What Do People Really Want?

I feel too old, and I feel too young. I feel like I’m being pulled in so many directions, like someone who was dropped out of time and space and now everyone around him wants to monopolize his attention.
I think about what my life was like when I was young. I remember things we never talked about, things that were “better left unsaid,” the hushed whispers of people wanting to be scandalized, but also wanting to keep up the appearances of propriety. They wanted to hold the moral high ground, but have easy access to the foot of the hill should they have happened upon something deliciously salacious.
These things exist today, at least as of this writing, and I am so conflicted by it. I carry with me memories of terrible things that happened, not just to me but to others, innocents who caused no one harm except to be different. People who said they were our friends, and then did horrible things to us, smiling as they did them.
Human beings confuse me. They say they want peace and love, but they build their profits on top of violence, and hatred. They cry for mercy and compassion, but they shout in a voice of rage and judgment at everyone they consider deserving of it, especially people who won’t shout back.
What do people really want?
They say that the pen is mightier than the sword, but also that actions speak louder than words. Does it have to be one or the other? Is it both? When do people decide which one means what, and when is it appropriate to call for it in a given context?
All of this seems so subjective to me, as if no one in the world truly knows what we’re doing, but they’re going to make damned sure we do it the right way.
Do you know what it’s like to pour your heart out, letting every truth you’ve ever known just spill at your feet, letting the words of your soul be put on display, only for people to dismiss it, and you, without a second thought?
I don’t like this age we live in. I find so much joy in some things: for example, same sex marriage is legal in the United States. I can watch people fall in love, people of any gender, any orientation, any color, and it fills my heart. When I was younger, the mere idea of two people of the same sex laughing, flirting, holding hands in public, it just didn’t happen outside of the very liberal cities.
Now, though, there is so many worse things. I read news articles, every day, where children are emotionally abused by our own government, where they’re physically intimidated, treated like shit by this United States government, and this same government has the temerity to call itself just, to call itself moral.
We drive away the homeless, and we starve the hungry. We exploit the sick, and we treat the mentally ill as lepers. We judge them harshly, deriding them as faking, or just looking to “get away” with something.
Our media has played a part in that, by amplifying the old stories of the welfare queen, the evil illegal immigrant, the old insanity plea, all of these seen as undesirable, detestable, not people to be salvaged, but tropes upon which to embellish a deep-seated hatred for those perceived as weak or different from what is considered the norm.
I often think I was born at the worst possible time. I don’t know what to do with myself. My words, which are all I really have, feel so ineffectual. They are all that I really am, and yet they feel inadequate.
What actions I take I always do so out of my own sense of morality. I don’t care for legalism, because even a perfunctory glance at history shows the law being manipulated to criminalize the virtuous, and to lionize the hustler.
Captain Malcolm Reynolds once famously said, “It’s my estimation that every man ever got a statue made of him was one kind of a son of a bitch or another.”
The problem with statues is we’re able to set into stone and steel this idea of a flawless hero, a man (and it’s almost always a man) who fought for freedom, justice, or whatever patriotic dross manages to get the funding for it to be made.
So once again, I say that humans confuse me. Do they want people to do good, or only good that has been approved by the governing majority? What if I believe the good I’m doing is necessary, even if the governing body doesn’t approve? Well, if we go by history, that person is either lauded when public sentiment shifts (often after they die), they’re imprisoned, or they’re murdered.
Seems kind of a shitty deal if you ask me.
I can ask myself “how do you know if what they’re doing is actually morally right?” and I can answer myself by saying “no one truly knows what is and isn’t morally right, we’re all winging this shit!”
All I can do is ask myself the primary reason as to WHY I’m wanting to do what I believe is good and right. Is it for myself? Sometimes. I want to live in a world where people are free, prosperous, and safe to live their lives in peace.
So many other people say the same thing, but when I look around, I see so much violence, hatred, deception, and death. What do we really want? I want peace, prosperity, and happiness, not just for myself, but for everyone. I actually work to achieve it, but again why aren’t these results being seen everywhere?
We’re all making it up as we go along. We don’t know what we want, and I don’t think we know what we’re doing at all. We’re groping about blindly in the dark playing the shittiest game of Marco Polo anyone has ever witnessed.
The government has no idea what it’s truly doing.
The police have no idea what they’re truly doing.
The judges, and lawyers have no fucking clue what they’re truly doing.
The only reason so many doctors and nurses seem to know what they’re doing is because a heart in one person’s body will likely be in the same location as the heart in another person’s body. Take away that consistency, and we’d all be well and truly fucked.
No one really knows. We’re doing our best, some of us, and the rest of us are just trying really hard not to fucking die, or to kill anyone. Everything else is our brains trying to take a hunt and gather approach, and make it work as a collaborative effort.
That’s assuming everyone is honest with their motives. It doesn’t even take into account what happens when one person decides they deserve a little extra, and start manipulating other human beings to come around to their way of thinking, whether it’s good for those people or not (usually not).
What the hell do we want? There are so many answers to that question, but how do we know they’re the right answers? Do we even know? Do we honestly know anything about ourselves that will answer the question with any measure of satisfaction.
Look. All I can do is love people. All I can do is see all of your mistakes, all of your flaws, all of your missteps, all of your misconceptions, all of your intentions, all of your actions, and STILL say, at the end of the day, that I love you, because I do.
Oh sweet precious human beings, do you even know what you’re capable of? All of you? ALL of you?