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« on: May 19, 2013, 01:57:26 am »
Because we grew up in someone else's walls, and our own walls, and the walls of our parents and grandparents and back across the centuries and the windows just keep getting smaller and there's no such thing as a sledgehammer strong enough to tear the fucker down, and there's nothing outside the walls anyway.
We can't breathe.
And we wonder if every generation feels this fucked or if it's only special generations, special times, that get cornered so fucking hard that even staying in the lines becomes an impossible task because they drew the lines smaller than your body and how the hell are you supposed to fit in there?
We crave dystopian stories because they're familiar. We live and breathe for the moment of defeat, the moment he loves big brother, the moment he swings in the breeze, the moment she goes D-con. There are no good paths open to us, only bad paths and corrupt ones. The walls are ten miles high and made of granite. It's just this, forever and ever, and so many people seem blind to it that it's comforting to know at least one other person in the history of the human race has seen what we see and it won't make things get any better but at least you're not crazy.
Not uniquely crazy, anyhow.
But in the end if even our insanity isn't unique what on earth can we bring to the table? What possible use is there for 7 billion brains, most of them tied up in the same stories, barely capable of keeping up with the demands of daily function? What good is progress if we're killing ourselves in the process.
I wonder sometimes if I hadn't squandered so much of my mental energy on trying to be sane what I could have accomplished. Or maybe if I had fixed the problem sooner. I talk about myself in the past tense and remember practicing talking about her in the past tense, trying it on like an unwanted wedding gown - big and uncomfortable. When was the last time one person could do anything? She died because we think it's okay for the poor to get sick and the rich to get better, because she was a stubborn ass, because they didn't make her get help sooner.
For no damn reason.
It all happens for no damn reason, no matter how many stories we write about it and how hard we try to spin it, in the end it's just a couple people sitting around and trying to weave a fairytale of relevance around a life that probably didn't have much impact, but saying that's sacrilege. If only she'd been fighting an evil empire, taken down while rescuing others from a natural disaster, protecting the innocent from a mad man, if only there was a story that was worth it, but there never is. We just get ground down under the same machine and don't do enough to make it better and then we're gone and our kids are in the same boat. Over, and over, and over. And the guys who say "give me liberty" bleed, and their children live on, and they shoot Shays men and centuries later still no one is free.
So kill me.