Bubbles 6 - The Knife and the Train

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What the malignant spirit that has captured us wants is this: genocide and slavery. Literally.

* * *

We’ve convinced our society that we don’t all belong to each other. We’ve convinced our society that life is something you have to earn.

We’re close to making genocide inevitable now. What’s next?

Next, we must convince people that violence redeems.

This is not hard to do. We humans are good at violence. It’s hardwired right into our amygdalae. It’s the distillation of the plot of about 99% of our most popular movies. If you hit me, I hit you harder. If you hit back harder still, I hit you back hardest of all. Eventually I will hit you so hard you can’t hit anymore, and the problem will be solved. If they bring a knife, you bring a gun. They send one of yours to the hospital, you send one of theirs to the morgue. That’s the Chicago way, and that’s how you get Capone. Roll credits, yipee kie yay, motherfucker.

You kill the boss villain at the end of video games.

The hero kills the boss villain at the end of movies.

But here’s the important distinction. The hero doesn’t just show up and start violencing all over the place until it’s full of violence. The hero ends the violence that was already there, with redeeming violence of his own, which escalates until at last it has cleansed the narrative of all sources of bad violence. Violence can’t only be the solution; it also has to be the problem. Violence isn’t just very very good, it is also very very bad.

This is where two buckets comes in very handy. You need only look at who is doing the violence to know if it is good violence or bad violence. If you haven't earned life, how can your violence possibly be good? And, if you have earned life, how can your violence possibly be bad?

'They' do bad violence to us. 'We' do good violence to end it.

If they keep doing bad violence after our good violence, it is because we didn’t do enough good violence previously. The solution becomes obvious: we must do more good violence at them. Harder violence, or more widely applied, or more brutal, or all three. The violence isn’t just good. It redeems. It is the perfected instrument for restoring bad things to goodness.

Our violence is good violence. We know it is good, because we do it. We revere it. We have parades and whatnot. Their violence is bad violence. We know it is bad, because they do it. We hate it. We will eradicate it from the face of the planet, like we did in World War I, which ended all war, and World War II, in which we stopped evil in its tracks forever, and the Cold War, in which we permanently stabilized the world and the War on Drugs, which stopped the drug epidemic, and the War on Terror, which has stopped terrorism forever…

Let me push back against myself on behalf of those of you I imagine I am losing my marbles. What the hell am I suggesting, exactly? That we shouldn’t have fought Hitler in WWII? That violence is never appropriate? That we oughtn’t to revere those who served and suffered and even died in our armed conflicts? That we should just let the terrorists go on with their heinous deeds, consequence-free? What if we were all speaking German right now? What if there were some crazy in my house ready to kill my kids? What if my wife were attacked? What if I was being beheaded by terrorists? I’d feel a bit differently then.

Well, yes. I suppose I would feel differently about that, if that were happening. Those things sound horrific. So let me say, right here and now, that if some maniac were getting ready to murder my children, I would welcome a weapon for the chance to stop that maniac, or the sudden appearance of somebody with a gun and the intention to stop that maniac. That would be just the ticket in that situation. I would not turn it down.

I would also like to take this opportunity to express my opinion that Hitler was bad. It is good that we stopped him, and it is to the credit of our country and those who bravely served that we did stop him. Glad to finally get that off my chest. I’ll say it again: Hitler was really bad. Good that we stopped him.

Let me also say that people who put their physical well-being and their very lives at risk in service of others exhibit a bravery that I believe deserves our wonder and our respect.

It’s worth calling back to the repeated theme of these posts, that we rarely set ourselves in opposition to things that are evil in and of themselves; rather we find ourselves in contention of some good thing that has been elevated out of its proper place. The key question is one of priority between good things. Order and prosperity and money and hard work are not bad; the evil comes in when they are made more important than the unsurpassable worth inherent to being human art.

Is it like this with violence? Is violence a good thing, or at least a necessary one? Can we imagine times when violence becomes necessary, to prevent some terrible abuse from taking place?

I think we can.

At least we can name a good thing, which might, in certain contexts, lead to an inevitable violent conclusion.

Let's talk about physical bravery.

Physical bravery can be very good.

