i am feeling filled with absurd contradictions. i feel too old and too young, too jaded and too naive. how can i feel so strong, and be so easily hurt? how is it that i can expect the best of people and settle for the worst? what is this life that so utterly baffles me on a regular basis, that leaves me a quivering mess, that tires my soul and exhausts my heart?
i was on the airplane yesterday, in the very last row with a family of four, a mother, father, and two small girls. the father was a petulant turd, he was childish and obnoxious. he spent the entire flight complaining about the seats that wouldn't recline, about the flight attendant asking him to put on his seatbelt when we hit turbulence, about not being able to get up when the seatbelt light was on. at the end of the flight he made some quip about trying to do something "out of sight of the Nazis". it was the last straw. in my head, i unleashed on him.
"could you please, if not for me, than for your daughters who seem to be sweet and wonderful girls and who look to you as an example, could you please manage not to be a jackass for the three and a half hours we are all on this plane together? could you please be cautious of your language? could you please not minimize the murder of millions of people by comparing the perpetrators of war crimes with flight attendants who are trying to abide by federal safety regualtions? could you please just be conscious of the fact that no one is impressed by your quippiness and sarcasm, that your wife does not think that's cute, but who goes along with it because it's easier than picking a fight with you in public? please, stop being a bully and just grow up"
maybe it was because at the very moment he made the comment about the nazis that i was reading about Jan Karski, the righteous gentile who smuggled out reams of evidence about the Final Solution to a resounding lack of response by the Allied governments and the leaders of Jewish communities in both the United States and Great Britain. He wore a star on his clothes and went into the ghetto.
i have a sense of humor. i am not an ultra- sensitive bleeding heart. most of the time i can maintain a certain degree of distance between myself and the atrocities of the world. jesus, if i couldn't i would likely have killed myself long before today. but sometimes, some days it's just too much.
the fact that people kill each other is a reality. genocide is not a new idea. it's not a product of industrialized society, no matter what Hannah Arendt proposed. The United States government enacted a policy of genocide, sometimes willfull and sometimes through pure and utter apathy, towards the Native Americans for the entire span of its existence. And don't think for a moment that much has changed. We, the victors, have done a damn fine job of sterilizing our history.
How dare I claim to have some sort of right to work for international human rights? and what is that idea anyway? we have no rights. we live in anarchism, pure and simple. our so called civility caves when it is challenged, why even bother trying to hold anyone to some sort of "higher standard". higehr than what?
fuck this noise.
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