Complacent Monsters
I write about the monstrousness of humanity all the time. I write about how whiteness is poison and has spread its self-destructive toxicity throughout the globe. I talk about the ways it manifests and the innumerable ways white people avoid holding themselves or anyone else accountable for our current hellscape. And here we are, continuing to escalate as no atrocity is horrible enough to do anything to stop those with the power you worship to change their ways.
Here we are in 2019 where white “liberal” democrats refuse to impeach a clearly lazy, inept, cruel, abusive, unqualified president or his administration. Where they are STILL telling marginalized and oppressed people to be polite, patient, caring, and civil, and most importantly to remember to vote despite being openly victimized and slaughtered by the people for whom they are expected to vote.
We are real-time seeing human trafficking, physical and emotional terrorism, dehumanization, concentration camps, child death, all the way to the courtroom where they argue to legally imprison and withhold basic necessities from those they wrongfully hold captive. People are being tortured daily and held in cages while their captors pat themselves on the back for a good day at work and go eat dinner with their families. And we do nothing to stop them. These are people collaborating to not just maintain but establish NEW atrocities to inflict on Black people and People of Color. And there is no end in sight.
But it’s not like you haven’t had practice. 400 years of practice committing atrocities upon Black human beings and anyone who did not fit with the image the white male leaders wanted to project. If you are privileged, you see the atrocities by choice. You choose where to go, who to acknowledge instead of grinding to escape the manufactured cycle of poverty that is rapidly killing many of us. If you are privileged, you go to work, choose not to talk about it, decide not to acknowledge it, and pretend we are innocent of any wrongdoing because we’re taking care of our families instead of admitting we’re doing nothing. Every year hundreds of homeless people die of exposure while properties sit empty because in this game of life, you gotta pay to play…and if you break the rules, you become a victim of the game until everyone else pushes you off the board in a desperate bid to save their spot.
A lot of us are constantly trying not to be pushed off the board. A lot of us don’t believe we’re not supposed to be able to play. That we think we can is a privilege that should be an entitlement, but the board is controlled by cheaters who rigged this shit to always benefit them. ALWAYS. Our belief that we have a chance is a lie we use to justify those we harm as we fight for our spot.
We’re all monsters and some of us benefit from that shit a lot more than others. But it is always, and I mean always, at someone else’s expense. Those of us who tell ourselves we care try to become aware of this and fight it in an attempt to hold off the inevitable self-destruction needed to purge the cannibalistic, self-inflicted poison of whiteness from our society. We are the liar and the placaters; the moderates and the correctors of the status quo. We are the everyday monsters who tell ourselves we’re decent people because we want to be better.
There’s a whole other faction that delights in the current cruelty descended from centuries of shared glorification of genocide and abuse. These are the people whose grandparents attended public hangings and ate lunch under the bodies. These are the people who genetic code carries a legacy of torture and violence that literally goes against nature. We are a species who evolved to inflict harm upon one another for the illusion of power. And I have no idea what to do with this knowledge.
It’s not a new realization but it is so contradictory to existence that I struggle to live with it. I cannot fathom how or why any species would evolve to destroy itself. What kind of dystopian fuckery is this? Yet, we have hundreds of years of evidence of not just white people’s willingness but their absolute joy at the idea of harming others for personal gain. White people support genocide because they think they’re immune. YOU support this shit because you think you’re untouchable. You think that siding with the powers that facilitate the abuse will protect you from the abuse and as such a person, you are the mistake that should have evolved out of humanity, but because your type of viciousness slaughters anything that challenges it, humanity has become its worst possible version of itself. Congratulations white people — you continue to be a blight on the species, contaminating us all and reshaping diverse, co-existing cultures into exploitative, diluted entities of self-destruction.
You have destroyed every culture you’ve touched and continue to leech your “greatness” from our fucking resilience. Fuck you for that.
A part of me wishes I could exist long enough to see the rancid legacy of your violent ways, but I am tired of living in the cesspit of your hubris. I am tired of navigating the foulness of your over-inflated, self-importance. I do not want to continue drowning in your lies and deceptions of your self-proclaimed superiority that reads as a violent copy of everyone else’s accomplishments in human history. Whiteness is the snake consuming itself, completely certain that it is smarter than the creature it’s swallowing.
And even though this will assure my destruction, I want to see you choke on yourself. I want to see you realize what you created, and I want laugh in your face as we face obliteration together. But that is not a privilege granted to the likes of me; I’m too low on the social hierarchy.
But a womxn can dream. And thanks to you, I dream of the end of humanity and it makes me smile.
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Originally published at https://talynnkel.com on June 21, 2019.
