It's Only A Matter of Odds Now

I had to watch it. I had no choice. Death splayed itself right in front of me.

One minute, life was being enjoyed by something undebateably marvelous to look at. The next, it had been smashed into eternity, into memory, now just something to be cleared away.

But not yet. I had to watch it still, watch it and consider its last split second of life, when it had been turned from unobtrusive to an obliterative mess. Was there pain? It happened so fast that it may not have known what hit it.

Not much of a legacy, that. But less can be said of other things: That its matter mattered.

Would it be better that the same should be said of us, that our end could be quick and without moments to experience the utter devastation of fear? As long as it's inevitable, is there a place we can go to cut some kind of a deal? You know, accept a few years to be cut short so the end, though unknown, be free from trepidation? We'll all be gone a long time, far longer than we'd ever be, or might wish to be, around. We've all been told that that's the idea, anyhow. We've all been told that that is what gives life value: The very existential concept of nothingness that will ensue someday, somehow, somewhere. It waits for no one.

Our last moment of consciousness should have as much value as the first. We should be able to cheat death to the first moment that we will be consumed by it. Would the ultimate justification be, then, to die in our sleep? I know of some who did. Were those last hours a waste? Or were they a blessing?

So in a way, I was jealous of what was displayed before me, however ugly: the residue of what was a privilege of sorts--that an ending of life could be as spectacular as it was violent and instantaneous to boot. It never had a chance, but it was endlessly lucky that it never knew that it had a chance to even have. It was minding its own business when something got in its way: decisively, devastatingly, no questions asked.

That thing that got in the way, that object of death, was propelled by someone who realized it in an indirect way, but never cared to conceptualize its power until confronted with it. Operated unobstrusively, legally, simply because it could be, he decided it needed to be propelled so he could accomplish something that mattered not only to him, certainly, but to someone else he had never met. That he had put it into a position of lethality was regrettable, sure, but we all have to go sometime, don't we? If a lower form of life happens to be haphazardly floating in our path, what else can possibly happen but the end of it?

Force can have but two responses: To prove itself unconquerable, or to be itself denied by a superior force. That neither knew the other could come into each other's way one horrible, decisive day could be the fault of no one, of nothing. Was it his responsibility that he became the agent of sudden, infamous destruction? Or was it result of nature, of the clash of things of which only one can survive? Brutal, yes, but as true as it is either accidentally or intentionally. For the other living thing, it just wasn't its day--so much so that it would never see another one.

It competed, in a way, though it never intended to. It just wanted to live and be beautiful. It failed. Life continues for the rest of us. Other beautiful things exist. What the hell.

Darwin was right. But he never said it would be fun. For all living things to exist on that incredibly precarious and fragile level, though, throwing themselves unknowingly into the randomness of someone else's whim, is not only to sell them very short, but to deny them of all possibilities to grow, to gift, to be admired and appreciated, to enhance each of us and all of us.

I decided that I didn't need to absorb that lesson any longer. It was time to get on with whatever life I had left, the remainder of which might easily be determined by whether or not I might get in the way of someone else's device that could instantaneously splatter me somewhere, for someone else to clean up and perhaps mourn or consider momentarily.

Maybe it's better that way. Maybe it's better that I, endowed with white privilege, can now experience that very gut-level chill that people are now confessing publicly, but no doubt has been building for some time now; that without warning, for absolutely no decent reason, someone filled with that privilege that they assume should be somehow permanent can appear out of their own, singular, rabbit hole and casually spray death for a few moments before being gratefully wiped out themselves--a spectacular, meaningless, violent and instantaneous death, the explanation for which is as irrelevant as whatever motivated it.

That mass destruction awaited the Natives and Africans in ways they couldn't have previously fathomed, either, in this land, which prides itself on its freedom in a way that now seems so detached from reality that it must seem ludicrous to those watching this building disaster. Now it awaits Hispanics, who live here because they want to, but also because many of them, too, have been chased across a continent by nefarious forces not in the control of either them nor any government, a circumstance now creeping into our own nation. It awaited three thousand Americans on that awful day in 2001, in which someone else determined that their religion demanded that sacrifice, to create hell so they would achieve heaven. The El Paso assassin didn't confess his mass murder as much as he acknowledged it, in the same, casual way that any of us might have admitted that the sun came up this morning.

The deterioration of the souls of the 9/11 terrorists, which allowed them to justify committing that barbarism, has sadly created a buzzfeed to ours. Mass shootings, which used to be experienced as one-offs, have only increased since then. Do not tell me that there isn't a direct link. Do not tell me that they didn't win.

The reactionary murderousness that has risen and is now flourishing is the product of omnipresent racial viciousness that we never got over nor really ignored, but believed could not be mainstreamed. The United States of America has now been branded, like a helpless calf is branded, painfully and permanently, as a racially violent society. Several other countries have now warned its citizens of the distinct possibility of an insane attack, should they wish to explore these shores. Who can argue that? Who can argue with the Boston Globe headline the day after the latest two slaughters: This Is Who We Are Now?

I sit in a coffee shop writing this, among others also writing things. People have shot up coffee shops, too, as well as movie theaters, churches, schools, shopping centers, newspaper offices, and celebratory fairs (although understandably, scanning my memory, there are now too many examples for me to name all the venues; I'd need a slaughter-based website to keep track). It would be perfect, though. It's peaceful here, busy, energetic, non-corrosive, the kind of place in which you can lose yourself and pretend that nothing else existed or mattered while the suggestion of polite, gentle humanity surrounds you. Sheer luck would attend to my survivability, just as it would in my church, though security has been hired. But here, the police, as quickly as they would come, are a lifetime away. There's nothing preventing this gorgeous Saturday afternoon from being devastated by someone's horrible obsession.

We now live in a very dangerous place, where there are now only odds to protect us. It took but a split-second of the sad death of a unquestionably beautiful thing to drive that point home. I pulled into the filling station, threw some water on the windshield, and removed what was left of the poor butterfly.

Be well. I'll see you down the road.


Mister Mark