man hands on misery to man
this post is about USA politics and also death. there’s an amount of swearing in it. you may feel morally judged by some of the things that i say.
written in the space of about 2 hours, give or take. extremely minimally edited. word count: approximately 1.5k.
post title is a quote from ”This Be The Verse” by Philip Larkin.
so i think i’m just going to start writing and see what happens?
the extent to which violence is normalized in my day-to-day life concerns me.¹ the casual nature with which death is talked about — as long as it’s the death of someone you don’t like or care about.
in 2022, i started playing a video game series called Dragon Age. the Dragon Age games are RPGs. as part of the story of each game, you kill a functionally-too-high-to-count number of barely-identified enemies. often, the only things that you know about these beings are (1) the identifiers (sometimes names, sometimes just labels) that the game has given them and (2) that they are your enemies.
and i think about that sometimes. most of my thinking about Dragon Age that i talk about is centered on specific characters and/or themes that i find particularly interesting, but i do also think about the ways in which death is treated by the narrative and the ways in which it is ignored. i’m not sure if there are conclusions to come to about that. i mean, death in general is such a massive topic, right? there’s so many ways that people throughout history have talked about death and written about death and engaged with death and attempted to prevent or delay death…
on Wednesday, December 4th, 2024, a man named Brian Thompson was fatally shot on the street outside a hotel in Manhattan. the only reason i and a lot of other people are aware of this is because he was the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare, a health insurance company whose parent company is based in Minnesota. broadly, citizens of the United States of America have been expressing increasing dissatisfaction with the options for health insurance coverage that have been offered to us over the past few decades; even in the wake of the 2010 Affordable Care Act, insurance companies have continued to raise premiums and curtail services seemingly to line the pockets of their highest-level executives.
the difference between this and what i was talking about directly before is that a lot of people know way more about this guy than we ever wanted to, because he’s more powerful than any individual has the right to be. but the presence of knowledge does not automatically lead to the absence of dehumanization. knowledge is an intellectual process, and (de)humanization at least partly an emotional one — it can be forced by intellectual means, but in most cases does request an emotional component.
thousands of people (at least) have been rendered unable to access medical care because of decisions made by people at this company, including the recently murdered. some significant percentage of those have consequently died preventable deaths. this is a level of horror that is frankly unimaginable for the average human brain. we don’t retain knowledge of that many people over any meaningful amount of time; we’re largely not capable of it. how, then, do we cope with this knowledge?
there’s a sense in which we’re expected to know about this and the other five billion ongoing atrocities that are happening literally as i type this. we’re expected to be aware of everything, and if we’re not doing something about every single thing, then we’re not acting in accordance with our values. (what happened to “from each according to their ability”?) or even if we’re not absolutely mind-numbingly angry all the time, then we’re not performing our values satisfactorily. sounds dystopian, right? welcome.
so i think there’s a sense in which, when one of these figureheads of atrocity dies, that death creates a space in which we’re allowed to feel relief. if we’re denying ourselves time away from the horrors — time for the most basic of recovery, joy — then the only place within the horrors for anything other than relentless rage is when someone dies. because death is justice, right? one life in exchange for thousands? it doesn’t bring back the dead, but it at least makes their deaths mean something, right?
death doesn’t mean anything. it’s not a fucking punishment. sometimes people die preventable deaths, and there is no action that can retroactively make that mean anything. it hurts. it’s fucking awful. why are so many more people being diagnosed with depressive disorders now? because we can’t fucking cope with this much pain. and yes, i’m swearing a lot in this paragraph, and it might feel like a sudden tone shift, and that’s because i’ve been holding back for this entire post so far.
let me be absolutely fucking clear: i do not blame any individual for their responses under a system that is designed to hurt them and is functioning correctly. i do not blame anyone for finding joy in the death of someone who has been responsible for unimaginable amounts of pain. we’re all trying to cope in our own ways here.
but the other aspect of this that i have yet to touch on is that the working-class left, from what (relatively) little of it i’ve seen, appears to value rehabilitative justice and the deprioritization of punishment. responding to someone’s death with joy, in a way that implies (if not outright states) that they deserved to die, directly contradicts these stated values. and, listen, people are hypocrites all the time. i don’t have any legs to stand on in that regard. i am in no position to judge how other people cope. what i am in a position to point out at the very least, as someone who is by definition working-class and by values and behaviours somewhere in the left of the political spectrum, is the large-scale discrepancy between words and actions that i am seeing illustrated here and have seen other instances of multiple times in the past decade of my adult life.
because, like, i’m fucking miserable about people dying preventable deaths too! if i succumbed to the peer² pressure of thinking about it all the time, i would never fucking get out of bed, i’d be that depressed! one of the only things i’ve managed to learn and (questionably) retain in my 28 years on this planet is that it is crucial for me to take space to recover. to feel joy that is unconnected in any way to any of these horrors. to allow my body time and space to process what the fuck is going on. because even if i’m only doing a fraction of what i wish i could to offset these senseless atrocities, i still have the ability to be a net positive influence on my corner of the world.
and to me, personally, being actively happy about another person’s death is a poison that i will not ingest. i don’t have to mourn the guy — frankly, i don’t give enough of a fuck to — but i would rather feed myself joy from sources that don’t lead me to question whether my behaviours are aligning with my values. death doesn’t feel like justice to me. another person’s pain does not feel like justice to me. it’s not cathartic or joyful or even any meaningful amount of relief. i’m not, like, morally better than anyone else because of this — i just spent my entire childhood and a significant chunk of my young adulthood being punished for stuff that wasn’t my fault and developing complex trauma from it. i don’t recommend this, by the way. don’t try it at home.
ending something i’ve written is always quite difficult. wrapping things up in a way that feels satisfying and meaningful… tricky to pull off. i would say i’m out of practice with this type of writing, but honestly i don’t know if i’ve ever written anything on this blog that’s quite like this. there are elements that can be traced as throughlines in a lot of my writing (if anyone were to have the combination of time and inclination to do that), but in that i’ve written about political things, it’s been… limited, in my recollection? i could probably use a refresher on my own writing, come to think of it.
anyway, uh, i’m just some guy with a slightly overactive brain and access to a computer. also i guess comments on this blog have always been disabled? this sure is a post to enable comments on. then again, i don’t even know if anyone reads this blog. i sure did just start writing and i have seen what happened, and now you can too, if you’re here. i have no idea if this (posting here) will ever become a regular occurrence again.
FOOTNOTES:
yeah, i’m aware that i sound like a boomer. something something “when sins of sons to fathers come, too heavy is the weight” (lyric from "The Moon / Awake" by The Dear Hunter)
loosest possible definition of the word