Take the Power Back, by Martha Thomases – Brilliant Disguise | @MDWorld

July 17, 2016 Victor El-Khouri 0 Comments

Stop it.

Just stop it.

I’m talking to you, Human Race.  Enough is enough.

The past few weeks have seen far too much random and needless death.  Most recently, the attack on innocent Bastille Day celebrants in Nice took out 84 people and put dozens more in the hospital.

(Aside:  Isn’t it redundant to describe death as “random and needless?”  Are there any sequential and required deaths?)

As I write this, there is no evidence that the nut-ball who drove a refrigerated truck into crowds did so because of radical Islamist rage, although DAESH is taking credit for “inspiring” him.  That hasn’t stopped one of our Presidential candidates from vowing to wage war against them.

Why wait for facts when you can spout tough guy rhetoric from the safety of your penthouse apartment?

I don’t know what to do.  Who do you call for help when the police are the threat?  How do you protect police doing a terrific job at a peaceful protest from a sniper who could be anywhere or anyone?

What can we do to stop someone from killing people when that person wants to die?  How do we live in a society where “suicide by cop” is a phrase with meaning in our language?

Look, I understand.  Human beings have emotions, and these emotions influence our behavior.  Any attempt to deny real feelings might work for a while, but will, inevitably, erupt at the most inconvenient times.  As a society, we have tended to shame people for “bad” emotions, like anger and envy.

(And lust, but that’s a different rant.)

Anger is very real.  As someone living in a city that is hot as hell and humid as a swimming pool, I treat any requirement that I leave my air-conditioned apartment as a personal assault.  I rage against the sweat that pours off my body like the fountain in Washington Square Park.  I want to push clueless tourists into oncoming traffic when they get in my way, especially when they make my trip last longer and I’m away from air-conditioning for extra minutes.  When my then-infant son wouldn’t stop crying once in summer, I wondered what it would be like to throw him out the window.

I don’t do any of those things, but neither do I deny that I have the feelings that inspire them.  Instead, because I’m old and educated and reasonably affluent, I have the experience and the wherewithal to create situations that allow me to vent without causing harm to myself or others.  I can retreat to my air-conditioning.  I can work out on an exercise machine and scrub the rage-fueled adrenaline from my bloodstream.

And I can knit.

It’s stupidly inefficient for us to each solve our rage problems.  It would be much better if we worked together to accept and celebrate each other.  That includes getting help for people who are troubled — even if they don’t want help.  I don’t know how to do this, but we have to try.

Because the alternative is too terrible to accept.  Even if we allow that we can’t reduce gun violence (and I don’t), we can’t eliminate refrigerated trucks.

Martha Thomases, Media Goddess, doesn’t know how the coup in Turkey fits into this, if it even does.