Tag Archives: ignorance

Delay the Blame

Leave a comment

“There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”  —LC

Leonard Cohen was right. But maybe that’s how the truth sneaks in as well. In an age of finger-pointing panic, saddling innocent necks with a concocted albatross feels like an exercise in sweaty futility.

Punching someone else in the mouth to alleviate your own toothache is psychotically pointless, and we are witnessing a disturbing cycle of dangerously misplaced condemnations in the form of false attributions.

Clean hands are too often tarnished and soiled by the stream of mud and muck spewed from the mouths of rabid believers desperate for vengeance. Idiots search for scapegoats in a world that has turned its back on their illogical ignorance, and they’re running out of easy targets.

Unforgivable violence as an outlet for the bottled frustration, isolation, and loss that have permeated the population is not going to stop the spread, clear the lungs, or bring back the dead. Sidewalk assaults, venomous threats, and racial slurs only fuel internal fires. So maybe it’s time to spin that mirror and explore some page-turning solutions—as opposed to bullet-spitting blame without scientific proof or justification.

The sneaky little secret that no one likes to share is that it’s not about race. It’s about disgusting food manufacturing and the ugly, unquenchable consumption of innocent, sentient beings. As long as we continue the barbaric practice of wet markets and turn a blind eye to the perilous commingling of humans and animals, we are at constant risk of viral outbreaks.

That’s a much longer discussion, best suited for another post.

But if we don’t take a drastic collective turn as a people and a planet, I recommend we start seeing this pandemic as simply one in a line, not one in a million. 

Adolescence Interrupted

Life and Loss

2 Comments

A terrifying concept of personal psychological hell states, “On your last day on Earth, the person you became will meet the person you could have become.”  —Anonymous

This could be read as a simple warning to keep carpe diem on the top of the list, or a friendly injunction not to squander talents or time.

But in this moment of global uncertainty and personal panic, perhaps the message is much simpler at its base. The clock on the wall that seemed to run on solar power is really just a parasitic imposter, suckling at the teat of a couple of old Duracells.

The days, weeks, and months are disappearing at an alarmingly unsettling rate. We are relinquishing the reins precisely when the horse needs our help to find his footing. But this is not a roller coaster that ends when our eyes finally open, and there is no waiting on the sidelines until things return to “normal.”

People are going to continue to die, and we need to prepare for the weight of that loss. There is an emotional heft in the acknowledgment that so much could have been prevented and so many lives could have been saved.

We are a selfish, shortsighted, and dangerously myopic society. Unwilling to sacrifice our petty personal “freedoms” for the greater good of our most vulnerable citizens will ceaselessly drive these infection rates and further delay any notion of achieving even a remotely flattened curve.

We’ll keep striding into crowded restaurants and bars without masks, and pretend this is all some overblown hoax designed by imaginary foreign foes (or local liberals) to keep us incarcerated in some oppressive fairytale prison of our own creation.

Wake up. Mask up. Shut up.

You’re ridiculous and ignorant to believe your life has any more value than another’s. Putting your foot down in refusal is merely flattening the gravesite soil.

Adolescence Interrupted