I realized that in another year, I will be as old as my dad was the last time I saw him.
I’d etched out a draft for an essay, observing how those who saw the insanity of Trump’s ideas for launching missiles at Mexican drug cartels without invitation or permission from the Mexican government, how cool these same voices are with Israel launching continuous strikes upon Syria and Iran and Lebanon and elsewhere without invitation or permission from those governments. How stupidly misleading it is for western media to be suggesting the source of the pager explosions, the IDF’s cyber-warfare unit 8200, planted tiny IED’s inside thousands of pagers and inserted them into the supply chain in such a way that only terrorists and only terrorists in a very specific territory would have access, rather than simply export a doomsday signal across the devices as cyber-warriors would be purposed with. Israel had the means over a decade ago to launch the world’s very first case of malware to result in human casualties. I’d insist the devices need not have explosives to do harm, as even vape pins with lesser electronics and minus capacities for receiving electronic signals have injured and killed people. But that Americans for whatever reasons feel compelled to tirelessly cast Israel as eternal under-dogs, when unlike the nations it attacks, and unlike most nations generally, it can afford both a nuclear program and a space program. As though quite literally, god forbid the fantasy go without co-signatories. I trashed the essay though as the only solution would seem to be bull-whipping everyone who has ever held federal office here in the states, but they’d just orgasm.
I say, that love is not this casual thing to be conveyed or expressed only when convenient or comfortable, rather is the opposite very much the case. For the livelihood of people we love are we willing to be more inconvenienced than for others and for the well-being of those we love are we willing to become discomforted. Whereas for the people we do not love are we completely unwilling, with degrees of willingness based on degrees of acceptability for one’s comfort and convenience. Meaning that persons who use the terminology of love with excess or in regards to all people, are professing a lack in understanding the cost to come of each and every love. What has become a massive pet peeve of mine are voices who throw the word love around quite a bit, but when any need arises for them to say or do anything more to show or prove that love they cannot be bothered. Most people will never know you to love you, in the same sense that most people have thoughts and feelings of their own preventing them from resource for prioritizing or replicating yours. At the end of the day the peculiarities of how you think or feel on politics or religion are not entirely shared by anyone, so that at no time is any person ever actually speaking on behalf of any greater number than the loudest voice in their head. Real love in such a society is as excruciatingly rare then as it is to any individual life lived. Not all problems know solutions. Sometimes, too often when rights and resources and opportunities are expected to face unethical deprivation to suit what’s convenient and comfortable to others, all that love can be is a sharing of the problem alongside.
Yet the BDS movement has been banned by many presiding over college campuses and state governments alike, assuring all that financial interests of foreign enterprises exuded upon American institutions carries all the gravitas which free speech rights of USA citizens thereabouts do not. As with Israel, the USA has always been something else masquerading as a democracy, a weather-strewn mismatch of self-possessed fantasists obsessively mistaking trees for forests and reinterpreting the provisions of their own banners at liberty and ad nauseam, the most hypocritical of contradictions be damned and observed only by traitors and madmen.
Loving people or places or things creates problems far more than it resolves them. Most problems in life and across the world come from demands for unearned love, and contrary to the claims of whichever groups you my reader yourself belong to or aspire to join, while love means nothing if it is not a special matter, still is it wholly unnecessary to love anybody in order to accomplish either a cohesive societal structure or a country where using and abusing people is never justifiable for survival or happiness. In which case is every claim of superiority a cry for help from the most codependent and helplessly fearful among us. No matter who the fuck you think you are or wish you were, you do not need love or praise, not when there are actual problems to face down, often presented by folks further along in their enabled game of me me me. A life dependent upon the subservience of others is itself the more destructive incarnation of codependency.
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has this to say on the concept of “blood and soil“. Blood and Soil (Blut und Boden) was an early Nazi slogan used in Germany to evoke the idea of a pure “Aryan” race and the territory it wanted to conquer. The concept was foundational to Nazi ideology and its appeal, though it predates the Nazi regime. Blood referred to the goal of a “racially pure” Aryan people. Soil invoked a mystical vision of the special relationship between the Germanic people and their land. It was also a tool to justify land seizures in eastern Europe and the forced expulsion of local populations in favor of ethnic Germans. The term was a rallying cry during the 1920s and early 30s when the Nazis and other far right political parties were in opposition to the fledgling Weimar democracy.