Recently there was a man, captured by our foundational lies, who boarded a train with a knife. There he saw a woman who he knew did not belong to him, nor he to her, because her outfit marked her as a Muslim. Because she was a Muslim, he believed she represented implied bad violence, and had therefore not earned life. He set about to make her understand, at the foundational level of terror, that she had not earned life, intending to relive her of that which he had decided she had not earned. Three brave men stepped in to stop him, and this act created a violent altercation. Two of those brave men died in that altercation.

I think it was good that those men acted to protect that woman. I think it was very good.

I think it is appropriate to honor physical bravery, and the sacrifice that frequently accompanies it. As with the men on the train, so with those who served and suffered and died for us in war.

The question is not whether physical bravery is good. It very obviously can be very good, and even heroic. And certain acts of physical bravery will in many instances make violent outcomes inevitable. I don’t know a non-violent way to stop a hypothetical madman from hypothetically killing my children, and I very much do not want my children to be killed, hypothetically or otherwise.

Violence has a very specific appropriate scope when properly applied within justice, I think. It addresses a specific and immediate problem. It has a temporary duration and a clear goal with a clear end point. It is most frequently done on the behalf of others. It is not instigated. And, crucially, it is done because no power greater than the mere physical is available.

Violence is always a tragedy if some other solution were available. And some other solution is almost always available. And, we could say (if we had enough faith and enough bravery) there is always some other solution: physical bravery without violence. Someone who will engage in a mortal fight for justice is brave. Braver still is someone who will die for justice without the fight. (If you now feel the instinct to defend specific uses of violence, you might ask yourself how oriented toward violence you have already become.)

But, even if necessary, violence is only ever a fix. It is never a solution. It is the weakest power. If any other power is available to fix the immediate problem, that power is the better power. In short, violence is a sign of some turn missed on the road, some collective failure to select justice at some earlier point.

But the compass decides the navigation, and the navigation the course. The course decides the path, and the path the destination. And our compass tells us that we do not belong to one another, and so other people do not matter. It tells us life is something that some have not earned it, and so it is their own fault that they do not matter. Little wonder, then, with such a compass, that our course becomes a preempively violent one.

Suppose an ethic involved selecting preferences between competing good things. Suppose then we selected a bad by-product of of a good thing, and then confused the bad by-product for the good thing? And then suppose that we made that bad by-product one of our most beloved preferences?

When violence becomes seen as a solution, it has been inappropriately elevated. When it becomes the preferred solution, then the society that prefers it has oriented itself to violence. It is an orientation toward violence that says that violence is the strongest power, not the weakest. It’s an orientation toward violence that believes violence redeems, that creates a preference for violence as the prime mover of justice, or even a conflation of the violence and justice as being interchangeable.

We are now oriented toward violence.

As I mentioned earlier, those who sacrifice on our behalf deserve our wonder and our respect. I also think they deserve more: a deep examination on our parts—prior to the decision to ask them to exhibit that bravery—as to the necessity and honor of our motives and objectives, and a thorough inquiry after the fact, as to whether those motives were honored and those objectives achieved. Exactly why did we send those brave people into that desperate risk? Did we honor their astounding selflessness by setting it to appropriate ends? Did we secure those ends? Are we willing now to sacrifice and pay the price to provide for them and ensure those ends are maintained?

But when violence is my orientation, I no longer have to ask those questions. I don’t have to worry about motive or objective—the violence itself represents both purity of motive and objective in and of itself. And I no longer have to concern myself with the after. The after to violence is more violence, until we at last come to the end of violence. Those who can no longer provide the violence I need have reached the end of my reverence for them and can be discarded. Taking care of them… it’s going to cost us, you see. It won’t be profitable. And life is something you earn.

My orientation toward violence advises me that the way to stop the threat of madmen entering my house to kill my children is to identify all the madmen and kill them before they ever enter my house—or, failing that, to always be ready at a moment’s notice to kill madmen. To assume that it is my job to be constantly watchful for madmen and ready to deal my perfected violence upon them at any suddenly adrenalized moment. That my approach to the world should be an orientation toward violence, and this will be the solution to a violent world.

That the way to end crime is to lock up and kill all the criminals.

That the way to end terrorism is to kill all the terrorists.

