These past few weeks my news feed has been nothing but fear, panic, outrage, and hysteria. It has been so bad that I nearly backed out of social media, again. I can hardly handle all the ignorance and general silliness that people vomit all over the place. Drama isn't really my thing. Three events in the past month have been at the center of all of this brouhaha, whether they deserve to be or not: the mass shooting in Charleston, South Carolina, the controversy over the Confederate battle flag, and the SCOTUS ruling on same-sex marriage.
I've held my peace over the past few weeks because I didn't want to be just another reactor. I wanted to respond. That's generally how I roll, I'll sit back and take a long look at what's going on, reflect on it, and then respond later. That seems to be the exact opposite of how our society behaves in the age of Twitter and sound bytes. Everyone reacts. Almost nobody responds. Responding to an issue takes thought, knowledge, and self-control. It takes maturity. Reacting just takes emotion and impulse. One of the major problems facing our society is that we all receive information in tiny little packets, sometimes not even complete sentences, and then we react in tiny little packets. Everything is thrown out into the nether regions of the internet in 160 characters or less, a span of text that is physically far too small to say anything worthwhile. As individual members of a larger society, we are no longer encouraged to contemplate and respond. We are encouraged to be outraged... over EVERYTHING.
The reactions to these issues over the past few weeks have been spectacularly absurd in their scope, their ignorance, their false pride, and their bigotry. The absolute, bald-faced stupidity of the vast majority of the social media vomiting is mind-numbing, and is largely the reason it has taken so long for me to respond. I've been shocked into silence, dumbfounded. I mean, I know how the masses are, but I still find myself amazed, even though by now I should be expecting it. In the span of about a week we went, in some cases quite literally, from zero to apocalypse. People were acting like this country was on its deathbed and the world was going to end. Don't be so stupid.
First of all, the shooting in Charleston was a hate crime and an act of terrorism. So many of the items that scrolled down my news feed in the days following the crime tried to debate that issue. Some people were trying to pretend that it wasn't about race, he shot them up because they were Christians. The bullshit weeping about nonexistent persecution by American Christians aside, it was about race, and either way it was an act of terrorism and a hate crime. What I want to know is, why is no one talking about the flag on his jacket?
Right after it happened we were shown two different photographs of this pig. One of him sitting on a car with a Confederate battle flag license plate, and one of him in the woods with a jacket on. On that jacket were flags of Apartheid South Africa. No one seems to be asking about that in my news feed. How did he come by those patches? Why was he wearing them? Is there some white supremacist group in the US that uses them? How did some ignorant redneck kid even know what they were? No, instead we're attacking a part of our own history.
People need to stop conflating being white, southern, and conservative with being a racist. Those things don't all necessarily go hand in hand, even if the mainstream media wants you to think they do. The liberal media wants to twist words and lump people together. This is all a part of the agenda I'll get to later. Don't buy into it.
This issue over the Confederate battle flag is ridiculous. I'm not going to argue history or symbolism. We've had enough of that over the past few weeks. The point I want to make about this is that these sorts of fights are empty grandstands for people to sermonize from. They allow us to throw stones from a distance at something that doesn't really matter, and feel good about ourselves for “fighting the good fight,” without us actually having to get our hands dirty. Racism, police brutality, the targeting of blacks and the poor in general by law enforcement, stop and frisk policies, the fact that our prisons are run by corporations and filled with young black men... these are issues worth discussing and fighting for. Taking a fucking flag down isn't going to change any of that, and has nothing to do with any of that.
The thing is, to change those things we'd have to get our hands dirty, takes some risks, live on the edge.
And then there was the truly apocalyptic event, at least in the eyes of America's Christians, the SCOTUS ruling on same-sex marriage. First of all, I'm really glad that we've finally come to this point. I'm hoping legalizing Marijuana isn't too far behind. Whether or not SCOTUS can make rulings forcing states to do things is a different subject. The point here is that the idea that a particular group of people doesn't have full access to the law and the full benefits of citizenship is absurd. That any American would be denied access to a portion of our legal benefits is ridiculous.
Another groups moral opinions based on their religion and holy text are irrelevant to that legal issue. No one wants to hear it. No one gives a shit. Just because Christians think something is a sin doesn't give them the right to pitch a fit and deny access and protections to a group of people, making them second class citizens. People are entitled to their opinions, their religion, and their right to speak their minds in a public forum. As it is, the hatred and utter ignorance from people has been shocking. It shouldn't be, I should expect it from evangelicals by now, but it still takes me aback.
What I want to know is, what are they hoping to gain by railing against the gays? What is redeemed in our world by getting all apocalyptic about gays being allowed to obtain sheets of paper from the government? How is this going to end our society? Physically, what we are talking about is paper. We are talking about people getting pieces of legalese typed on sheets of paper.
How much of the world was “saved” for Jesus by these people bitching because they didn't get to continue to deny rights to gay people?
The general outrage at this has been unbelievable. In the spirit of outrage, let me give you a list of things I think we ought to be outraged over more than gay marriage: child soldiers, sweat shops, human trafficking, government surveillance of American citizens, the fact that the TSA doesn't work, America's crumbling infrastructure that our leaders act like isn't falling apart, the passing of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the classism in American society that keeps the poor pinned beneath the police line and protects the rich from the rule of law, factory farming, puppy mills, the high rate of homelessness and suicide among LGBT teenagers, the fact that a trans woman is literally more likely to be beaten to death.
But, oh HOLY SHIT MARRIAGE LICENSES. I mean, really.
What is marriage anyway? On a spiritual and emotional level, it's a connection between two people bound with commitment to each other. Love, I think is what we call that. Do we really need the government's permission to have that? I'm pretty sure all kinds of people have that without licenses. So what is it that we need marriage licenses for? Well, for legal and economic benefits such as: health insurance, custody of children, life insurance benefits, wills, the ability to visit a loved one in the hospital, and a whole host of other legal items. When I was filling out the paperwork for my current job, one of the things I had to do was designate who was going to receive my money (i.e. pay, leave balance, retirement money, etc.) if I passed away. That form was very clear that this person or persons had to be next of kin unless I was married, and that if I wanted to assign these benefits to someone other than a family member, my family member had to sign off on it. Thus, if I had a girlfriend I wasn't legally married to, my mother and father would have had to sign off that she could get it. Which up until just a week or two ago, would have been true for every gay couple in this country. Now that SCOTUS has passed this ruling, they don't have to deal with that legal bull crap anymore.
Basically, none of the spiritual crap that the Christians weep crocodile tears about applies here.
All of this, ultimately, is nothing more than meaningless distraction. The power structure of the government, corporations, and the media propaganda wants to keep us divided and fighting each other. This culture of reaction and outrage is a part of the growing mob mentality that is infecting this country. When we allow ourselves to be drawn into these hysterical fads, not only does nothing change, but we are actually helping the elite maintain the status quo that benefits them and leaves us behind. The more fear we are blinded into accepting, the more time and resources we waste fighting each other, the less energy we have as the people to realize there are more of us than there are of them. We don't have to buy their bullshit, their lies, or their party lines.
Think of all the good we could do if we spent all that time and energy helping each other instead of fighting. We've bought into their system, but we don't need it. It needs us. We've forgotten that the market and the government only exist because of the people, and only exist to serve the people. Now we have the people serving the market.
We can make a better world. They want to keep us divided, but we can come together and build a whole new way of living without them. The best thing we can do right now is invest in our families and our communities. They want to keep us apart, now is the time to come together.