Domestically, Conservatives coyly tell themselves that if they are not wearing literal Nazi uniforms then they could not possibly be dehumanizing anyone. Despite anything resembling a platform being promoted by them in recent years concerning nothing but the taking away of rights or resources or opportunities from whichever subset of the national or global population. If a predominance of migrants were causing genuine concerns, there would be no reason to fabricate issues of them eating domestic pets, those concerned could simply cite actual effects. Americana quintessentialist Elvis Presley had both a song and movie about kissing cousins, and instead of addressing that, it’s evidently easier just to make shit up, the more derogative the better, about persons with different lives than one’s own. Curating mental imagery of foreigners as savages ignores verifiably homegrown insanity such as how child marriages are legal in more USA states than not. Inside the bluest state of California and the reddest state of Florida each, a girl (never a boy) as young as ten can become legally wedded with a parent’s consent, although if she should later wish to pursue a divorce she requires by law an adult to initiate the process, or else must wait until becoming 18. And as I have insisted throughout this website of two-thirds baked ideas, the political spectrum of the USA at state and national levels is limited to competing shades of rightwing, so too are the rest of Americans by and large, with each and every one consciously or subconsciously hung up on the notion that the group they most wish to belong to requires all others to warp their own thoughts and feelings toward the interest of said group. Everything for sale is a cash-grab, even the things you like.
Too many governmental disruptions arrive from modern Republicans genuinely not understanding the role of government or how it functions. You cannot sunset welfare programs with one hand while with the other pushing for Americans to make more babies. American liberals just want different clusters of humanity to suffer, noted by the ongoing US military presence in well over a hundred nations generally without invitation or permission as with Guantanamo Bay and gone wholly unobserved by them, down to their feels for their own unborn, inconvenient reminders of their abhorrence toward personal responsibility, as most abortionist fanatics entitle themselves to shelter in place behind victims of circumstances actually beyond their own control as if nobody but them had the right to recognize value in the life of others. Actions often speak louder than words, so only that which you love is permitted to survive, eugenicist? Prevent the growth of cancers and cancerous agendas, not living things with the potential to know joy, for what is life itself but each and every option of the world short of lethal acts.
My younger sister is facing womanly troubles which will grow progressively worse in coming years, unless she undergoes a hysterectomy. According to current Texan state law however, she is still of child-bearing age and as such, for both her and her doctor would such a procedure be illegal. She learned over a dozen years ago that she can no longer have children of her own, going back to an earlier car accident during her senior year of high school. Even though she cannot carry a child, because the law classifies her of age nonetheless she is looking forward to a condition that will rapidly deteriorate her health in the years to come. Relocating is prevented by said health concerns, as well as the total absence of money. Seeking the surgery out of state would result in deputies waiting to arrest her upon returning home. Fighting to stay alive and healthy are made violations of state law-books then. Meanwhile, in recent weeks we have learned that her dog Venus, who was a rescue and is currently about 7 human years old, has a torn ACL. Selling the dilapidated house would not afford the surgery to repair it. A surgery to remove the leg would be about a third as much of the cost, yet still astronomical when there are not two pennies to rub together. If she cannot provide assistance for the animal though, state law insists she surrender Venus to a facility where she will be put down, an unfamiliar place surrounded by faces who see only another paycheck or statistic. We want the pup to live as long as possible with pain as diminished as much as possible, and there is no resource for that, as the only reasons for existing permitted in this country are adding to the power and authority of the loudest egos we happen across, and nothing more. We are expected to kill or to be killed, but should we kill ourselves instead we are depriving the system of its delusions of normalcy.
I’ve said this before about free speech, but it applies to free expression no less. That it does not automatically guarantee an audience or acceptance for whatever expressed. And that’s fine, because those people as well have to engage their own thoughts and feelings, or else any life becomes the prison. When anything can only ever be familiar and comfortable, from what’s met with schools and news media and online social networks, even entertainment and commerce and who they buy from and who they sell to, then blood and soil doesn’t merely apply to the MAGA movement or the Republican party, rather every single American resisting disengagement from the popularity contests of conformity, coalescing into stereotypes, wants no less for their immediate circle than blood and soil catered for them explicitly.
Decent people do not want for anybody to die. Americans however, sincerely believe they are being cheated if strangers daring to endure lives of their own won’t suffer and die. The two sides of the abortion debate for example could combine resources to assure that every unwanted pregnancy is rescued by way of removing the living embryo faster, safer and cheaper than dead ones, with no lingering strings attached legally or financially and finished with in vitro tech and delivered to adoption networks where they’d at least have a chance to indulge their human right to self-determination. But the divisions are united, in the conviction that others deserve to suffer and die. My mom loved that idea of mine, but last month was the third anniversary of her passing, and this month brought the 24th anniversary of my big sister’s death. I love them still and miss them along with my dad, but what they share with my little sister is a belief in happy endings, and that belief kills all; reserving the greatest weight of their love and trust for people and institutions which could not care less, for the people and institutions of my lifetime will themselves into believing that respect being received does more good than would respect being earned. I hope perversely I will outlive my little sister, if for no other reason but that decent people should not have to see how I contribute my absence in blood and soil to what society remains.