That the answer to those who have not earned life is that they have earned death.

That we are the people meant to deliver that death.

That I am the person to do so.

And it starts with the best of intentions.

So, hey, let’s kill all the terrorists. Who, in the days after 9/11, could not want to see those who planned that attack dead? I sure did.

So we attack. We attack a place where some of the terrorists are. We also attack a place where the terrorists aren’t, but which seems like the sort of place terrorists might go. (We also don't attack a place from which most of the terrorists came, because that place is very profitable for us, and we love profit more than we love violence ... but that's a different essay.)

The terrorists see that we are now there. They meet us there and begin to attack. We attack back. We attack with the largest and most expensive and powerful military the world has ever seen. We dig in. They kill us. We kill back harder. Homes are reduced to rubble. Unaffiliated people—husbands, wives, sons, daughters, fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers—die in all this carnage.

They keep killing us.

Our conclusion becomes that our mistake was not killing hard enough. We surge.

At some point, it becomes natural for us to be at war. We start to praise our bombs on television for their beauty and size and sophistication.

We build remote-controlled airplanes that can deliver death from heights undetectable to the naked eye, and they deliver death and destruction until normal people on the other side of the planet begin to live in terror of a clear blue sky, and to see the flag that is painted on those aircraft they cannot see as a symbol of that terror.

There is not less violence now than when we started. There is more. There are not less terrorists now than when we started. There are more. And we have joined them in bringing terror to the innocent. And still we, captured in our belief of violence's redeeming strength, think the answer is that we have not yet been fierce enough in our prosecution of good violence.

People start attacking us at home, using similar language to those we are fighting abroad. Many of us think the problem is that we haven’t yet cast a wide enough net of violence. Perhaps we need to kill in some more countries. Perhaps we need to suspect more people to see if they need death. Perhaps we need to start suspecting more people here at home. Perhaps we need to start rounding those people up.

We begin to equate the twisted version of religion practiced by murderous 'other' people with the peaceful religion of  'other' people in our communities.

We begin to see suspicion of such people as common sense.

We begin to see the existence of such people as a grave danger.

We begin to think that something should be done about those people.

We begin to think that we should be the person to take those actions.

We begin to carry knives on trains.

You see?

We are no longer addressing a specific and immediate problem.

We are no longer failing to instigate.

We are no longer engaged in something of temporary duration with a clear goal and a clear end.

We are no longer engaged on behalf of others.

We are no longer checking to see if some other, stronger, braver, better power might be available to us.

We are oriented toward violence. It is not a fix; it is a solution. More, it is the solution. We think it will redeem the evil we see. And when the violence grows, our only conclusion is that the violence has not yet redeemed the conflict because there hasn’t yet been enough violence.

The suggestion that we do something other than violence begins to seem dangerously weak. In fact, it seems like a moral failing, even a betrayal of the memory of physical bravery enacted on our behalf. It seems like siding with the enemy. I suppose you want to invite the terrorists over for tea, do you? Have you forgotten those who sacrificed for your freedom?

Rules preventing us from enacting any sort of good violence begin to seem ridiculously naïve. Suppose there’s a bomb set to go off in one hour and you have the only man who knows its location…

If you found a society that had been captured by the idea that violence redeems, you would likely find a society that eventually advocates torture.

You’d probably find a society that invades other countries prior to any actual aggression, to prevent perceived possible aggression.

You’d probably find a society that spends an inordinate amount on weapons and armies—nearly more than the rest of the world put together.

You’d probably discover a society that considers the unfettered ability to personally own weapons to be a more important human right than the right to health care or food or clean water or education.

You’d likely find a society that believes strongly in the death penalty, and thinks brutality in prisons is just a well-deserved and necessary part of the punishment.

You’d probably find a society that cheers when a state governor brags about presiding over a record number of executions.

You’d probably find a police force that looked more and more like a military, and you might discover that this force is oriented in shocking ways toward violence as a first response, particularly toward those people society has already decided represent presumed moral defect.

You might find that diplomacy is scoffed at in such a country. You’d find a country that might not even bother to appoint diplomats.

You might find a country that considers invading a country that has not attacked it, and expects this to be understood as a defensive strategy.

