Still I See No Changes

Feast or famine
Feel the damage
We create ourselves
Fists, two handed
Strike the air
None are landed
Where it matters
So we leave, abandoned
Thoughts and dreams
None are standing
Violent vacuum
Violet bandings
Around the wrists
Of those demanding
Hope and change
All remanded
To live their lives
Unchanging blandness
Politicians promises
We could stand less
To listen to those
Whose words depress
Optimistic futures
With no redress
Open windows
But no egress
Nothing is different
We all regress

Generational Memory, Racist Attitudes, and the Failure of Reconstruction

In my opinion, the entire modern idea of the American Civil War is completely wrong. This was not a war about fighting for the control of a single country. For entire duration of the war, there existed two countries, the United States of America and the Confederate States of America. Each was fighting for existence. The Confederate States existed because, when they were part of the United States, they were afraid that the U.S. government was going to put an end to slavery. 

That was the entire reason for the existence of the Confederate States. Full stop. People couch the Civil War in terms of states rights, but the right for the states to say whether or not they would be slave states was the one right the Confederate States were specifically fighting for. If there had been a compromise as there had been in years before that allowed those states to keep slaves as long as they had seen fit, there would have been no secession, and no war.

Whatever you believe, this is the truth; there was no wrong reason for wanting to end slavery.  

Just as there was no right reason for wanting to keep it. 

Why do I bring this up? Because almost 160 years after the Civil War ended, the beliefs that created it are alive and well. Reconstruction failed miserably, and nowhere is this more evident than the American South. 

During the prosecution of (or in the aftermath of) wars, people often talk about winning “hearts and minds.” 

I am here to tell you that the entire notion of “hearts and minds” is unbelievably stupid.  

Sometimes, in order to win a mind, you have to break a heart. 

In the immediate aftermath of the Civil War it made sense to pardon the soldiers who fought for the South. It never made sense to prosecute the average soldier, and people like Robert E. Lee were so beloved that any prosecution would have resulted in further bloodshed. It also never made any sense for the U.S. government to name military bases after Southern generals. One hundred and sixty years later, we still have military bases named after people like Braxton Bragg, a Southern general who by all accounts was a sadistic tyrant who delighted in executing his own men. 

But heritage, not hate, right? Tradition is an excuse to keep ignorant rules and ignorant behavior alive. 

Look, I grew up in (currently live in) Virginia. I live next to Lee Highway. I have to drive on Jefferson Davis Highway, through a largely black neighborhood in Richmond, to get to the VA hospital. To say that I grew up with a high regard for people like Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson would be an understatement. (This sort of thinking is why it took Virginia a full 100 years after the Civil War to legalize miscegenation.) It seems like there is a deliberate effort to brainwash people into thinking that, despite the readily apparent horror of the cause that they fought for, these people were inherently noble. 

That in itself is another lie that Americans tend to believe. War is, in and of itself, inherently ignoble. “Dulce et decorum est. Pro patria mori.” That is rarely true. And it certainly should not extend itself to people who were enemies of this country. 

That is the thing that I understand the least about the veneration of the soldiers of the so called “Lost Cause.” The Confederate States, for their entire brief existence, were enemies of the United States of America. It makes zero sense for an American to display any sort of reverence or veneration for the leaders or symbols of their cause.

Allowing this sort of belief by canonizing the leaders of the South through federal and state recognition has led to an ongoing generational memory, one that portrays the Union as the aggressor and in the wrong. It has led to a century and a half of often state sanctioned racism. 

We do not allow children to continue believing in Santa Claus after a certain age. At some point, we need them to understand that there is no longer any charm in furthering the belief in what amounts to a mass delusion. 

Similarly, the belief that there was some sort of nobility in the leaders or the cause of the Confederate States is a 160-year delusion. It is equally as implausible as the notion of a genial, red-faced, bearded, and obese man distributing Christmas presents to all the children in the world in a single night, via the means of a magical group of reindeer and a sleigh. It is passed through the generations, perpetuated by a continued belief in the supremacy of the white mind.

This belief and the attitudes it creates are readily apparent. A black man goes jogging in Georgia. He stops for three minutes at a house that is under construction. He leaves, is chased and confronted by two armed white men, struggles for his life, and is murdered. 

The white men, instead of being arrested and prosecuted by local prosecutors, are protected by them. The men are only arrested after a video of the incident is released. The video was released by a lawyer for one of the men because he believed it would exonerate them.

Because “they” should just do what “they” are told, and everything will be fine. 

I am sure the Confederate Generals and other leaders thought about slaves the same way.

A New And Harsh Reality

The leaders of Britain and the United States were shown a forecast which predicted that, in the absence of harsh quarantine measures, the novel coronavirus (Covid-19) would cause millions of deaths in those two countries alone. (Many of these deaths could be collateral deaths caused by people sickened by the virus overwhelming the health care system, and sapping resources away from others.) They further predicted that those harsh measures would need to be in place until a vaccine is created in order to limit the amount of dead.

