Love is an ideal, a childish figment of our desperate imaginations forever beyond our grasp, but peace doesn’t need to be. Failure to give or to receive love should be no invitation to hate, and finding no reasons to hate is no compulsion for the pretense of love. What separates mankind from beast is binary thinking, the presumption that the universe is a choice, whereas without both trial and error there’d be no foreplay and without foreplay life would be wholly unlivable. Cracked mirrors do connect the dots for us, grand for as much life as we breathe into them if only attentions were paid alongside our debts.
As someone who’s been hospitalized for depression 3x over the years, the last more than a dozen years ago, I accepted long ago that no love to spare for myself does not mean I have no alternative left but to hate myself. We can be more complicated than that. Good stews have a mix of flavor. The older I get the more I understand how all problems boil down to ego, to noses in the air to avoid the smell of our own shit.
My big sister was strangled to death by her guy. Knowing what my family has been through, her tongue bit off and an eye expelled, us forced into a closed casket ceremony, the number of ladies to nonetheless request I choke them turn me the fuck off. I feel sadism and masochism have a time and a place, and as the proverbial bedroom can represent an awful lot, my boundaries are almost nonexistent. But when they get crossed the whole experience feels one-sided, one participant giving and one participant taking. Respect given should be returned, lest it be called out for the idolatry it truly is. Empathy lacked from my personal intimacy always reminds me of a line from some comedian, how if Jesus comes back a cross is probably the last fucking thing in the world he’d want to see, much less come across.
And I’m far from prudery. Reserved but not shy, in my 20s I modeled for a number of art classes and life-drawing groups and I’ve a lengthy history of streaking, even across freeways. If the mood hits I’ve no qualms with pulling a Type O Negative/Wolf Moon and leaving a bed looking like a crime scene. Blood is undeniably another measure of expenditure. One of the funnest ventures was making out with a couple of girls atop the altar inside St Joseph’s chapel on campus at College of the Holy Cross. We’d broken in during the night, tripping balls and gave god a holy what-for through not demanding love of each other, as would supremacists, tyrants and divas. I believe prude people, along with celebrities, are dishonest with themselves foremost. All confusion in this life would be cleared up by honesty, with ourselves and with the folks around us, especially the strangers we encounter online and off. No contradictions or false pretensions, rather cards on the table and minimal costuming. For no matter how virtuous be the claims of whichever guise or symbolism being sold, hiding behind banners or flags or ideology is still hiding. Unmask. Acknowledging the vital needs which neither use or abuse others is kind of how problems get resolved privately and publicly. Suppressing them is suppressing resolution. Being denied what we want is not fascism, although being denied what we need is and complying with that makes us co-conspirators in our own undoing. The American way is to destroy anything we cannot profit from, including ourselves, as though everything not bending over backwards catering to our personal ego is somehow bad and evil and lesser than.
As long as people are starving you do not need games. Entertainment is not a right, but life is. You can say that’s not your responsibility, but the Nuremberg principle taught modernized western civilization that nobody forces you to be the bad guy. Own it. We can bitch and moan about the government not doing this or that, and for such astronomical reluctance they shall get theirs inevitably, but if you’ve money set aside for comic books or the movie theater, you yourself can help somebody stay alive for a day or three. So why not. Consuming is not a necessity in the pursuit of happiness, just as a junkie’s quick fix does not even begin to compare to a clean conscience. If you believe you need that new album, that new fashion or tickets to that upcoming sporting match, you do not understand what need authentically is. And how dare you validate fucking marketing reps, paid to lie for their own living. Capitalism is not atheism. Pop has long been religion unto itself though, nay-sayers ostracized for finding cause to look beyond TV screens for their identities or aspirations. Instead of the masses defining culture, artificial culture defines the masses, so criticism of what’s trending is taken as a personal affront *and* metaphorical denial of Christ. Just look at the numbers of people who condemn the writings of Ayn Rand while buying millions of dollars in superhero movie tickets with no sense of irony. Personal offense over critique of a popular, for-profit thing means only being sold hook, line and sinker on having marketing do one’s thinking for them. But if they did more of their own thinking perhaps escapism would be wholly unnecessary in the first place.
Nobody wants free expression when it allows ideas offending them personally to fly free. Denial about exceptions is contradictory. The public, too selfish to see safe spaces are ideological segregation, claims to not want thought police, but they clearly want subjectivity police. I say the internet has always existed for buying and selling, ideas far more than products/services. Faith in marketing being the word of god gets tested only when it becomes a matter of investing in one’s own demise. Very few can afford the lipstick mandated with dog collars. But most people will hungrily sell everything about themselves for the opportunity to wield that leash over others, never wanting to consider the ego of others carries as much weight as their own, which is none at all. Free speech online or off is not remotely complicated, just that all parties insist on exceptions for their own, heaven enforced for what they like and hell enforced for what they dislike. If a thing is deemed worthy of either our affections or our enmity, even if only as a mere catalyst its existence predates our responses to it, regardless of an objective case made for its negativity or positivity. And thus it needs not our affections or our enmity to exist, to be itself.
Neither love or its deprivation holds any water whatsoever, so why invest everything left of ourselves into the ideal? When love is regarded by the more ignorant among us as universal, forgiveness and forgetfulness only enable the worst among us to do as they would do. Making it hardly synonymous for peace. Obligations whether societal or spiritual to love or to not love generates problems and conflict. Peace is the absence of personal demands to and fro, allowing a self-exploration without obstructions in favor or not of what might be discovered in the doing. You and I shall grow whether we love one another or not, we can learn that much at least from the universe which abounds.