#112

Man, I'm gonna take the ads off when I finish this post. I saw them on a friend's phone and they were just nasty. Not aesthetic. I don't need that shit around at any price or advantage.

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Inevitable as the pandoria of ills that uniquely plague the human organism may be, the sublime element is just as inexorable and everpresent. 

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Thinking specifically of rape, suicide, murder, torture, war, genocide, and enslavement (fun post today, folks), the arrangement can be seen as helical: each consistently interfering and interweaving with one another and with the life of everyone I have ever known in brutal, undeniable, and direct terms, and each constantly interweaving themselves into and defining the life of the world, that thing we call history.

That the political is personal has always seemed to me an unnecessary statement. That information is in definition one of the word "political" and also in a very popular and apt definition of what a human being is, which is a political animal. Presented as a sinecure for the attitudes of apolitical or politically apathetic people, I don't understand who they're kidding. People know that. They understand exactly why they don't give a flying fuck. They take it personally.

I am much more interested in the human as a historical animal, in human beings as subjects for whom the historical is personal; the animal with a historical sense for whom the history of the world--not the history of the nation or the family or the tribe or the state, but for whom the history of all humankind is personal. Apolitical attitudes are whatever to me, but ahistorical or historically disingenuous or apathetic attitudes seem to me far, far more damaging and poisonous. 

Our political lives would, I think, improve dramatically if more people were exposed to and understood more history from more places about more people, and took it seriously. 

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For a while, at least. There is no permanence in any improvement, victory, ground gained, or agreements reached. Sad fact, but even the very best and seemingly eternal of our words and deeds can only last but a little span of time, are born as doomed to the fate of the temporal as any one of us. 

Gotta believe that little while is worth it while it lasts, though. That this terrible, implacable DNA adds up to something that can transcend its nature even for a moment. That the whole thing can work because it is mirrored by another helix, one of kindness, healing, respect, peace, freedom, creativity, joy, honor, wisdom, generosity material and of thought and spirit, and numberless other proteins. 

Because of who I am, I believe the latter helix carries more weight, bears more significance than the former. I hope this is true in general, that the math checks out, but for me, it is the truth.

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Okay, try to have a good day, everybody. I am excited to go to work and to walk in the pretty snow to get there. It is cold and February is hard and this climate thing, well, dang, but spring's still coming.

Be well.


--JL