I remember the first time I came home after getting beat up on the school bus. I pointed to my bloody nose and asked my dad to do something about it. His response was my first introduction to the true cruelty of the world.
“Well, what did you do to make somebody hit you?”
“I didn’t do anything,” I managed to mumble.
He gave me the smirk that indicated he’d already decided I was lying. “Well, that doesn’t make sense. Nobody would just come up and punch you for no reason.”
This was while I was still young and uncertain. I was still growing into the use of my own senses and building my identity. I relied on my mentors for guidance, so I didn’t know that I had the right to reject the idea that people didn’t do evil things for no reason.
Now that I’m fifty I know better.
Yes, there are some people who will pester you and torture you and exploit you and rape you for no reason at all. No, you didn’t do anything to provoke it.
But back when I was a kid, I didn’t know.
We live in a world where almost everyone you meet embraces laziness over justice. Rather than investigate a conflict, authority figures are inclined to believe it always takes two parties for there to be a fight. They dismiss out of hand the idea that some individuals stomp through life inflicting as much damage as possible without any consideration for the pain they cause.
The collective response of decent people isn’t to oppose such monsters, instead, we avoid them. We deny their existence. We put our heads in the sand and protect ourselves in whatever ways we can.
You might think that conflict is the worst pain in the world. It’s not. The worst pain comes from submission and compliance.
We are a nation of enablers.
I look back on my own life and I’m stunned to recognize how many of my decisions were motivated by conflict avoidance. There are whole worlds within my reality that are closed off to me. I try to disregard their existence. There I am, along with all the others, with my face firmly rooted in the sand.
I see advertisements for new cars, but the price is prohibitive so I watch the pitches with glazed eyes. It’s like they don’t even exist. I don’t sit down at a restaurant without looking at the menu first. If the prices are obscene, I leave, no questions asked. That establishment becomes erased from my radar, I’ll never go into that place again.
The clothing in my closet is threadbare. When I purchase meat, it’s from the manager’s special section. I do all my own repairs around the house. There are entire service industries I’ve never called. There are businesses with web pages and offices that will never serve me.
Yet the people they do serve are in my community too. My kids go to school with theirs, they play on the same team. Even though some people in my community are worse off or better off than I am, we’re all prisoners of the same false reality.
In other parts of the country, there are men who own multiple mansions, and yachts, and islands where they go to rape children. They never have to work, they get everything for free.
I wonder if that population is made up of the sociopaths on the bus who, for no reason at all, used to beat up on me?
What compelled my father to insist that such cruelty didn’t exist? He must have experienced it too? Why do we turn away from injustice and say, “Well, there’s nothing we can do?”
Why are we so programmed to avoid obstacles rather than run them through?
These days, almost everyone is feeling the pinch of economic hardship. We work extra jobs. We all have side hustles. Prices keep going up. There’s no time to rest. We don’t get healthcare.
We feel the press of the monsters all around us, so what do we do?
We do what we’ve always done in the past. We turn away from them. We pretend they’re not there. We go around. We pretend we’re free.
But the thing we don’t see is that the monsters are placing the obstacles deliberately. They’re setting them out like an intricate cage. They know we’ve been indoctrinated to turn away. So they can arrange their camouflaged challenges to get us to do what they say.
We have to stop submitting to our indoctrination and demand a change. It’s ineffective to ignore the injustices we’re confronted with every day. The bullies have overstepped. We can’t continue to live like this.
Ask yourself why.
Who decided that only evil people can have nice things? Why should they get to own mansions that gather dust, while the rest of us struggle to feed our kids? Money is fake anyway, why does it control our lives but never theirs? We’re the ones who do all the work, why do we turn over the profits to those who never do their share?
We do it out of convenience. We do it out of fear.
But it’s killing us.
Consider for a moment that you have a right to basic dignity. You have a right to go through your life without expecting people to attack you indiscriminately. There are more of us than them. If we band together, this is something we can demand.
Still so many people are asleep. If you try to rouse them they say, “You’re delusional, it’s always been this way.”
It doesn’t have to be.
We live in a time where the president has created a secret police that’s comprised of murderers and rapists and predators and beasts. So much of our population defends the crimes they commit in plain sight. Fewer denounce them.
You’ve got to pick a side in this fight.
We have to awaken the mass of people who live lives of quiet desperation. Hold them gently by the shoulders, look them in the eyes, and say, “We have to stop ICE.”
The obstacles have gotten so big that there is no longer any way around. We have to be unapologetic forces of justice and good. We have to overcome our own blindness and force ourselves to see the truth.
We don’t have to accept a world where our children are condemned to be helpless, powerless workers who are sacrificed to serve the cruel appetites of terrible men.
We don’t have to accept that.
We must first acknowledge the truth that some people attack you for no reason. They continue to attack until everyone is dead. There is no protection in pretending that isn’t true. These monsters inhabit the cracks of our society that we’ve conditioned ourselves not to see.
The blinders must be stripped away from yourself, from your family, from your neighbors, and from your friends. We have to embrace a new identity for humanity.
Let’s stop bowing to the will of cruelty and stand up to demand justice. Let’s shake off this indoctrinated apathy and recalibrate our perception of reality.
Those of you with nothing are the ones who deserve everything.
Those with everything deserve nothing.
There are more of us than there are of them.
Have the courage to see the truth you’ve conditioned yourself to deny. It starts with you.
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