Last week was a hideous, hideous one.
It goes without saying something is extraordinarily broken in the United States of America. Multiple school shootings, the murder of Charlie Kirk, the talk of civil war, and palpable fear of more violence in a nation already awash in it.
It’s just fucking horrible.
There are plenty of takes out there already… valid ones calling for common-sense gun reform, solidarity, expanded mental health services, and systemic change to address this grotesque violence.
And then there are the stunningly ignorant takes from those advocating revenge or celebrating murder.
Anyone calling for more violence, bloody revolution, or civil war is a fool who doesn’t understand what’s at stake.
Full stop.
They’d be wise to look at the horrors in Ukraine or Gaza and ask if that’s really the world they want to inhabit. A world of blood, fire, heartbreak, and watching loved ones die before your eyes. That is the outcome of political violence. There is no shortcut, no alternate ending.
Consider the quote from Alex Garland above, whose film Civil War made waves last year and is worth revisiting at the moment. This was given to the New York Times in a discussion of the memorable scene in the film where two snipers are shooting at one another in a typical American suburb, surrounded by destroyed and out-of-season Christmas decorations. It’s perhaps the most surreal moment in the film. Especially because neither of the soldiers can answer the journalists’ question: what side are you on?
Instead, they repeat (approximately) “there’s someone in that house trying to kill us, so we’re trying to kill them,” which perhaps more poignantly than anywhere else in the film, reminds us that our notions of morality, of right and wrong, of good and bad are parts of ourselves that get jettisoned in a survival situation. Which anything approximating civil conflict would become for everyone it touched, by the way.
We dug up an old installment of The Cure to reflect on this sadly prescient film and its messaging. A relevant section of it reads:
Interestingly—and controversially—the film offers minimal political insight into the orientations of the different factions battling for control of America: there are references here and there to recognizable touch points--an unspecified event called “the Antifa massacre” and paramilitary dudes in Boogaloo Boy-esque floral shirts-- but the politics of this world are left fundamentally opaque. Which, creatively speaking, actually works.
Instead of a specific political vision, what Garland renders is a broadly macabre and gut-unsettling vision of warfare's chaos and barbarism unfolding amidst the backdrop of our relatively decadent American reality. The film underscores something we've mentioned in past installments of The Cure: that there are civilizational layers of order and organization woven throughout our lives that are so pervasive and taken for granted as to be invisible.
Our phones work. The lights turn on. The water is clean. You can call an ambulance. Gas stations sell gas. Food stores sell food. Is all of that shot through with the problems of late-capitalism? Yes.
But what would we do if all of that disappeared as it does in times of upheaval, whether hurricanes, natural disaster or warfare? What if this terrible thing--that's happening around the world and causing untold suffering to millions right now as you read this--happened here?
Our current world is very far from perfect and still dangerous for and frightening to too many, but in America at least, many of us would barely be able to get home from work if the internet went down. How many of us really know first aid? Survivalism? Orienteering? The other things required to survive in a world stripped of modernity?
Against a too-relatable backdrop, the film manages to evoke that alien reality in its depiction of the upside-down chaos and violence of life in a warzone. It shows the way that morality can warp and collapse in the dark lights of raw survival and brutal trauma. The film delivers a vision of the way that so much of what we take for granted--the invisible order of our world, in its convenience and comforts and flaws and constraints -could disappear in a single orgy of violence.
It’s important to remember that, in moments of trauma and terror like the present, there are yet worse outcomes. That violence begets violence and anyone condoning or advocating for such needs to take a beat and consider what they’re proposing.
Fortunately, those voices are fewer and farther between than our feeds would have us think. Most people are rightfully horrified at Charlie Kirk’s murder, as they were at the unconscionable political violence that’s been wrought on both sides of the aisle.
And that, in this extraordinarily dark hour, is a reminder that the angriest voices online do not define us. The vast majority of Americans do not crave violence. They want safety for their kids, peaceful neighborhoods, and a chance to lead a decent life. The vast majority of everyone abhors violence, no matter what banner it flies under.
If you’re inclined to think otherwise—and prefer indulging the dopamine thrill of righteousness and go through life believing that hordes of evil people are out there just raring to destroy what you care about--it would be wise to remove your head from your ass, stop doomscrolling, and expand your real-life experience of whomever you consider “the other”.
You will find out something everyone with a brain in their head and heart in their chest knows: that the other is not so other at all.
Too bad if that’s uncomfortable or hard.
That’s why bravery is called bravery.
This is the kind of courageous action—taken in humility, unplugged from the soul-rotting doom cycle of the news, approached from a place of love rather than fear—that this world so desperately needs.
There is no alternative. There is no other way. Otherwise, it’s suffering all the way down.
As many voices have pointed out, we can no longer say “this isn’t who we are.”
It very obviously is who we are.
But not who we have to be.
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