Tipping The Scales

I just want all of you to know that even though I can sometimes seem abrasive, even hateful, it is not out of hatred or disgust for any of you, but in defense of you. I hate the system that traps us here, that keeps some of us bound, and others fighting just to breathe.

I have no tolerance nor patience for injustice, cruelty, exploitation, and in the process of burning away as much of it as I can, it leaves me seemingly misanthropic.

The system in which we live, especially in the U.S., is fraught with violence. It is committed against not only individuals, but entire classes of people every day, and it is done to keep those individuals and classes fighting amongst themselves, because if you’re suspicious of your neighbor, you’re too busy to be suspicious about why things are the way they are.

We didn’t get here overnight. This was a long time developing, with the straps tightening slowly, and the buckles fastening gently, as not to alarm the person being restrained.

We’ve reached the point in our so-called developed society where we wonder whether or not it’s extreme to care for someone you don’t know, whether it’s too much to demand an accounting for everything our government does in our names.

People who speak up, who speak out, they’re looked at askance by those who are unsure, because in our respective cultures, people are groomed to behave, that the word of the state is like the word of a mother or a father.

Well, I reject the state. I say this with much candor because to soften those words here gives powers and principalities the wriggle room they need to reshape the message, not that they wouldn’t find a way anyway.

And who is ‘they’ that I find so onerous? Is it some shadowy cabal pulling the strings, setting up a one world government in order to make us slaves to their whims? Nah. It’s just rich and powerful people. They have names, they have faces, they get appointed to public offices. You know who they are, just as I know who they are.

They do it because it makes money, and humans got together, in some kind of social contract, and decided money was how we would apportion goods and services to where they were most needed. At the time, it probably seemed like a really good idea, at least to those who knew how to benefit the most from it.
See, there are certain types of people who don’t see other human beings, other living creatures, as anything other than game tokens, as resources to be shifted from one place to another in an effort to increase the income of the players. Hell, most of the time it’s probably not even intentionally cruel, but that doesn’t change the cruelty.

Most of you, even ardent capitalists, whether you know it or not, have a little communism in you. You have a little anarchism in you. Usually it comes out when you need help, because capitalism is a system not designed to care whether or not you need help if you have nothing deemed of marketable value to trade in return.

The inherent and much cliched cruelty in the system. That’s it. People change lives. People change our environment. They envision, they plan, they build, they adapt, they innovate. The cycle goes again and again, in times of feast and famine, with or without any incentive except in the mind of the artist, the engineer, the laborer.

I don’t need a reason to feed a hungry person aside from the fact that they need fed, to clothe them when they are exposed, to heal them when they are sick. I need no other incentive to help human beings, because they need help.

There are people who give their lives to protect others, and they do it for far less than their lives are worth in compensation, but they do it anyway because their sense of value is correct: life is precious. Life matters. All of these little gadgets, and trinkets, and tchotchkes that are mass produced and gather dust, they can be remade, remolded, recreated.

Once a life is snuffed out, it is gone forever. There will never be another one quite like it in the universe ever again. Such a thing transcends mere human value, it goes beyond what can be tabulated or weighed.
If you were to weigh one human life against the sum total of all the gold in the world, the gold wouldn’t have a chance of tipping in its own favor.

You, my dear reader, are more valuable than all of the precious metals in the universe. You, my sweet friend, are more precious than the whole of the earth’s so-called riches.

Please realize this.