The Fiction Falls Apart in the Final Paragraphs (you've been warned)

Imagine for me, if you will, a man on his knees in a dirty kitchen, his head angled vacantly towards the floor. His arms hanging at his sides, palms turned upwards. He is surrounded by fragments of archetypes, held together by a web of ideas. There is a large stain on his shirt, like someone spilled a pitcher of white wine on his chest. He breathes almost imperceptibly. Pre-dawn light trickles in through the window. The faucet softly drips.

A little girl in a yellow nightgown pads into the room.

“What are you waiting for?”

He turns his head towards her and looks up.

“Dawn.”

She gingerly steps around the mess of concepts on the linoleum and sits in front of him. She pokes at the undefined pile of thoughts. She smiles.

“You’re silly.”

He cocks his head.

“Why would you say that?”

She scoots next to him on the floor, threading her small arm through his. Picking up his hand with both of hers and playing with the ragged edge of his fingernails.

“I like you,” She says.

“You don’t know who I am,” he says.

“No,” She says leaning her head on his arm, “you don’t know.”

“Just look at this mess.” He says. He pulls his arm away from her and gestures to the sticky ideas and broken categories that litter the unswept floor. “How is anyone supposed to make sense of this?”

“They don’t.” She reaches for his arm again, but he pulls away. She crosses her arms and pouts. “See! You’re doing it again!”

“Doing what?”

“Being silly! Ugh!” She throws her hands up in the air, exasperated.

The thinnest hint of a smile shows itself on his face, and he looks at her again. “How am I being silly?”

“You don’t even know.” She says, still pouting. She turns her back to him.

He reaches his arm around her. Her cold façade begins to melt.

She takes a deep breath and sighs. “You’re silly because you think this,” she says poking the mess on the floor with her toe, “is you.”

“Isn’t it though?” He says, “I made it. It came from me, and it’s pure chaos.”

“You made me,” she says. “But I am me, not you are me.”

“How do you know?” He says.

She wraps both of her arms as far around him as they will reach and squeezes hard. “You can’t hug yourself.”

“You’re very cute,” he dryly states. “But this is all I have. If this isn’t me than what is?”

She presses her small hand into the still wet stain on his shirt. Liquid rolls down her forearm. “This is you.”

“I can make even less sense of this,” he points to his chest, “than I can of this chaos.”

“Stop trying to understand!” she raises her small voice so that it almost sounds big. “I don’t understand anything! But, I’m happy. You will clean up the kitchen in the morning, and eventually you will put all the things back in the cupboards again. But, even when you stop whining about it, it’ll still not be you. These are your toys, and you broke them. You made a big mess. You will have to clean it up yourself. But you are not your toys, you are you!”

“But, without these I have nothing,” he says.

“You have me.”

“For now,” he says. “But as soon as you leave this room, as soon as I finish writing this story, you’ll be gone again. I made you better than I made this cacophony of idealistic constructs, but you’re still just a dream. Just an archetype of innocent affection that I brought into this mess to make me feel better until the sun comes out.”

“That’s not all I am.” She says, standing up. “Before you send me away again, let me drop the childish vocabulary and let you know what else I came from. I’m more than just an archetype of innocence and untainted love, although those are most definitely there. Most of me comes from your desire to have someone to live for. You feel more real when you’ve got other people to exist with. You tend to lose your sense of corporeality when all your time is spent with ideas, especially ones like these. In this story, you made me an avatar of hope. Why do you think you gave me a yellow dress while you waited for the sun? The sunrise is coming, you can’t stop that. Sure, you’ve made a mess of things, but if you left this kitchen from time to time you’d figure out that there are people out there worth living for already, and they see something in you that’s good, something worth keeping around, something that is you.”

She turns and walks out of the room. I sent her away. The symbolism begins to collapse under the strain of my heavy hand. My avatar, he stands and looks about the kitchen where we, or I, or he, made this mess of thoughts and tried to make sense of it all. It starts to swirl around him in a haze of smoke and coffee grounds. He stumbles forward and slides open the window. We face the east, and hope the sun rises soon.

