth. We still buy their lies and goods. The glass ceiling has cracks in it and still we focus on this hyperself. The self that feeds their machines that advertise and keep us wired. We value the instantaneous emotional consequences to this version of ourselves rather than the long term ones. So important does this thing become, that anyone in contention or in disagreement with this persona becomes a person non-gratis, an existential threat to the very identities we’ve forged in the crucible of cyberspace. When we have differences of opinions–that line has become near impossible to cross.

I see people from all walks of life. I own a retail business with my family. There, people of many colors and pocketbooks enter with their own opinions and unwavering convictions. Some air it out more than most, their hyperself seeking the validation of its rabbit hole. They’ve been digging deep. The deep state is responsible for all of this. They want to depopulate our numbers. They eat children. They are responsible for a million egregious and unseen things, and still we are not outraged by the million egregious things we see them do. These are ordinary people woven into a conviction that weaves a narrative into life. They forget the life that stands before them.

Others condemn the condemners. Foolish are those that doubt, for COVID is a global phenomenon, and there is no country that is not suffering a sort of devastation from its insidious breath. I side with the loss of life, especially at the hands of a synthetic chemical toxin crafted in a lab, for it is a devastation no matter how inflated stats may be or how exaggerated the accounts given are. The real accounts have put me on notice. It is the right to life that I side with. Still those same people I might agree with, have turned absolute in their conviction. People must absolutely take a vaccine, they must absolutely fall in line with a State they never trusted anyway. Full disclosure, I have my vaccination, but I love and respect many people who haven’t. I stand by their decision to their bodies and their peace of mind. I understand the reservations about hurried science, we are just numbers on a sheet in a government database. I haven’t drawn the line that seems to be drawing itself in hardening sand.

We still live amongst each other. We always have! The racial divide, at least among people (I will not give the out for the systemic oppression that still thrives openly in our government and their agencies), has grown since the election of a black president. A melting pot exists and still, the caramel burns at the bottom as the cream froths at the top. Words divide us, as do ideas, and still most people are open and decent to each other regardless of the other’s creed, culture, or race. We are fighting each other in order to pick a side, but the picket fence is six feed wide. The ranch is acres big and the fingers we are pointing are at each other and this divide they set between us. How many laws were written into each passing bill that provided a stimulus check? How many compromises were made to our privacy in those half-thought-out promises? How rich has someone become off the suffering that is COVID?

COVID is a reality. The handling of that reality remains in the hands of the Establishment. Failed leadership and an increasingly divided people are perfect prerequisites for madness. I do not know if things will get better before they get worse. The possibility of a manufactured virus that attacks the body unlike any virus before, able to mutate and transform and cause irreparable harm to us as a species, demands serious attention. Vaccines are the easiest answer to that question, but don’t blame someone for looking for another answer. Listen to their concerns, not necessarily to agree but to understand. It is entirely possible a completely conspiratorial reason motivates them, but too is possible that health concerns are their main motivation. Vaccinations are subject to clinical trials that can take years to deem safe. I don’t judge someone’s hesitation because of unforeseen consequences.

Beyond a pandemic, the reality that scares me is the reality being built right now in the heart of this storm. Racism and hate divides the country in a way I have not experience in my lifetime. Never before have I ever seen people feel so entitled to their racist attitudes. When I was young, racists had the decency to keep it to themselves. Now they barker louder than they bite, but damn are their teeth sharp. I think they fear the sharpness of the Other‘s teeth. They forget the Other is trying to live too, and that they have the same American Dream that is ascribed in myth. The fear grows with the fire of prejudice and misunderstanding boiling beneath. My own fear is that the pot will overflow.

I do not have the wisdom to remedy such a dilemma. I just know that we need to keep talking to each other, as if we have to live with one another. As if we are building a world together, even if it is just the community or the smaller neighborhood. We are all in this as brother and sisters, mothers and fathers, friends and lovers. We need to fix our gazes on something other than each other. Even our families have become divided, a politics estranging us from the one constant that should always be there. We must continue to talk to one another, before the exchanges are something more egregious than the words. We need to stand up for what is right, but not lose sight of what that is. I would say God help us, but I know still, we may yet help ourselves.