‘The best way to defeat a warrior is to provide for them, their family, their neighbors, and everyone they know. Then they will have no reason to fight.’ – Jasper H.B. (myself)
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          I started this month tired and angry. I was wholly worn out. The past several months I’ve been focused on social commentary and how everything that is being in America is effecting me. I was burned and heartbroken and to cope I just wrote off much of Right Wing, Conservative crowd of folk as “Variable C”. I found it to be dehumanizing. I was that angry, and to some degree I still am I asuppose. Just because the world is a grind doesn’t mean I should chew up others and spit them out. I act towards a better world. And if everyone does what is in their scope, I think that the world will be better off. I want the future to be so alien that people wonder how we lived at all.

          Through one part patience and one part procrastination I was primed to open my ears and look for something… anything really, to keep me from wholly hauling off and going on a verbal tirade. As I let a “Watch Later” playlist of YouTube videos run an analysis of a Final Fantasy XIV character came up. During which a phrase came to mind… or to ear. I can’t rightly recall. Either way, it is the present title.

          “Hurt People hurt people.”

          I’ve got… two-hundred some odd drafts of various types kicking around behind the scenes here. And while I want nothing more than to develop them all into my typical long-form articles I don’t have time for that. The people that agree with me won’t mind reading it. But the people of Variable C likely won’t sit through several thousand words of me taking potshots at their worldview, and they are who I need reading my words the most.

          Going on schpeels in comment sections does no good. I am oft charged to ‘open my eyes’ to their opinions and ‘really listen’ to videos that challenge my views (often delivered from a Black speaker) and the same courtesy is not done for me even in sharing just my own experiences.

          Part of me is broken. And while I’ve collected the pieces and arranged them so that I’m able to recognize a semblance of myself again I am not all together.

          This is not as… professional as I prefer to be. But I’m exhausted. Getting energized and fired up has burned me out. But I look at America, the next couple of months, the impending Presidential election, and I have to at least talk. I have to say what I need to say because it needs to be said. And if I’m being honest? I’m genuinely afraid I won’t be around to say it.

          An unusual aspect is that it is not a fear for myself personally. When I was alone and estranged in my late teens I had bad and questionable experiences occur. But it didn’t matter to me because no one relied on me. No one asked after me. And if they did, I wasn’t in a place to hear them. Or I figured they could deal with my eternal absence one way or another. But through my various phases of “just making it” I was welcomed into the homes of my friends with their children. And over all the odd times and in regards to all the various ways children look up to elders I came to a point in which I could not deny my import to them. From simply being given a familial nickname to the sheer belief that I will be at a birthday party because I had never lied to the child. I mattered, broken and incapable as I viewed myself.

          I’m not afraid for me. I’m afraid for “my kids”.

          A story. As a child I went to three churches. When I was seven or eight, just about the time for First Communion in the Catholic community, I remember my pain from Christianity becoming more directed at me. I was not baptized and, as I had not followed the chain of Sacrements, passages in the Bible about the eternal fate of the unbaptized were… a tad more relevant to me than most of my peers. Across the Great Schism at another church, the message was reinforced. If I died unbatized and/or without giving my heart and life to God and Jesus, I would burn in Hell. There would be no amount of good I could do to avert this fate. I opted to go through a baptism ceremony at the third church, one I actually felt empowered in. But it did not matter to either of the others. I hadn’t done so in their tradition, so it was not recognized.

          The following year I became a hellion. And why not? Nothing I did mattered. My fate was the same. I also remember speaking openly about killing myself. Not due to any particular imbalance I think. Merely because I saw no point in my continued existence. If I lived one or one hundred years my fate was the same. And I did not want to go through another one or two baptisms. I did not want to be a part of groups that made me feel that badly about myself. Between the birth of my sister and… the admittedly silly reasoning of “If I can control my actions and emotions I can become a Jedi” about a year or so later I felt compelled to forge my own path and stick around. I had something of my own that mattered. However, even today I am prickly when it comes to Christianity as a whole.

          My story was mirrored recently. An acquaintance of mine has a son who is about eight himself. He is mixed, half Black. Another child in his class told him specifically that Black lives didn’t matter and that, since he is half black, he did not matter.

          I can’t say how that will stick with the child. But I know how Christianity’s damning of me sticks with me still. Yeah… I heard it every day but Saturday until I was in eighth grade, but… It starts early. I still remember racist shadows and wonder if that was about me or if I’m just looking for something to be aghast and clutch my pearls over. And I look back on my previous experiences to try to make sense of the new ones that happen. I try to find similarities. And yes, as you can imagine a writer doing, I make a story. But in that story I prevail. I’m a model Neutral-to-Lawful Good protagonist. Help others, do the right thing, prevail, and leave the world a little better in my wake.

          But the reality is that my story may end abruptly. Making the decision to leave the house even for a simple walk is a harrowing decision. And it has been so since I was eighteen, the first time I was stopped. It is most disruptive letting down my defenses and feeling good about life only to have jarred out of it with police intervention.

          There are really big problems in the world, yes. We should all really be focused on fixing those. I wholly agree. But the problem is that those issues are leagues on the other side of the horizon.

          I don’t feel safe leaving my house. I can’t focus on global affairs, politics, or human rights issues when putting one foot outside my door is a paralytic thought.

          Hurt People hurt people. I don’t want to hurt anyone. But I have to tell the truth. For instance, President Trump has, to date, refused to denounce White Supremacy. Such organizations persist in America and have been emboldened by his presence, and that is a threat to me. They view him as being on their side. And it’s not just Trump’s problem because it persisted long before he was in office and before either he or I were conceived or born which is saying something.

          This world is broken. I want to fix it. For myself. For you. For everyone that follows.

          I have to tell myself constantly that I can’t change you or your opinion. I can’t “fix” you. You aren’t broken. It is hard when I see opinions echoed from the world. But I am going to work to keep that mindset well away from me.

          But I ask you to keep reading my works. And I’ll keep listening to yours. It’s important to the sake of our friendships that we do. This is my blog. These are my words. This is my truth. And if you see that a choice that you make truthfully hurts me, even apart from you, I can only hope that eventually, you may choose differently. If nothing else so I can come and visit you. I accept that eventually can be a long time. I also accept I may not be alive to see it.