![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Absolute Truth
Jul. 12th, 2014 02:50 amThis evening I went to a play. Or, really, thirty plays in one hour, performed in random order. Most were funny, if only in their absurdity. Several were insightful. A few were banal, or simply mystifying. But one in particular, titled "Apex", managed to fulfill the actors' stated goal of absolute truth.
The performer, a young black man, sat at an improvised table with a large chef's knife and fork. He talked, with obvious fondness, about how his young son loved animals, even though at two years old he wasn't able to grasp much about them aside from shapes and sounds. Certainly his son had little idea of how ecological systems worked, the performer said as he removed a bloody steak from a box; how the strong preyed upon the weak, how animals struggled and fought for their very existence, either by defending themselves from predators or by growing more effective teeth and talons to kill their prey. And, as yet, his young son had no idea how humans, with no natural predators, could get so bored with their position as apex predators as turn upon each other. To concoct systems of rules and competing priorities so labyrinthine as to produce horrible effects. To stand over the corpse of a six-year-old child and truly believe that this was a price worth paying to protect a 'liberty' enshrined in law more than two hundred years ago by people with perhaps more optimism than understanding of human nature. He did not know how he would explain this to his son. But it is the way things are, the dish we have set before ourselves, and he would do his best to swallow it.
I felt the way I did once as a child, when I slipped off a swing that moments before had been safely carrying me through the air, only to land on my back with shock-deflated lungs, unable, for a few terrifying moments, to remember how to breathe.
My feelings around this topic are a swirl as chaotic as the show that spawned this rumination. Horror, at the undeniability of this truth. Frustration melting toxically into impotent rage, at my perceived powerlessness to change it. Anger, at the majority world that turns a blind eye to such facts, because that's the easiest answer. Guilt, because I often do the same, and am afforded a position of such privilege where I am able to do so nearly constantly. But beneath it all, a horrible, empty sadness, because if it feels a terrible inevitability to me, it almost certainly does to everyone else. And our collective belief will indeed make it so.
I do not know how to fix this problem. I have no idea where, amongst the decades of tradition and the reflexive responses and the engrained paranoia and the entrenched cultural fear and anger, one might even start. But it is, indeed, the dish we have set before ourselves. And every day that I do nothing, I fear I partake of it as well.
The performer, a young black man, sat at an improvised table with a large chef's knife and fork. He talked, with obvious fondness, about how his young son loved animals, even though at two years old he wasn't able to grasp much about them aside from shapes and sounds. Certainly his son had little idea of how ecological systems worked, the performer said as he removed a bloody steak from a box; how the strong preyed upon the weak, how animals struggled and fought for their very existence, either by defending themselves from predators or by growing more effective teeth and talons to kill their prey. And, as yet, his young son had no idea how humans, with no natural predators, could get so bored with their position as apex predators as turn upon each other. To concoct systems of rules and competing priorities so labyrinthine as to produce horrible effects. To stand over the corpse of a six-year-old child and truly believe that this was a price worth paying to protect a 'liberty' enshrined in law more than two hundred years ago by people with perhaps more optimism than understanding of human nature. He did not know how he would explain this to his son. But it is the way things are, the dish we have set before ourselves, and he would do his best to swallow it.
I felt the way I did once as a child, when I slipped off a swing that moments before had been safely carrying me through the air, only to land on my back with shock-deflated lungs, unable, for a few terrifying moments, to remember how to breathe.
My feelings around this topic are a swirl as chaotic as the show that spawned this rumination. Horror, at the undeniability of this truth. Frustration melting toxically into impotent rage, at my perceived powerlessness to change it. Anger, at the majority world that turns a blind eye to such facts, because that's the easiest answer. Guilt, because I often do the same, and am afforded a position of such privilege where I am able to do so nearly constantly. But beneath it all, a horrible, empty sadness, because if it feels a terrible inevitability to me, it almost certainly does to everyone else. And our collective belief will indeed make it so.
I do not know how to fix this problem. I have no idea where, amongst the decades of tradition and the reflexive responses and the engrained paranoia and the entrenched cultural fear and anger, one might even start. But it is, indeed, the dish we have set before ourselves. And every day that I do nothing, I fear I partake of it as well.
