War and Violence
Guns are really fucking scary.
I haven't seen one in years and god am I glad I haven't. But I have heard them, at night, assorted pops and bangs I am reassured are just firecrackers but I swear it doesn't sound like it.
I have been rewatching brooklyn 99, every scene that ends with a bullet fired seems like it last minutes rather than seconds. A tear falls from my cheek watching protagonists end up hospitalised in order to move the plot along.
And shit am I glad I do not live in America. My view of the country, just like many people I know, is a hell hole that first tries to do everything in its power to hinder your survival and then ontop of that lets people carry around weapons capable of killing with the press of a button.
Many people would say my sensitivity to death and guns alike makes me weak, inferior to those who sit by and let it happen.
But it makes me feel morally superior, so fuck it.
In order to not feel anxious about posting this I am going to extrapolate this to something more meaningful.
World views. These are nuanced, labels don't work but as society likes to do society makes labels.
'pro-life' is a phrase that recently has become accosiated with not good people. I am not comfortable quoting the example I am talking about but I think it should be up to a person what they want to do, and not up to some arbitrary philosophy.
Do what feels right in the moment for you, and don't let others opinions sway that.
I don't want this to be a post about abortion but I also don't feel I conveyed that is what I was talking about while trying to not mention it explicitly.
At school today my history teacher got us to do a 'quick write', where you write non stop for 10 minutes about a topic. It was on 'the importance of remembrance day and war service'. I don't know what holidays or traditions happen outside of Australia, I would assume its commemorated in most places? the end of World War 1, 11/11@11 am.
I have an anecdote I will pose as a quote, ‘I am grateful for the people who lost their lives for some old men in expensive buildings who had a shit day and took it out of someone else’. This is what goes through my mind during every minute of silence on remembrance day. I feel war service and remembrance day are just another example of the stupidity of man kind, and the lengths some people are willing to go to try and prove their point. I can’t say I don’t respect people in military service, but I also can’t find my own logical conclusion for that to be something someone wants to do? Are they just taking the risk that there will be no need for them to actually need to go to a warzone? Do they just enjoy training and the experience of using heavy equipment and guns? That is understandable, if so then I see it being that they also do not want our country to go to war which I feel the same about. But what if there are people that join war service because they want to fight in a war? Because they, just like the people who sat in expensive buildings ordering millions to their death in the 20th century, enjoy destruction? I doubt it, but humans can be weird. I don’t know how I got to this point in this quick write.
That is my long way of saying what the fuck is war? And violence?
. . .
Excuse me dragging this on for longer than it needs to to express that I hate violence, I just have a lot of anecdotes for this.
Today at school I was playing hangman in my science class with the 4 or 5 people that didn't go outside for a quick break. A few minutes in a kid who had gone out to play handball I believe walks in calmly, he is typically like this, dissociated I would call it. Often I find myself worrying about how he got to where he is. Anyway, then the teacher comes in and tells him he needs to go the front office, in the voice my science teacher gives when he is fed up - my science teacher is very rarely fed up.
So then I wonder how that happened? What did happen? I am not big on the gossip thing and most people that are witnessed it so it didn't actually spread because there was no one interested that didn't already know. However from what I did hear, and what I assume, he got overwhelmed, someone made a joke that didn't come across as a joke and then communication broke down.
So is that just what violence is? The breakdown of communication into physical force? I feel war is very similar, the breakdown of goepolitics to the point no one has the energy to negotiate.
How the fuck do we get to that point?
I am a bit frustrated not only with my answer but with that every time I answer a question I ask another
Perhaps people just don't have the empathy to back off when they see those around them overwhelmed. It is quite obvious when someone is, or perhaps I am just good at pattern recognition.
It is commonly said and just as common are examples that neurodiverse people tend to have lowered adaptive coding; this means they struggle more to conclude how someone else is feeling.
If I can clearly see someone is overwhelmed and I statistically have a reduced adaptive coding then how do the neurotypical people not see it?
The 2 conclusions are they see it and they don't care, or that they are not tuned to the patterns of someone being overwhelmed as I am.
It has taken a lot of energy and time for me to recognise myself getting overwhelmed, that was realistically one of my goals for the year, even if i had never written it down.
so maybe I am just conditioned to recognising the patterns of mental breakdowns.