#tantrum throwing

by Don Hall

Lying on the couch after showering and dressing for work, I hear someone’s dog howling. It is the cry of a dog left alone but not in pain. Just lonely for his owner. It is a sad half bark/half howl and the dog repeats it over and over and over.

Earlier, in the gym (masked up and distanced) an obviously angered guy trying to work out has lost his cool. “Eat shit, hater!” he bellows. The person he’s yelling at is not apparent but this guy wants everyone in the gym to hear him. “Eat shit, hater!” like Tourette’s or something every ten seconds or so. “Hater! Eat shit!” This goes on for at least ten minutes until I speak up. 

“I think he gets the message.”

“What? Am I bothering you?”

“No. But it seems something is bothering you.”

Once acknowledged, as if the point was for someone to notice his rage, he settles down into sets of squats.

If the past decade in America has had a word to describe it it must be “fragility.”

Trump’s ascendency to the Oval Office revealed the fragility of our election process. COVID revealed the fragility of our healthcare system as well as our fragile economic models. Our population’s reaction to both expose an emotional fragility that should be embarrassing yet is justified as a rejection of everything from systemic racism to toxic masculinity.

From Progressive activists to Trump conspiracy theorists the message underlying the causes is that my feelings and opinions are important and I will howl and bark until someone acknowledges my frustration and pain!! Anti-maskers are just incessantly yelling “Eat shit, haters!” Cancel Culturists are stomping their feet and screaming about the hyperbolic pain of reading a book about a black man written by a white woman or a children’s author who believes that we are mammals and the default is two sexes. Misandrists, misogynists, trans-activists, self loathing whites, self aggrandizing blacks, MAGA and Marxist, are all howling like children being denied a cookie or the opportunity to play Fortnite.

“Eat shit, haters!”

Last week, the Woman’s Council of Ireland and Amnesty International Ireland lent their signatures & authority to an extraordinary statement. 

“organisations that seek to defend biology... we repudiate their beliefs”

What?! Effectively stating that these organizations repudiate biology. Why? The fragility of a tiny slice of humanity who now demand that they get to decide for the rest of humanity that biological sex doesn’t matter.

Last week, Trump’s legal team has stated, without a flinch, that the reason Trump lost Georgia is because Georgia's Republican Gov. Brian Kemp has been bribed by a Venezuelan front company in cahoots with the CIA to throw elections to Communists. Why? The fragility of both Trump’s enormous ego and the fear of becoming exactly what Republicans have already transformed into: the sycophants of an asshole with no moral or ethical boundaries.

“Eat shit, haters!”

Our trust in our institutions is feeble. Friendships and family connections proved to be far more brittle than we thought. Our ability to differentiate between fact and fiction is paper thin.

The aptitude for communicating ideas has toppled in great part due to our reliance on social media and the ever expanding definitions of harm and violence online. Offense is now considered by the chattering class as equal to a board to the back of the skull so the concept of a good faith debate has been all but shattered.

More and more we are becoming emotionally fragile. As we fragment into our individual pods of shared online values, we lose our spine in the face of adversity. Like a baby bathed in Purell daily, we have no built-in capacity to fight off germs so, like the purified child, we scream when anything unfamiliar or potentially dirty confronts us.

“Eat shit, haters!”

My mother was quite young when she popped me out and was determined to keep me clean and healthy. At one point, so the story goes, she had bathed me so often that my skin was covered in an angry soap rash and I was terrified of dirt.

My grandfather, an oil rigger by trade, saw this unfolding and one day dug a small hole in the back yard, filled it with water, stirred up the mud, and tossed me in. I squalled as if I was in mortal danger. I screamed and screamed and he, knowing it couldn’t hurt me, let me scream. I cried until my tiny baby brain realized the same and then I relaxed and enjoyed the mud.

I’ve been a filthy human ever since (although I shower daily).

As our tethers to a semblance of shared reality strain we are assaulted by weapons of chance and nature. And, instead of finding common ground (the pandemic is an equal opportunity infector), we fray further and those who cannot grasp the seriousness of the situation cry and stomp their feet.

A population conditioned to throw tantrums in the wake of any notion of giving up a built-in sense of individualism for the greater good is destined to be leveled by forces that do not care about their feelings of grievance. A pandemic has no concern for the Second Amendment, police brutality, or who is or is not our president. A virus infects everyone from Proud Boys to Antifa. COVID loves our emotionally needy tendency to be bored, cave in to anxiety, and our societal inability to suck it up for awhile.