It’s almost midnight here in my studio. I was watching The Nice Guys on Netflix, a popular movie that I ignored years ago because it was popular. I hit pause for a moment to grab a drink and as I sat back to the desk I looked at Twitter my heart began to sink.
I read a story about three teens from Arvada, a town not too far from me, where three boys threw rocks from a moving truck, one that killed a young lady who was just driving home. The article said they started by vandalizing cars and statues I believe. Why they through a huge rock from a moving truck to another car is beyond me. Was is just to see what they were capable of?
There’s something so sad to me to live in a world where the idea of consequences is something that’s old fashion. If not old fashion, then a concept for “other” people. A lot of us share that concept these days. It’s a delusion of safety that we send through our perception of the world in a feedback loop that reminds us that we’re what's good in the world and the evil is always someplace other than our hearts. When that loop breaks it not only takes away that delusion but it can take our hearts and minds along with it. Perhaps the only difference between our philosophy and those teenagers is that they have a dead person attached to theirs now.
I’m going to write about a part of me that I hate. when I say hate maybe a better word is ashamed, I’m ashamed because deep down I know I don’t hate this part of me. when I was in junior high I was friends with a kid who was always in trouble in one way or another. Keep in mind this was a time where you had to be friends with the people around you as opposed to having the option to ignore the people around you in favor of an on-line community. I was a kid who loved comic books, heavy metal and theater. That doesn’t seem like the type of kid who is an outsider by today’s standards but back then, there weren’t people like that around me on a daily basis. So I was friends with whoever wanted to be friends with me I guess.
So one day on a bus ride home from school one of my friends decided it was the day to pick on me. He kept kicking the back of my seat on the bus while calling me names like pussy and gay. I told him to stop and the more I told him the more his taunts increased. Then he said something that every dumbass throughout history of man has said that always makes this situation worse,”You ain’t going to shit pus-”. at that point I reached over the back of the seat, put my hand around the back of his head, then slammed his face into the back of my seat. He tried to push away but I was bigger and stronger as I hit puberty sooner than he did. I was holding his head against the seat with my right and found a way to put my hand under his chin while holding him in place with my left. That’s when I started to crank on his neck, I cranked so hard that I could hear and feel his neck start to crack. That’s when I could hear all the other kids start to freak out and tell me to stop. The bus came to a stop by my house and I grabbed my duffle bag and left.
I was so angry. Angry because I let myself get that mad, angry that my friend thought he could tease me and get away with it, angry ….angry because I liked hurting him. Angry because I had that in me. Up until that moment I thought I was a good person, I wasn’t innocent by any means. I had been bullied and have bullied people. I had gotten in trouble every now and then but nothing really bad. I’m surprised I didn’t get in trouble on that day, one of the injustices that worked in my favor I guess.
Both of my parents are fairly violent people. That doesn’t mean they weren’t loving as well, they were. My mother tried to kill one of her bosses with a pair of scissors after he slapped her in the face in front of the other employees. My father was a tough looking guy , kind of had that John Wayne/Clint Eastwood vibe around him at times. He had just lost his dad two weeks before I was born. My delivery had complications as my head was too big it seemed. They needed to do a caesarian or both my mom and I weren’t going to make it. I’m not sure the reason but the doctor was dragging his feat on the whole situation and my mom had been in labor for way too long, more than a day I’m told. So at some point my dad wasn’t about to lose either of us, he had already lost his dad earlier. So he grabbed the doctor by his neck, held him against the wall, and told him that if either my mom or I don’t make it out of that hospital, neither would the doctor. The doctor immediately started the operation.
Neither of my parents wanted me to be like them, they wanted me to be a man who used his brain not just his braun. For the most part that’s what I grew up to be, but that day on the bus I knew I had their rage in me as well.
So why am I telling you all this? Do I think you all have the same rage as I do? The same temper? God I hope not. The truth might be is that some of you have a worse temper, some not as much. I’m telling you all this because I think there’s point of rage that a lot of us have that we kind of hope is there but at the same time we don’t know where it is. There is a possibility that we have a violence within us that we fool ourselves into thinking doesn’t exist. For me that’s something that I couldn’t get away from. No matter how much of a good person people thought I was, I knew deep down there was a part of me that’s not going to think twice about hurting another person if I thought they deserved it. It would be years later before I discovered that the most dangerous and destructive emotion on Earth wasn’t hate, it was righteousness. Hate might be the flame, but righteousness is the spark that sets the whole thing off and keeps that party going until there’s nothing left to burn.
I see a lot of righteousness in the world these days. I see a lot of trolling. Political trolling, cultural trolling, call it what you will. There’s a lot of people trying to get a rise out of another person with some odd idea of that if the other person gets angry that the troll wins. It started on line of course but now it’s starting to appear in the streets. We see it on internet videos , we see it in protests, it’s all based in the hope that there won’t be consequences to our actions. I see an escalation that will set us back decades of progress. I know sometimes we need to tear down the old to build the new but I think we can take better care of this world by ways other than setting fire to what we don’t like.
That being said, please don’t think that I think I’m better or more evolved than you, I’m not. I have my prejudices as well. when I think of the pharmaceutical industries and how they take advantage of people I’m filled with righteous rage as well. I listen to historical podcasts about civilizations like the Mongols,Asyrians, or any other ancient peoples and they talk about the brutal fashion they disposed of their enemies with, well I get it. One of the things that keeps me from going down such a path is the loss of all the good things in my life. I’m not talking about material things, I’m talking about the relationships I’ve built over the years, my appreciation for little things that bring joy, all the things that tell me that I’m a good person, not because I was born that way, because I chose to be.
I think a lot of us get swept up in the times we live in and we forget to make that choice. I’m not saying that people don’t have the right to be angry, there is a lot to be angry about. Let’s not fool ourselves , hate feels good, hate makes us feel strong when we feel weak. Hate promises so much, it says it’ll fix all our problems. If we get angry enough, the world will change its ways. It offers so much and asks so little, all we have to do is give up on any possible way forward that doesn’t have hate in its heart. It does have a place in our lives, let’s not pretend we’ve evolved past the need for it, that’s another mistake we tend to make. I’m sure there are people who have been in real combat that would say that hate came in pretty handy given the situation. I guess what I want to say is that maybe we need to get to know ourselves a bit more than we think we do. Not everyone who finds them in a situation where they’re close to breaking someones neck will stop when people are telling them to. I felt bed enough for what I did, I can’t imagine how I’d feel if I had killed him. I’d like to think I’d feel bad about it.
How do those kids feel about what they did? There is a part of me that wants to write it all off as these kids being just some sociopaths. I wonder if we jump to that conclusion too easily? If we do, I suspect it’s because we hope we have nothing in common with people who do monstrous acts. I know how hard it is to look inward, I really do. That being said, perhaps this is the battle we should face before we just say fuck it, whose got a match?
I’ll go first, I’ll let you know what I find.