You might find presidential candidates in such a society suggesting that we murder the civilian populations of our enemies. You might find it's an applause line.

You might find presidents who boast, as evidence of their moral strength, that when they are hit, they hit back a hundred times as hard.

You might find a country that believed any atrocity were allowable, provided only that some enemy were doing something similarly bad.

If you wanted to know which people such a society considered an enemy, you’d probably look for the people for whom acts of aggression were never permitted, and against whom acts of violence were rarely prosecuted.

Or, to put it another way, you’d probably want to look for which people the police stood before to protect, and which people the police faced to oppose.

If this were a deeply ironic universe, you might even find that people ascribed to all these ideas while worshipping a deity who admonished his disciples to put their swords away lest they die on them, who presented an example of a God who would sacrifice himself even to death rather than utilizing to harmful purpose any of his infinite power.

In a society that has determined that some earn life and others do not, the idea that violence redeems makes violence the natural solution for dealing with those who have not deserved life.

Then, after that, you just have to get efficient about it.

This is the conclusion: Other people not only do not matter, but it is their fault they do not matter, and it is good if, as a consequence for their failing, they are harmed. But it is even better if they die.

Here is the penalty for believing this lie: Cowardice and fear. If the only best solution is violence, then I will be ready to enact it with less and less qualm from an ever-increasingly comfortable position. If I live in a world where violence redeems, then I will become more and more ready to allow it to be delivered to more and more people, even while the threat I perceive grows nearly as quickly as my fear of the world around me, grows nearly as quickly as the every-increasing proliferation of violence that I support to redeem that threat.

And here is the danger of believing it:  the threat I fear will inevitably grow. If I insist on a world where violence redeems, eventually one of the millions who I, oriented toward violence, threaten, will agree to meet me on the deadly battlefield upon which I have insisted, will attack me not from their strength but from their weakness, will try redeem the problem of me using the very sword that I have drawn.



A world in which violence redeems is a world that will inevitably kill me, maybe once, but more probably a thousand times.

* * *

Genocide is nearly inevitable now.

Finally, you just need a little push. A little blame. An undue focus on crimes committed by a specific group. Turn a blind eye toward crimes committed by other groups.

Make a government hotline to track 'them.' Disable law enforcement's investigation of 'our' most dangerous individuals. Build the largest industrialized prison system, and the largest military, ever known to human history. Take police forces already trained to view specific neighborhoods as war zones, its residents (and those who resemble those residents) as foreign hostiles, and themselves as occupying force, and empower them to greater boldness. Start testing certain concepts, speaking aloud ideas that have hidden for long generations behind cover of euphemism.

Start saying we need law and order, by which you mean stopping people randomly on the streets and frisking them.

Start suggesting that our problem is an unbecoming timidity when it comes to violence.

Start saying that we need to bomb until the sand glows.

Start saying we need to go after the women and children.

Start suggesting that an entire desperate population is a poisoned handful of candy.

Return to a policy of enforcing draconian drug laws in minority populations. Start praising dictators who murder suspected drug users in their own countries.

Propose a travel ban. Fight to enact it in court.

Start rounding people up. Split up some families. Get people used to that idea.

Conflate a vulnerable group with rape. Call them animals. Then go after the most productive and openly integrated and cooperative members of that vulnerable group, to make sure the totality of the dehumanization across the entire group is made clear. My, just listen to the cheers.

When we feel threatened, suggest the answer is to kill all the people in a country.

And just …let it all continue for a while. Let the gears of the machinery you’ve constructed turn until it releases its inevitable product.

Imagine the alarm we might see expressed, were we to see such things, recently receded, growing new roots once again in our soil.

It would be dramatic. We might even be tempted to think such alarm over-dramatic, were we the sort of people who preferred order over justice.

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FRAME
0. ART
1. SISTER
2. THE GREAT DIVIDE
3. SPIRIT
4. BELONG
5. BUCKETS
6. THE KNIFE AND THE TRAIN
7. OUR FAVORITE FLAVOR

STORY
8. CHANGE THE LOCKS
9. THE LOWEST RUNG
10. BOTH SIDES
11. I’M TRYING, RINGO
12. EVERYTHING IS PERMITTED

Bubbles 5 - Buckets

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What the malignant spirit that has captured us wants is this: genocide and slavery. Literally.