In the 30 Minutes Between Now and Work

I don't have time to work today, but I will, because I didn't cancel, and because I need my job. I think I found a fourth roommate, so the housing situation is taken care of for the summer at the least. The starbucks is playing lady gaga, and the baristas are wearing little hats made of coffee sleeves and rubber bands. The puppy tied up outside the store seems to be afraid that his owner has been raptured. Don't worry, little guy, that was last Saturday, and we're all safe now. His bark is so shrill, and he seems to be in love with everyone, especially his owner, who looks an awful lot like a Norwegian Liev Schreiber.

It is now 20 minutes between now and work. I should spend this time working on my honors project, or calling Anya back, but I'd rather let my fingers run across this dirty keyboard (sometimes the O key sticks and my words-per-minute drops by half) beating out the kind of rhythm you'd expect if the Animal Collective and DJ Shadow made a record on a designer drug cocktail during a minor earthquake. I would not be the least bit surprised if that actually happened.

 It is now 10 minutes between now and work. The other day, I sat down with Noah and we looked over our statistics for our respective blogs. Whenever I look at that stats page, I immediately feel two diametrically opposed emotions. 1) man, nobody reads this thing. I have, like... three views a week. 2) Who the heck is reading this thing? I haven't updated in a month? Who was reading posts from over a year ago? Blogging is a strange thing. Sometimes I want to say something, and sometimes I just want to say, like today. If you're still reading this, I hope you'll realize that it's nothing. I'm just blowing off steam, or smoke. Have you ever really watched smoke? The way it curls up, twisting like a ribbon, stretching like plastic wrap, until it dissipates into the wind. Smoke is some cool shit. Noah has more views than I do.

It is now 2 minutes between now and work. I'm not going to read this over before I post it. I wonder if I said anything regrettable. I guess I'll find out. I followed a new blog over the weekend. It's a girl from my hometown, a friend of my sister. She talks a lot about faith. I don't think she knows that it's me. I hope she doesn't mind. I hope I didn't creep her out. I maybe did. We'll see.

Hey guys... we're gonna be okay.

Us and Them (too long and unedited)

I've been thinking about this one a lot recently, and I'm still working the whole thing out, so don't kill me if I say something offensive.

There are two things that acted as the catalysts for these thoughts. The first was a conversation I had with a couple of my favorite philosophers defending my opposition to the death penalty, pacifism, and opposition to abortion (and with those three things I've lost most of you). The second thing, and yes, this is kind of another book plug, was a book that we were assigned for my sociology capstone class on the sociology of evil.

I'll get to that later though. I'mma start rambling now.

Morality is a tricky thing from a social sciences perspective. According to the tenants of cultural relativity, which we must take accept methodologically if not philosophically, morality is a social construction, just like everything else. There is no objective morality, and every action must be judged based on the moral precepts of the cultural context of said action. I should be clear here, I don't hold to this in terms of my personal philosophy, and only do so tentatively in my studies.

Certain evolutionary psychologists have theorized that morality is based on a certain kind of ethnocentrism. Any moral act is one that is beneficial to the whole, sometimes to the detriment of the individual (take that Ayn Rand, and now I've lost even more of you). That said, the source of quite a lot of human evil, and especially the systematic violence found in war and genocide is also based on ethnocentrism. This ethnocentrism calls for protection of the "us" (the ethno- of ethnocentric) by way of the defeat or destruction of the "them."

So, what of morality? "Greater love has no man than this, that he should give up his life for his friends." There's that ethnocentrism again, the group is more important than the individual. But, who is the ethno? Who is the "us?"

"'Love your neighbor as yourself.' 'Teacher, who is my neighbor?'" And thus follows the story of the Good Samaritan, a roundabout way of saying, "everybody."

According to my reading of the words of Christ, he is promoting an "us" that has no "them." He is promoting a morality based on love for all people. Most people wouldn't take issue with that statement, but we sure as hell live like we do.

