SRF Heavy Industries

I know it’s supposedly a symptom of a psychotic break, but I’ll admit it anyway. Nothing seems real anymore.

It’s not that the things I see happening are actually impossible. It’s just that I didn’t think it was possible that things could happen like this, that there would be a causal path from the history of my childhood to here.

I don’t know where the disconnect is for certain. I do blame myself. It’s obvious that I didn’t realize people, in general, in groups large enough (or merely wealthy enough) to be a voting majority, could be so fearful and small-minded and lacking in empathy and short-sighted and greedy and full of a misplaced sense of righteousness as to allow things to come to the way they are. Not just here in the USA, where I live, but worldwide.

This isn’t living. This isn’t a life. It’s an afterlife. It’s Purgatory. It’s Hell.

Even the people seemingly having a good time are obviously smelling the brimstone odor of fear, watching the skies for the immanent rain of hatred and fiery retribution from the massing tides of those who have lost everything.

I look at the world like a ghost would, like a confused and stranded remnant would, trying to figure out how and when I died. As an intellectual exercise, because it would change nothing to know.

I skimmed past a story this morning about a woman who fell overboard from a boat and had to swim and tread water for eighteen hours before she made it to safety. Her dog also went overboard with her, and as things turned out, she was forced to drown her dog to keep it from drowning her accidentally by climbing on her in its desperation to keep its head out of the water.

There are plenty of us floating. There are huge numbers floundering. Fear is what makes us try to climb on top of one another and shove each other under when, if we were calm, we could hold each other up when we get weak and tired.

In the apparently idealistic world of my childhood, that’s what people did. There was always charity, even for people who had different color skin and didn’t believe what we believed — or even didn’t seem to believe anything at all. Or even had been made mean and ungrateful by the pain of circumstance. Maybe it was just my parents and their good choices for friends and associates, and I was just shielded from the bastards. I went to public schools, though, and while there was the usual cliquishness, we’d show that we — any of us, not just the people I got along with — could be actual human beings the instant circumstances required it.

And it didn’t stop with that generation either. I’m good friends with people one decade, two decades younger than  me. Even a fresh crop of kids in their teens. They seem to understand empathy and compassion too.

Who failed? Who failed us? Was it the old folk? Survivors of the previous Depression, or maybe their children, so terrified of losing half of their millions that they’ll drown the rest of us to prevent it, scrabbling and clambering over our choking soon-to-be-corpses to keep from feeling like they’re sinking? How do they justify it to themselves?

I don’t know. Maybe it’s time to drown the dog.

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