* * *

We’ve established that we don’t belong to one another—the first step toward genocide.

What’s next?

Next, we'd have to start thinking that life is something one earns. After all, if we don’t think life is something that is earned, we can’t make two buckets—and we are going to need to make two buckets.

It takes two buckets to enact genocide. One bucket is for the right people, who have earned life. And the second bucket is for the wrong people, who have not.

(If you've been reading along you might sense some potential hypocrisy. You might be thinking that I’ve been putting people into buckets labeled 'Justice' and 'Order' … and perhaps so. But hold on. We’ll get there.)

We don’t put the wrong people in their bucket to kill them—it’s too early for that. It’s not that they deserve death. They just haven’t earned life. As a result, they do not deserve sympathy, empathy, or assistance. In fact, to provide them these things when they haven’t earned them is immoral, for they haven’t proved themselves by doing the right things the right way. Why should they get the basic necessities of life? Why should I have to pay for them with my own wealth—which is, let’s not forget, my moral virtue?

This is why I recommend so strongly that, if we wish to set about enacting genocide, we start by convincing as many people as possible that we don’t all belong to each other. Once we've done that, it’s going to be very easy to convince people that life is something you earn, to convert other human beings from perceived art to a presumed infraction.

But how does one earn life?

We can make the metric for earning life anything you like—or we could make it about many things. For ease, we might want to marry it up with existing unjust beliefs within a society. So, for example, in a culture that equates wealth with moral virtue, we could make it about wealth.

If wealth is interchangeable with morality, then the lack of it naturally becomes interchangeable with immorality. When life is something earned, after all, it stands to reason that those who die and suffer are those who failed to earn life. If they failed, then they must have deserved to fail. In fact, it becomes essential to believe that they deserved to fail. Blaming the failed for their failing becomes reflex. It becomes assumed. They have to be at fault, because if they aren't to blame ... well.

If they aren't to blame, then the fact that I am healthy and well would not be entirely because of my own virtue—and that can’t possibly be true. If they aren't to blame, I wouldn’t be a totally unconnected free actor in the world, entirely responsible for my own success—and I am. If they aren't to blame, then we might all belong to each other—and we do not. If they aren't to blame, someone else might be to blame for the inescapable fact that people suffer and die—and that someone else might even be me.

The key ingredient if we are making two buckets is blame.

An abusive system seeks to perfect itself by invoicing the costs of its own injustice to those suffering its abuses. Thus, injustice will deny its own existence, convert itself to justice by converting the suffering it causes to blame. The poor, therefore, are at fault for their poverty. Their poverty is not brought on by a system that ensures it; instead, their poverty is their own moral failing. Blaming the sufferers for their own suffering becomes second nature in a society oriented toward preserving an abusive order. Converting their suffering to perceived moral failing becomes common sense. It becomes reflex.

Who is at fault for the social woes caused by poverty? Why the lazy poor, of course, who’d rather suck the government teat than work hard like good people.

Who is at fault for the collapse of the housing market? The greedy poor, of course, who chose to take the predatory loans Wall Street lobbied to make legal.

Who is at fault for the national debt? Welfare mothers, of course, having babies they can’t afford, that I now have to pay for.

Why are there so many abortions? Irresponsible women just don’t want to have to take care of the babies that have been made unaffordable by policies I support.

Who is at fault for the threat of terrorism? Immigrants, fleeing countries our country destabilized, families on the run from the terrorists whose ideologies our bombs have empowered.

Did you get sick? You must have lived an unhealthy lifestyle. I don’t smoke and I run 20 miles every week. You should have done that.

Drug addicted? You should have had a stronger will, like me. I'm not addicted.

Depressed? Cheer up. Be more grateful, like me. I'm grateful.

Kids go to a bad school? You should have sent them to a better one. That’s what I did with my kids.

Uneducated? You should have studied harder. I studied hard.

Get raped? What were you wearing? I’d have dressed differently.

Cops shot you? Should have obeyed them. I’d have obeyed.