A vaccine could take as many as 18 months to create.

This is a cold and brutal truth; the world cannot sustain a quarantine for that long. There is not enough food to sustain such a shutdown. The economy cannot sustain such a shutdown.

We have entered a moment where decisions are currently being made by the leaders of the world that could result in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. How long can the quarantine last before the economic toll is so great that people can no longer afford basic necessities? How long before the the supply chain gets disrupted to the point where supply shortages are causing famines?

This is the decision; allow the virus to spread while insisting the most vulnerable populations remain under quarantine. Or kill the economy which will eventually result in more widespread suffering.

This is the harshest of all realities; they will come to the conclusion that the relatively young and healthy are the least likely to get sick. They will tell people to go back to work. They will ask all others to quarantine. Life will resume, the virus will spread, but it will not kill as many people as it may have. But the people it does kill, we knowingly traded their lives so that our way of life could continue in some shape or form, albeit altered.

While every available resource should be put to use finding a vaccine, we live under a new and harsh reality; our way of life was never sustainable. Anyone paying attention could have and should have predicted that this was a likelihood. Now we know. But what do we do with the knowledge?

Humanity stands on a sharp precipice. We either find common ground, set forth a join effort to create a vaccine and do our best to take care of the vulnerable among us, or we fracture and the life of leisure that we know ceases to exist, overwhelmed by chaos.

Historically, the moment that man is arrogant enough to believe that nothing can stand in our way, collapses happen. Let us hope we find the humility to help each other on a global scale.

The Myth of the "High-Functioning" Alcoholic

Alternately titled "Why I Started Drinking and Why I Quit."

Let's clear something right up; there is no such thing as a high functioning alcoholic.

I will repeat this, for emphasis (and because I like semi-colons); There. Is. No. Such. Thing. As. A. High. Functioning. Alcoholic.

Full stop.

I started drinking at the age of 22, after I joined the Army. The reasons for this are pretty simple. First, I wanted to fit in with the people around me. Second, having grown up extremely sheltered (hello, homeschooling), I discovered that alcohol helped to mask my general unease and anxiety in social situations.

Honestly, when I drank, I thought I was an absolute delight.The people who knew me back then can tell you that I was not, in fact, always delightful.

It wasn't long before I began drinking for other reasons. I drank when I was bored. I drank before I did any homework because I hated learning Korean. I drank for attention.

I drank because I truly enjoyed it. After a lifetime (up to that point) of rigid self control, it felt like freedom. In fact, before I left Korea, I wrote that on the wall of the bar I frequented. (Everyone signed the wall. The name of the bar was, in fact, The Wall.) So if you ever go there, if the wall still exists, you will see this: "Alcohol=Freedom. Ben Potter"

Don't believe that bullshit.

Drinking stopped being fun in Korea. It became something I thought I had to do to function. I drank to distract myself from the fact I hated my life, and the person I had become. I drank after I got sick, after I gained 100 pounds, after I broke up with my then fiancee. I drank when I was horribly depressed. I drank even though I was taking multiple blood pressure medications, Valium, Paxil, Effexor, and other random drugs the Army gave me to mitigate the symptoms of my illness.

I blacked out more times than I count. I did ignorant and ridiculous things.

I justified it by telling myself that I never missed a day of work. And that I was good at my job. That was true for as long as I drank.

 I justified it by telling myself that I was the only one that I was hurting.

That last part is the lie that all addicts tell themselves. That their addiction and their actions as a result of that addiction are all contained within a vacuum of self harm. Or that their actions are merely a consequence of their addiction and not the other way around.

I could tell you that I largely quit after Korea, but that would be a lie. There would be more blackouts, more bad decisions, more terrible behavior. I tried to quit the month before I left the Army, because at that point I had been drinking every single day for almost two years. I spent that entire month on my couch, shaking, sweating, puking.

It took another five years after that to completely stop. I realized how few healthy coping mechanisms I had developed to effectively deal with stress. I was still using alcohol as a crutch and I desperately needed to make a change.

And lest we make excuses, I did not have a disease. I made choices, with full knowledge of the consequences. I made those choices. It was not my mental illness, not my physical illness, not peer pressure. It was me, refusing to look at myself in the mirror and question the wisdom of my actions.

So what, you ask, is the point of all of this?

If you use alcohol as a mask for a lack of effective coping mechanisms, that is problematic. There's a whole new acceptance of day drinking among the parent crowd that is unbelievably toxic. A reliance on alcohol to relax or relieve stress is not a sign of someone who is high functioning, no matter how well they do what is required of them. 

It's a sign of someone who is an addict.