March 28, 1999

America really sucks it out of you..

And that’s all I can start out with. There’s nothing to complain about, really. All’s well; I have enough money, I have friends, I have a close family, I have a place to live, plenty of food to eat, and I have plenty of things to learn.

What’s missing is the passion. I can get excited about things, but things pass. Nothing around here seems to last. Maybe there never were heroes, and perhaps there never were any adventures? Is it that, or have we replaced those adventures with their retelling? Have we just taken the one plot-line of struggle and triumph and rehashed it and retooled it on a weekly basis to make us think "this is what life should be like"?

Yes, yes, and yes. We have a society in which adventure is illegal, or at least well supervised. Have you ever seen the warnings on a god damn amusement park? "You might die, so have fun safely." They spend untold millions making rides and entertainments that couldn’t kill an epileptic paraplegic, and then they so intently want to avoid being sued that they make sure you know that, even though everything is so safe, don’t have too much fun.

You can’t so much as hike across a field or play an organized sport without signing your life away in waivers of responsibility.

Then you’re given this second-hand reality of TV dramas and fucking action movies that get you all excited to save the day, and do something great with your life, and you end up driving home in your airbag-laden crumple-zoned seat-belted car to sleep on your posture-enhancing mattress wrapped in your fire-retardant blanket to be wakened by your UL-listed ABS plastic alarm clock.

The only way to do anything truly exciting is to violate someone’s rules or someone’s laws. Excitement and adventure mean risk, but everyone in this fine nation is so afraid to get sued that they’d rather sit under a grounded lightning rod in a rubber suit than actually take charge of their life. They’d rather have you arrested and locked away for years than to risk some sort of confrontation.

Then the complaints from these same people; "The streets are unsafe!" "Drugs are taking hold of our children!" "I can’t get a fucking erection because of my tap water!"

It’s not like I can hold judgement over any one person and say "it’s your fault, undo this that you have done!" It’s a product of 200 years of societal evolution. America is so diverse that to do anything for someone is by implication wronging someone else. To give more funds to schools to teach English as a second language helps the Hispanic immigrants, but now where’s the money to build more inner-city housing for the blacks?

I say that a society this restrictive and yet this "free" leaves only an outlet for our frustrations in unsanctioned, unsafe, or downright illegal activities. We have the freedom to think and in fact say whatever we want, but to act on it ‘impinges on someone else’s freedom’. Not only is that what the supreme court would say, but it’s what I say, and it’s the truth. When someone says "all niggers should go back to Africa", it’s upsetting to many who’d hear it, yes, but any one black person who might hear it can still decide whether to take argument or go on with their lives. When the Klan beats a black man to death in the street shouting the same thing, that man and his family are no longer free to make that choice.

That’s the drastic. On the other hand, you can learn all you want about the New York City subway system from books and records, but to actually go into the labyrinth of tunnels with a flashlight is considered trespassing. You don’t kill someone, but you put someone else at risk to take responsibility for your death should you get smooshed by a train.

Freedom to think and talk but not act contradicts our most primitive of urges to hunt and protect. Evolution may have brought us to this stage, but it’s left us with vestiges of our previous needs; to throw, to run, to kill, to climb..

Our society allows us to outlet these tendencies, and we’ve called that forum "sports". That, though, is not enough. Humans have been designed to look out for themselves and their families; anyone else is an outsider and a competitor.

Our society’s creeds are "cooperation and tolerance" (acceptance, even). As Humans, though, we resent being ruled by someone outside our own clan. Kings and czars have all been overthrown at the call of this innate reasoning. So, now, in America the Democracy, we are ruled by everyone. Everyone is free to make his own rules and demand his own laws. We have fulfilled our instinctual needs? Not by a long shot..

We just lack a single scapegoat, for how do we overthrow ourselves?