Not even 100 days in and I have to stop myself from pointlessly, foolishly raging against and wishing that every one of these crooked, death-loving, merciless, rapacious, malignant, mercenary cockroach-centipede motherfuckers the worst fates I can imagine.
And you know exactly of whom I speak.
And I know that such a desire is in poor taste and immoral to boot. I know it stops up my heart, immediately blinds me, limits my ability to see and think clearly. It incapacitates me. It provides a moment of comfort, and that might be the worst effect — comfort from wishing such ugliness.
So I find myself trying to step away from the anger and trying to see as clearly as I can what I do hold dear, and thus why they drive me toward this precipice — to articulate the ingrained and visceral triggers these ‘people’ arouse. To build the sentences simply. To do this without lying to myself.
Therefore:
One must stand against deliberate cruelty, however it is masked, against whomever it is wielded, whether it takes the form of a personal action one witnesses or the form of a policy or law. There is an exception to this: if I had the power to hand over Bashar al-Assad and his lieutenants to his Syrian victims, I would be willing to witness what follows — that expression of justice.
Human life and ecological systems are to be cherished and protected. Human life should not be fixed into one savage Darwinian encounter after another. Water and air and habitat should not be destroyed for profit: hatred of nature is a form of suicide. I cannot understand those who show disdain for the outdoors or for animals. It is as if they have been summoned from some ashy, dark alternate dimension. I keep expecting to watch their heads suddenly rotate all the way around.
Children before adults, always, in every way, and that includes after being born as well as before.
One must make every effort to see clearly, to resist dogma, to step outside the shadow of ideology no matter who advocates it, left or right. Ideology is poison, the incubator of fanaticism and lies.
Fairness in law, in its origin and in the powers of the state which apply it.
Work is essential. One must keep moving forward. Nostalgia is a trap. The past made us but it is over. There is forever something of note we can do before rolling into the void.
Wrestle with God, the old provoker.
Thus, when those in power do their deeds and smile their awful smiles after taking part in nefarious acts, when they lie and lie, when they exercise cruelty with pleasure, for me these are the codes they profane.
