Radical Empathy

~ lawrencegriffin5 ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been reading Mariame Kaba’s “We Do This ‘Til We Free Us,” this new book about the abolition of prisons/police/etc. It’s all stuff that has existed for some time, but that is coming into prominence more as we see the increasing violence of police against Black people in the news all the time. The book looked interesting because I always want to explore the furthest reaches of what’s possible, of the roots of evil or injustice in the world. It makes the case that abolition of the cops and prisons wouldn’t mean some new, violent world, but instead trying to put in place a world that doesn’t need them anymore.

I think when I was growing up, it was a more innocent time. It usually is, when you’re a kid. I remember always being curious about things, but never trying to offer expert opinions when I was younger. I didn’t pretend to know anything. This partly came from being hard of hearing. It was like I never really knew the world, everything just a bit out of focus, so I had to really try to learn and to soak things in intensely. I remember in high school being frustrated that I didn’t know very much about politics or the news or anything. But looking back, I was just taking my time. I had to do it my own way.

By college I was starting to pick up on things. I just took it at my own pace and began really just sort of throwing myself into the world. It wasn’t really a coherent ideology. I just started to sort things into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ and seeing what the issues were little by little. By 2014 or so, with the rise in mass shootings, that was the impetus for a lot of my views. That and seeing how women, minorities, etc were wronged. These things were easy ways to let the ideology form.

All of this is just to say that we come by the path of righteousness in various ways. Nobody’s perfect at first. Learning and education are the thing. “We Do This ‘Til We Free Us” doesn’t mince words about the need to abolish police and prisons. These are things I myself might have qualified or whiffed on even pretty recently – there’s this thought that it would lead to some horrific outpouring of violence, an unjust society. But the book doesn’t think so. Instead, the roots of most crime could be soothed and eventually go away and we wouldn’t need police or prisons to act as external tools to punish anymore.

One of the things that’s stuck out to me in the book so far has been the anecdote about Martin Shkreli, who jacked up drug prices to comically, criminally insane rates. He got thrown in jail – but only for some kind of white-collar upper class reason, not for what he did to the drug prices. And the drug price issue hasn’t disappeared. Throwing him in jail didn’t do shit.

Punishment is unnecessary. How much do I need the state to act as some kind of a blunt hammer to make me feel OK? I’ve never had to call to the cops and I’ve lived in plenty of out of the way places by myself with nobody I knew around. The idea of sticking somebody – even Sirhan Sirhan, as the recent story went – in jail out of purely moralistic, punitive reasons, doesn’t appeal to me anymore. I remember I used to worry about recidivism. This comic book idea of the killer coming back and killing again. Jason Voorhees shit. I think this is the kind of base-level puerile emotional appeal we should avoid going forward.

I remember in Orlando some time back, there was a case of a guy who’d shot and killed a pregnant police officer and had beat up his girlfriend. He got totally pulverized by the cops a while later. They put out his eye. The reaction at the time was something like ‘man, good riddance, he got what he deserved!’ I was apprehensive. I remember thinking ‘well, what happens next time when they get the wrong guy?’ Cops aren’t inherently good, or even mostly good. They go on power trips all the time. And extending from that – maybe this guy in Orlando doesn’t need to be brutalized by state sanctioned troopers anyway. Maybe the justice system should be impartial.

Instead maybe we need a new system where things are more fair and people aren’t scrounging to survive. People are inherently troubled and flawed, and the external crises going on, poverty, climate, etc, don’t do anything to alleviate this. Maybe we need to quit blaming the individual. I titled this “radical empathy” – trying to not have this draconian medieval view of individuals if I can help it. But maybe it’s not that radical at all.

The Site Is Live

~ lawrencegriffin5 ~ Leave a comment

So I finally went ahead and made this site live. I think I was procrastinating it. I think maybe there’s some mental block where I was sort of dangling this ahead of me like a carrot, something that just always existed in the periphery, a constant occupant of the mind.

And I’m doing all this to try and advance as an artist, either through writing or comedy. You have to be able to put yourself out there. Which is tricky for artists because the things that make us want to create are not necessarily the same instincts needed to do business and be savvy that way. I’m not really a marketing kind of guy. That’s not my big talent in life. I don’t have an eye for “making content” like is needed these days. If I had my way I’d just fuck off and go create things and experience art at my leisure. But this is not the way of the world.

Add to this the complications of the pandemic. It was a long year for a live performing artist if you were taking any of it seriously. I did maybe a handful of very tentative live sets, and every time, the virus surge would get worse after, and I had to stop again. It’s still going now. Fortunately the vaccines make it much easier to go and do things now, but you never know what the next day’s news will be.

All of it has come with a real sense of the fatal. It’s easy to become overwhelmed with just the chaos of everything, and the pain people are in. So much of this, we have no control over. This is why I believe it’s important to just keep doing what we want and making the best of it in whatever ways we can. The world might be going to hell in a handbasket. But I still put this site live anyway.

Thoughts On The Unvaccinated/American Systemic Decay (Also, An Introduction To The Blog)

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So I’m here now.

I figure I’ll use this as an unfiltered space to air grievances, rant, ponder and other kinds of things.

I’ve never been one to sugarcoat anything and I also have no idea how to properly introduce myself. This is a site for me as a writer, but I don’t want to be one of these assholes who pushes their real authentic self down to sell stuff. That is not the way to do it. I’m going to write about pretty far left stuff, talk about art in an unfiltered way, whatever I want. My philosophy has long been that I don’t want to put anything out except what I would enjoy myself if I was looking into some other author or comedian. So others who enjoy what I enjoy will maybe find stuff to like here. These rants will likely be powered by coffee, heavy metal and alcohol at varying points.

So I’m just gonna jump right into talking about the world. COVID’s still ravaging us and things are uncertain day to day. To cope, people have been taking to social media and posting righteous screeds against the unvaccinated. This is understandable because we really have so little control over anything except social media and our own words and thoughts. But I’m not so interested in just ranting about that. I think the problem goes deeper.

An article I read posits that the unvaccinated in part might not be getting it because of our healthcare system. A large barrier to it is people who are weary, confused and unwilling to participate in the healthcare system. Despite the vaccines being free, healthcare in this country is so costly and sometimes people have been billed for COVID tests or other related things anyway. The system is such a bloated horrific monster that people are simply turning away and throwing up their hands even when they don’t have to like with the vaccines.

Other issues could have to do with transportation or work. People might be afraid of missing work or have no way of getting to a vaccine center in a timely manner. There are wide gulfs of inequality in this country. We live in a system where we’ve given employers near limitless power over us. This is a big problem for the trend of vaccinations – if people are scared to miss work, or are worried they’ll have adverse side effects, they may put it off.

I get it, there are some people who are just awful anti-vax morons, there are bigots and other types of people who are easy to hate. But that is the small-brain way of thinking about this. The real targets we should be angry at are the capitalistic system that only wants money and funnels everything to faceless corporate overlords, and who both political parties are beholden to.

I think another thing I was getting at here was the sheer difference and breadth in the lives of people. Among the people I regularly talk to, we have read enough shit to know to get the vaccine. But the pandemic has been confusing, both in the messaging from the authorities and news outlets and just because we’ve never gone through this before as a modern society. Not everybody is reading the stuff we are. Some people heard about breakthrough infections, heard we had to wear masks anyway, were confused – these people are not necessarily MAGA diehard anti-vaxxers. It was a communication issue. Everyone’s got a different life and we just don’t know everything they’re going through.

The country’s whole scam is predicated on getting individuals to point fingers only at one another, never at the system or bigger corporations, etc. Don’t fall into that.