Drowned in a flood? Why didn't you evacuate like I would have? Better still, why did you choose to live there in the first place? I chose to live someplace that is not currently underwater.

Do people of color struggle in generational poverty? Tsk. They really should have focused more on the family unit. My family eats dinner together every night and we read the Bible. And where are their fathers? In prison? Tsk. Shouldn’t have sold marijuana. I didn’t sell marijuana. It never even occurred to me to do that. I had no reason to do that, therefore there is no reason to do that.

I deserve life because I have it. Others have failed to earn it and therefore don't. The reason they failed? Who knows? These aren't questions the already virtuous need to ask.

It could be they're lazy. Perhaps they should have worked harder.

In a society captured by the idea that life is earned, we might find that hard work is held to be interchangeable with virtue. And virtue is already interchangeable with wealth, so hard work and wealth will become similarly entangled. Soon I don't have to work hard to be considered hard-working. I don't even need to actually earn life by my standards in order to earn it.

Hard work is a moral virtue. Peacefulness is a moral virtue. Hard work can earn you money. Peace allows wealth to flourish. Thus all I need to do is reverse the causal relationship and suddenly, because of my money I become hard work. I become peacefulness. I become moral virtue.

And it is through my possession of these outward signs that my society deems I earn my life.

And it is through their lack that my society deems others do not.

Imagine thinking the bowl of Skittles was the image that says it all.

But it goes further than money and hard work. We can entangle any two things to make you presumed worthy or presumed unworthy. Let's do a couple more, just two of many...

Suppose you lived in a society that believed all the assumptions mentioned so far. And then suppose that for centuries this society considered people to be property. Suppose that during those centuries the dividing line between people who were property and people who could own property was whether they were considered ‘white’ or not.

Bill O'Reilly is very forgiving of the indiscretions of young boys.

Further suppose that for millennia women were given to men by other men, in financial transactions called ‘marriages,’ while other women were owned by men as concubines or kept as mistresses or purchased as prostitutes, and any women not entangled in one of these ownership-based arrangements were marginalized, suspected of malign oddity or strange defect.

In such a society, whiteness and maleness would become interchangeable with property, and therefore interchangeable with wealth, and therefore with virtue. Whiteness and maleness would themselves become assumed moral virtues. They would be implied hard work. They would be implied wealth. They would be implied ownership of property. And, therefore, they would carry an implication of having earned life.

Conversely, to be not-white and not-male without agreeing to become property would make your existence interchangeable with theft. Not being a thief, but being theft itself. Possession of a body that should belong to another. Non-whiteness and non-maleness would themselves be assumed sins of laziness and poverty. They would make you implied poverty. They would make you implied property. And, therefore, they would carry implications of having not having earned life.

Living without the mantels of assumed morality conferred by whiteness and maleness would be the difference between experiencing a society to which you are assumed to belong and experiencing a society to which you are assumed to be a belonging.

Bill O'Reilly is very forgiving of the indiscretions of young ... wait a minute.

After millennia and centuries, we wouldn’t even think about it. These would be habitual beliefs. They would be reflex. They would be tradition. They would be mirrors that didn’t let us see ourselves.

So if men tend to make more money than women for the same work, they will be considered naturally more virtuous and hard-working, by the very fact of their advantage. We'd invent any number of reasons why this gap did not exist, or was in fact good.

And if white people tend to have more wealth than people of color, they will be considered naturally more virtuous and hard-working, by the very fact of their advantage. We'd invent any number of reasons why this discrepancy is fair and just and good. In such a society, for example, phrases like 'regular, hard-working’ people,' might be used interchangeably in pubic discourse with 'white people,' with an implied corollary about the rest.

In such a society, we would discover that women have a common shared experience, in which they walk the street observed by men who seem to feel toward their bodies and demeanor a general right of ownership. In such a society, we might regularly encounter comments, jokes, and even elaborate ceremonies premised on the assumption that the relationship of a father to his daughter is best understood exclusively as the obsessive and faithful stewardship, on behalf of some future beneficiary, of a perfectly unsullied vagina.

It's funny because he's murderous.