This is where the Nazis come in (Goodwin's Law at play). While reading this book, I was forced to look at a bunch of child-killing, drunken, war-crime-guilty Nazis and empathize. My father has been known to get in trouble with his peers for saying that there is little difference between us and Nazi Germany, and he doesn't mean that in reference to current politics on either end of the polarized spectrum. He means that human beings are human beings are human beings. The ancient Sumerians are more similar to Nazi Germany are more similar to Tibetan monks are more similar to the founding fathers are more similar to Islamic extremists are more similar to us than they are different.*

We recoil at the thought that "we" could be made of the same stuff as "them." I'm no Nazi. I'm not anything like one of those terrorist bastards. I'm not a fag. I'm not a racist tea-partier. I'm not a dirty hippie. I'm with "us," and "they" are not. Inherent in every evil produced by ethnocentrism is the dehumanizing of the "them," the xeno.

If we are called to a faith and morality based on the love of all people, then the easiest way to get around it is to start de-classifying people. The Nazis were monsters. We will defeat the evildoers. Inhuman atrocities. There is no such thing as an inhuman atrocity. Every atrocity that ever has been, has been entirely human. Evildoers are evil in as much as they are human, and monsters have only ever existed in stories.

This entire thing has been amplified in my mind in light of the recent killing of Osama Bin Laden. I've already made my controversial statements about the death penalty and war, so... I'm not gonna do it again in a context that would lose me the only people who are left reading this thing. The thing I will comment on is a response that a relative of mine (who I love very much and respect quite highly) who posted the following as their status update, "Hope you are NOT enjoying your new home Bin Laden!" No. Just. No. This is not how we ought to respond to the death of another human being. This is how we respond to the destruction of an ogre. This is how we respond t the death of Sauron. This is a fiction.

If we are to truly transcend our morality from simple ethnocentrism, if we are to truly accept the teachings of Christ, then we should never, ever rejoice at the idea of someone's hypothetical eternal damnation. We must acknowledge the humanity in the "them" and by doing so, we must prioritize their humanity as the primary source of the "us." I realize that Osama Bin Laden's death is a symbolic thing. It's not about one man's death, it's about... other stuff. I haven't analyzed it, and I don't really want to. The problem is, we do this all the time. An American Journalist is beaten in Egypt, and we're all over that story. Today, 12 Iraqis died violently and it might make it on the news as the final statistic in a story on "the Arab response" to Bin Laden's death.

I'm not trying to argue that we should all walk around in a haze of depression because of all the horrible acts of humanity, but rather, it seems to me that it is easier for us to ignore much of the evil in the world when it is committed by inhumans and/or against inhumans. Problem being, there's no such thing as an inhuman this side of a Marvel comic book.

It is my firm conviction that true morality, the morality of Christ, is one which views every single person as a neighbor, and every single group as a collection of neighbors. There is no "them," there is no xeno, there is only "us," there is only "ethno." I am made of the same stuff as Hitler, Bin Laden, Mother Teresa, and St. Paul. I am capable of the same kind of horrors as the worst of war-criminals, and I am capable of the same kind of miracles as the Amish community in 2006. I have as just as much in common with the monsters as I do with the saints.

To take this position is to admit the depressing fact that humanity is prone to incredible evil, not due to some metaphysical fluke that produces a bad generation every now and then, but because we are human. If you're still reading this rambling drivel, then you are familiar with my addiction to hope. In this instance, my dad shared some with me this past Saturday.

"And he showed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding from the throne of God and of the Lamb. In the middle of its street, and on either side of the river, was the tree of life, which bore twelve fruits, each tree yielding its fruit every month. The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. And there shall be no more curse, but the throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in it, and His servants shall serve Him." Revelation 22:1-3 (Italics mine)

I don't know what form that promise will take. I don't know what that will look like. But I know the intention, and we have seen a glimpse of the heart of God. The healing of the nations.



* If you disagree with this paragraph, call me up and we'll talk it over, I'm already going too long here