The Sound of a Dead Horse

This is the obnoxious, unproductive, self-serving sentiment you’ve heard time and time again. Please don’t expect anything else.

I picked up my phone and wrote out posts or replies a thousand times yesterday, each one feeling more glib than the last. I wanted to revert to my 16 year-old self and tear into strangers on the internet, desperate to drill my personal synthesis of deep-seated political rage and humanistic bearing into their perceptibly thick skulls. I want to call ‘em all fucking hateful, disgusting, cretins.

I didn’t stop myself because I second-guessed my convictions. I stopped because I found myself thinking “What’s the point?” How can I possibly beat this dead horse in a way that is productive? 

I feel eternally torn between the call to quell bigotry and violence with enlightenment and the desire to block out the static in order to focus on enriching my own time on this Earth. But when you have the privilege of that choice (and the lack of caveman brain that renders you incapable of empathy), it feels impossible to choose the latter without a cold shame shooting the option dead in the water before you even try.

My philosophy tells me that no individual should have the right to play judge, jury, and executioner. And yet, we’ve seen our nation’s leader play all three in our faces as he centralizes his own power to unjustly rip apart families, dismantle supportive infrastructures, and incite hate in the streets, all leading to violent deaths in a multiplicity of forms. So are we all meant to lie down and take it because the other option is ugly?

I do find it interesting that all the people I went to high school with who would sleep or text their way through history class are so keen to forget that political violence, with its dark and storied past, has admittedly been responsible for some of humanity’s progress. Hell, this fucking country they all gleefully suck at the teat of wouldn’t even exist without it. They are the same people who are ecstatic to go through the world ignoring mass murders of children overseas, only pausing from their modern monotony when it misfires on a reflection of themselves. 

Arguably wrong means. Definitely right end: hate silenced.

I want to believe things will get better from here. A huge, dark cloud has just been dissipated from our atmosphere, so why does it feel as if an even worse one is peeking over the horizon? All I know is hell is hot. And 99% of us are going there if nothing changes, which we seem thoroughly incapable of doing, despite my pleading wishes with the universe for things to be different.

Nobody is denying that this energy is volatile, unkempt, and untamable. But the rhetoric condemning it as black-and-white is historically wielded to placate. And placation is always the precursor to suffocation.

This reflection was submitted by a contributor to The Forum and has been published anonymously. Its opinions are the author’s own and do not represent The Forum, Forum Media, or any other entity.