Stop Making Sense

Ramble On

“Order Must Prevail.” Joe Biden

Why is it so important that people pay the MTA fare to the point that the city has hired more and more police to ticket people who don’t pay? Fiscally it makes no sense, it costs more to have all these cops, their salary, the wild amount of overtime, health insurance, pensions, all the lawsuits, there will always be settlements for police misconduct, than the $2.90 we pay for this crumbling public transportation. It’s about rules, and training us to follow them. 

I cannot succinctly write anything because my brain is broken. It’s a feature, not a glitch, of the language and reasoning when discussing the First Amendment (it’s the FIRST one, that’s how much those founding fathers everyone loves so much cared about free expression), what kind of protests will not be met with violent agents of the state and the justification for Israel’s genocide of Palestinians. I can’t make sense of it because it doesn’t make sense, when I try to follow the logic of the thought I cannot.

We know there is no right way to protest, the right way to protest is polite and agreeable, which can easily be ignored, because it was allowed. No one is disrupted or inconvenienced. I saw an interview with a traveller after people shut down the road to Chicago’s O’Hare airport last month. “These protesters aren’t making any fans out here, making people miss their flights.” I didn’t realize we needed to be fans of people not being murdered for it to cease. It’s not the Chicago Bulls, it’s a genocide. We prefer death to dissent.

How much more can we declare just how little we care about mass graves of doctors, babies, patients, just people, all people. I know that the videos of older white female professors getting arrested won’t really do anything, other than the moment they had, which really was a moment of “Everybody is getting arrested, even old white people.” The one professor was cool, she looked back at the person filming and told them her name and title, head of philosophy. That poor economics professor got taken down like a calf at a rodeo, clip the ankle, shift the weight. And Jill Stein, well, I just can’t with you. There’s already too much happening. What I can tell you for sure is that we don’t really care about what happens with older women in this country. Nice try.

Sometimes I think something will be done about guns and school shootings when the majority of this country have lived through a mass shooting. We’re getting there. The status quo is holding on with its surprisingly strong death grip, trying to indoctrinate us to their propaganda before they’re just a pile of dust and dentures.

Everyone says it’s not as easy as you think it is, stopping killing people. Somehow mass murder, devastation and famine is easy to execute. And look at all that property damage. I don’t think Netanyahu has broken a sweat. I’m fucking wringing my hands here trying to make sense of the senseless, this bullshit we are witnessing and funding, and I won’t because I can’t. 

How do we live under constructions of theories, political theories, the rules and regulations made up in a loud silence by very visible unseen powers, parading this theory as the truth. The only truth is our love affair with certainty, and how we mistake it for right. The ability and need to pretend that the collateral damage of tens of thousands of Palestinians, their homes, their universities, their art, their libraries, their hospitals, their food, their past, their present, any future, cannot be justified if you just stop nodding your head. Propaganda is killing us.

We strip people of beauty, respect, love, comfort and security in an attempt to make them worthy of the pain we will inflict upon them. We ask impossible things of people, to be worthy victims, to transcend this violence and deliberation, to be just right. Then we might care. The same with protestors, there is no right protest. Rather, the best protest leaves us feeling good with a souvenir, and no, change is not that souvenir. Any other means in which to communicate must be done in an orderly manner, because order must prevail. Not people. 

One evening a few months ago I had a thought, a thought I probably considered an epiphany, which doesn’t happen all the time because I’m not delusional. The way my brain functions, it tries to get to the base of the thought, to the process, to the why. And then it asks the question, if this dot, this period, is the given, what happens when we question the dot? The dot is the basis of the line, the thought process. Sure, this is a hack job on deconstruction, but I’m a few decades out of English classes and academia in general, so please, be kind. 

I didn’t love reading Jacques Derrida, most famous for his writing about deconstruction, but I did in a way. He was difficult, and what I liked more was how much other people in theory classes hated reading Derrida. The difficulty is part of the text, you baby. I can do the hard things. A while back, a little high on a little edible, because that’s what happens during aging, the body can’t drink all the drinks it used to but the brain needs to dim a bit at the end of the day, a question drifted into my mind. 

Am I Derrida or Am I High? 

That’s the question, the statement, the epiphany…and since this phrase revealed itself through the clouds of my brain, I’ve wondered it often, and texted myself these thoughts. Am I brilliant, or just a stoner? I text myself sometimes, it feels like an easier way to have the thoughts compiled together. Most of my texts are sent after the sun goes down. Here are a few to break up the pain of these days:

“But this learning-it’s softer than certainty and not in love with itself. It doesn’t perpetuate its own power. It notices, it pays attention, it feels the air and sees how a bright moon can feel like sunburn. It’s not unravelling or doubling down, no gamble, no unfurling. It is being.” 10:42 pm

“Certainty versus wandering the fucking binary.” 9:59 pm

“Why aren’t feelings also information? Aren’t our feelings sometimes informed by facts? That some of us, statistically, are more likely than others to be ripped off, beat up, raped, murdered, disregarded for justice-and it is not random based on individual occurrences but based on facts.” 5:36 pm

This deep thought was preceded by “Cleavage is a gesture.” 

“How much of governing is offering support to people, creating a society, and how much of it is trying to control people.” A rare daytime text at 11:04 am. 

“What feels better than the ending of a Rocky montage?” 9:24 pm

“Inconvenience is the worst thing for white people.” Monday, January 1st, 8:29 pm