we all feel attacked
Tags: America, Anger, Racism

I’m not going to aim for nuance here, because nobody is looking for it right now.

I’m not going to tell all the suburban moms who have sheltered themselves from the world pre-pandemic that there is a difference between protesters and looters.

I’m not going to tell protesters and everyone getting mad on social media that there is a difference between good cops and bad cops.

I can try to tease out the nuances of every situation however much I want and “encourage dialogue”, but none of that will work.

The fact of the matter is right now, we all feel attacked: by a pandemic, by racist cops, by a government that has failed us, by armchair liberals, by sociopathic conservatives, by white supremacists who feel like Mexicans are taking their jobs, by crypto-Confucians who are actually confused angry Asian-Americans left out by American society so they stand with China, by Donald Trump, by Xi Jingping, by your fucking neighbor, by crazy Evangelicals, by sassy gays, by kpop stans, by that one guy you’re beefing with in your imagination because he has a better car than you. Pick your poison and add it to the list here.

And guess what? Very little is going to change after the pandemic. We’re going to only become more hedonistic to make up for lost times, more money-obsessed, more superficial, more insecure about our truest feelings, more impoverished, more alienated, more violent, more callous, more self-absorbed.

Security is going to become the main driver of basic human behavior of the next 10 years. Security from violence, security from hunger, security from shame, security from negative emotions, security from being left out, security from ugliness you can’t post on IG. The whole spectrum.

Some of you will argue that you can’t equate racial violence with all the other issues we are dealing with. Fair enough. What I’m trying to get at, however, is a much deeper and foundational problem:

We are all making decisions out of the feeling of being attacked physically or emotionally.

Even worse, we have no other way of emotionally or intellectually approaching a problem.

I know I don’t. I’m a millennial just like everyone else my age. I was not raised by this world to be an adult. I was raised to be fucked in the head. What’s worse, I get the feeling that even most Americans older than me are the same way. Why else are the police attacking protesters? The protesters are challenging their power, and like any institution, they are acting out of self-preservation of their power and their ingrained systemic failures.

There is no system of power in the world that will not feed you to the dogs if it means their self-preservation.

It is only apt our current president of the United States is the most insecure man in the world. Deep down, there is a Trump in all of us. It is incumbent upon us not to listen to him.

Sigh. I know. I know we all feel hopelessly degraded day by day. I know we’re being treated like shit. Black people are having it the worst. They are being policed by people who see them as less than human. One thing I have read this past week that helped me gain some understanding was from the hip hop artist Reason, who suggests: “In my opinion, no cop should be policing a neighborhood that they haven’t lived in for at least six months.” He says this because the cops who are not from the neighborhood patrol in fear, and that is what leads to tragic police violence.

This is stating the obvious, but I wouldn’t be able to be a U.S. citizen if it were not for the civil rights movement of the 60s. Black people have fought for us minorities even before some of us were born. As Kendrick Lamar opined in “Money Trees”: “The one in front of the gun lives forever”. It’s a line as wailing and tragic as it is beautiful, for it is as much about the countless blacks who have died from injustice as it is about the true power of what it means to be black American.

As for those Americans braving a pandemic to peacefully protest for a better America, I salute you. You are braver than I am. While you guys were protesting, I was incapacitated at home due to stomach pains.

After the protests though, and after this damn pandemic, I think it would be prudent for us all to consider the possibility that there is a moral corruption within the American soul. The new world is not brave. From Jeff Bezos shafting his workers to your racist Chinese grandma, Americans will only care about their own security and trade it for their souls. No one will care anymore. Fuck it, nobody did. The moment they failed to get PPE to the hospitals was when we knew we’re fucked.

In the Old Testament, Jews used to repent after these types of catastrophes. But repentance requires God, whether we prefer talking about God in the spiritual sense as the true Alpha Omega or in the secular sense as some abstraction representing actual morality. As Americans, we don’t have God in the Old Testament sense of the word. Maybe we should. Or maybe we just need to realize that outside of the lead waters in Flint, there is a moral poison in our waters and we need to develop a new way of thinking that helps us step outside our selfishness, our constant need for security, our self-preservation — because all these are exactly the impulses that leads us to create more institutions, cultural or otherwise, that will grind us into meat if it means keeping itself running.