without all agenda

The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.

Pacifism seems to be either a dirty or unspoken word these past weeks, but a few thoughts. Hollande has declared the recent tragic attacks in Paris as an act of war, and war has been reciprocated with war in the last two days with the US and France continuing to bomb the parts of Syria that Russia currently wasn't bombing. The question at stake seems to be "how much should we bomb them" versus widening the question as to what would bring peace to the region. The military industrial complex sells us new and improved ways of killing people, and for the past decade the US has bought the best, and federal funds support some of our brightest scientists in developing new ways to incinerate people. We're told that in order to succeed we should have invaded Iraq more aggressively from the start, that drones can kill people "before they become a threat" at no cost to us, that the government needs us to give up our privacy to keep us safe, and that if we can just kill enough and in the right places, democracy will emerge from those who remain. The US spends $610 billion on defense, France 53.1, and Russia 84.5. Why does our arsenal for "keeping peace" mainly comprise of more effective ways of killing people? Surely with that kind of spending, we could radically reimagine technologies and strategies that save lives-- we could develop technologies and commit manpower to safely evacuate civilians en masse, strengthen supply lines for food and medicines, airlift portable clinics and surgeries with lifesaving medical equipment, and build safer shelters and zones for civilians while peace is negotiated and people are brought to justice. I'm not arguing that technology will fix everything, but I can't help but doubt our current strategy of believing that we can kill and arm our way to lasting peace. The conflict thus far has been characterized by people we know have been radicalized by desperation that are now committing atrocities in the power vacuum that was left behind from yet another ill-planned war. I mourn for Paris, Beirut, and everywhere else humans have been murdered, including the hundreds of thousands who have died in Syria over the past years, and the millions more around the world that will needlessly die until we as a species can find better ways of securing human life than bombs.

I’m mourning for Paris, I’m mourning for Beirut, and I'm mourning for the refugees and Muslims who are already being blamed for this terror. But now I'm also mourning for us. I'm mourning for us. I'm mourning for us and for what we do to each other.

The more I time-travel the more I learn I am always just where I need to be.

We did the thing. Because remember, the talking about the thing isn't the thing. The doing of the thing is the thing.

Real empathy is sometimes not insisting that it will be okay but acknowledging that it is not.

Take a little pill Drown it out in laughter Take a little pill Maybe think about it after