I’m new here. This is my first post.
This is what I am told all the time, as I’m sure some of you are too. You’re too negative, too angry, you need therapy, you need to get a job, you need to be normal and go with the system and stop trying to make trouble and get a life and learn to be happy with what you’ve got instead of trying to change the world all the time.
But I see it everywhere. I see nothing but prison walls where they see progress. I see nothing but death where they see productivity. And so I say it. I speak about it. I get ignored. I get dismissed. I get unfriended from my LiveJournal friends and my MySpace friends and other “friends” on other such sites, all used as a means to reach out and make people see and hear and know what I see, what I hear, what I know.
So what it boils down to is this: I’m in a burning building. Nobody seems to have noticed but me. I shout FIRE!!! to make everyone aware of it. People look and see what I’m talking about, but immediately begin criticizing me on the way I say it (too doom and gloomy, you don’t give me hope, yeah, but what do I DO about it?) instead of getting their asses out of the burning building! And of course I could get out myself, but there’s no part of the world that isn’t burning. And it won’t stop until they stop torching it.
But even worse: I’m unable to work. My body hurts and my mind won’t focus on doing all the shit I can’t see as anything but helping the problem grow. I hate money and I don’t want any. I don’t have any, actually. But this makes me incapable of doing hardly anything that I know of. Yet I’d be willing. If I weren’t alone. Totally alone. And with very little knowledge of how this world works (I don’t have a job also because I’m completely inexperienced and uneducated) and therefore not knowledgeable about what to do. I want to do something. I just don’t know how or what. And nobody will join me. And what would we do even if they would?
This was me in a nutshell as I was leaving the church, realizing that everything I’d believed in before was a lie. This was back in 1999. I hadn’t seen the movie Instinct yet, but then I did, and it touched me. So I found the book it was based on… Ishmael by Daniel Quinn… and it hit me hard. And since then I’ve been obsessed with his works, and even moreso by the works of Derrick Jensen. I’ve been working on my own site where I can hopefully make an impact:
http://www.thestumblingblock.com
…but I don’t think it will. I don’t feel any confidence at all. I feel my efforts were wasted. If all I have is a film that very few people will watch (about 400 so far) and maybe even a podcast show that very few will listen to anyway, what good is it? I keep feeling like ending the project. I keep feeling like ending my life and getting out before it all hits sometimes. And my friends want me in therapy, and I want THEM in therapy. I’m the one who shouts fire, after all. They’re the ones that are insane for not listening.
I’m tired of feeling this way. But moreso, I’m tired that not enough people do. I’m just tired of watching death, destruction, decay… and I’m tired of being told to become okay with it.
That’s who I am.
Ray