In such a society, we might find that when women are raped, the particulars of her activities are closely parsed to discover what she might have done to earn such rough treatment, as if the investigation were not about discovering the facts around the crime done to her, but about satisfying in our minds the reason the raped woman earned her rape, in what particular way the assaulted woman actually belonged already to her assailant.

We might find men who come to the defense of an abused woman framing their ability to do so along the strangely specific contexts of transitive empathy on behalf of the women they 'have' in their own lives.

We might find that when a young white rapist is sentenced, the judge publicly frets about what damage the sentence might wreak upon their promising future and what damage it might do to their implied moral virtue.

Chance Macdonald, 22, pleaded guilty to common assault in April
after he was initially charged with sexual assault and
forcible confinement following a 2015 party. 

We might discover that a wealthy white man can brag about sexual assault and still win the presidency, if he is wealthy enough, or at least famous enough for being wealthy. He might even in his bragging crow that these are the very star qualities that “let you do it.”

And in such a society, we would discover people of color who know they walk the streets observed by people considered 'white,' who feel toward their very lives a general right of ownership.

We might find that, when a person of color is killed by police, the particulars of the victim's past are closely examined for infractions from years past, which are presented as an obvious part of the story—a story which seems to be not about why an unarmed human being was shot dead, but about why the dead person now might deserve to be dead. And, should the victim prove particularly virtuous, the story might become about how this particular death was tragic, in comparison to all the others. And, if a person considered 'white' kills a person not considered 'white,' you may find a significantly different framing of the story.

Mugshot for the victim, not the shooter.

(P.S. He still also fatally shot Tyre King.)

We might find that an increasingly militarized law enforcement views any calls for consequence arising from abuses of power as a direct attack upon their ability to do their jobs, and even an attack upon their very lives. We might discover that charges for police actions were very rarely pressed at all, even when an ever-growing set of videos captures acts of shocking corruption and brutality and murder. We might find, in rare instances when charges were pressed, that acquittals were the norm.

We might find that a grass-roots movement that exists to proclaim that their lives actually matter (despite the contrary assessment of the justice system), and to demand the public servants hired to protect them stop murdering them, is spoken of on mainstream media platforms as equivalent to terrorist organizations or hate groups—or worse. We might find powerful people calling for laws to be passed making it legal to run such people over with cars.

We might discover that a political party can come to power while actively working to strip people of color of the right to participate in society as equal voters. We might find them nominating as their leader a man who took out a full page ad in the paper of record to demand the execution of five innocent black men, a man who declared Mexicans rapists, a man who proposed a Muslim ban and a border wall, a man whose solution to the problem of police brutality was to relax existing standards in order to make the police even less hesitant to employ violence and harassment against people who our society deems have not earned life. We might find that this man referred to such unfettered injustice as 'law and order,' and we might find that when he did, millions nodded and clapped and cheered.

If this were a deeply ironic universe, we might even find that people ascribed to all these ideas while worshiping in a religious tradition that spoke of a deity who fed and healed without price, taught that he was a shepherd who would search for every lost sheep, that in his kingdom there was no wealth, or race, or religion, or gender.

Those are the sorts of things we might find, in a society dedicated to the idea that life is something you earn.

This is the conclusion: Other people do not matter, and it’s their own fault that they do not.

Here is the penalty for believing this lie. Insecurity. When I believe in this lie, others with greater leverage can compel me to twist myself into discomfiting and violent shapes, just to prove that I have earned the right to live. I might spend my life focused not on the living, but in the desperate attempt to prove my right to live.

Here is the danger of believing it: When I believe life is something that is earned, then eventually I, being human, being finite, will fail. No matter how strong, or smart, or successful, I will fail. And, having believed in a world where life is earned, I will have no longer earned life. I may even believe this lie of myself. It will certainly be believed of me, one who has taught the lie for so long.

A world in which one must earn life is a world in which I will inevitably earn death.

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FRAME
0. ART
1. SISTER
2. THE GREAT DIVIDE
3. SPIRIT
4. BELONG
5. BUCKETS
6. THE KNIFE AND THE TRAIN
7. OUR FAVORITE FLAVOR

STORY
8. CHANGE THE LOCKS
9. THE LOWEST RUNG
10. BOTH SIDES
11. I’M TRYING, RINGO
12. EVERYTHING IS PERMITTED