I am writing this piece during a specific moment in time. It is a little after 23:00 on a Friday night. I have my “liked” songs playlist on Spotify playing through my AirPods. The playlist is on shuffle. The first song is the 8-Bit version of Threshold from the Scott Pilgrim vs the World soundtrack. I smile.
I added this to my liked songs playlist not long after I’d opened my Spotify account — some time around 2012 when I was a dipshit high school student.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about whether people really can grow and change over time. I believe there was an opportunity window to achieve such a feat, however, I believe that as we have become more warped and diseased by constant sensory-overload, that opportunity has diminished.
I grew into myself as a self-avowed Communist after many years of fucking up and learning from those fuckups. I don’t really believe there’s much encouragement anymore for that kind of growth. I think that people have entrenched themselves so deeply in the conceptualization they have — not of politics, not of ideology, not of faith, but of reality itself — that no Herculean attempt at excavation can save them.
This is a bit of a Doomer take. Mea culpa. However, I think the assassination of known Nazi Charlie Kirk has truly been the bedrock-striking moment of this entrenchment.
I’ve seen Liberal media sources, Liberal politicians, Liberal pundits and twitch streamers — ahem, Hasan, ahem — turn suddenly squeamish when they are ultimately reminded of their own mortality.
The problem with the mind infected with liberalism is that mortality is a failing. It is the ultimate end in which one can no longer continue to cash checks. One can no longer dunk on someone who’s ostensibly your enemy online, millions of miles away. Mortality means death means I can no longer gloat.
This is a sad view of the limited life we have. It’s a sad view to base perpetuation of the rise of fascism on, and your own culpability in it. The fact that you cede every narrative to fascism, that you eulogize Nazis and white supremacists. It’s sad to limit yourself so wholly when your soul, like mine, must cry out for liberation. It must call out for something that is not the reality you have provided the scaffolding to have built. It must call for more, but that call goes unanswered.
That call goes instead into a eulogy who wished death upon the most marginalized among us. The call goes into sympathy cards for Goebbels. Look at his and Charlie Kirk’s Wikipedia pages side-by-side and justify your eulogy then.
I started this playlist with a song from when I was a dipshit sophomore in high school. I ended with a song I found last year that touched me deeply and spoke to my experience of being non-binary.
There was a time I believed that people could grow, but, god damn these trenches seem impossibly deep.