Abandonment. It’s a word that doesn’t get tossed around all that much, but you can feel it permeating.
What is this year, but a sense of abandonment of anything meaningful?
This isn’t about what happened on a particular day a month ago. No. Because abandonment is not limited to one group of people or another. Everyone, essentially, did it in some capacity. That was 2016, all of it.
In the weeks and months and leading up to that day, all you can ever see was people abandoning any sense of meaning or purpose for the sake of…fuck if you really know anymore. Whatever it was, it was self-indulgent and delusional.
In the aftermath, the shrill of 1,000 banshees could not match the utter bullshit you heard.
And oh, the noxious and often cruel actions everyone did to each other. Throwing one’s friends under a bus because of what they believed. Talking shit to others because they just happened to think what they’re doing was rational. Abandoning people because they suddenly don’t fit a certain world view. Expounding an overwhelming sense of righteousness combined with an alienation of any “other.” Showing exasperation and paranoia where there is little reason to. And most of all, an unwillingness to fight when someone actually pushed. Instead, shrieking fire, isolating, a blatant refusal to engage. Perhaps some benign hope that by staying in a fetal position, “they” will go away.
You were no innocent in this, of course. Nobody was. You fucked up, you said stupid things. You snapped when you shouldn’t have, said dumb things. It takes a lot to realize that, to acknowledge the heinous noise around you and how engaging in it only makes it worse. It takes a fuck ton more to walk away from it. Somehow, you do.
Yet what is the cost of disengagement? To avoid the toxic sludge that turned everyone to a monster to admit your own faults? Everyone abandons you. You become nothing. Your introspection and self-realization are for naught in the face of a collective moral arrogance that transcends any sort of social boundary. Nothing learned, nothing changes…instead, you are a lost cause, a traitor, an “insert-a-form-of-hatred-here.” A dumb shit.
Abominations are not born in a void, nor are they summoned by ignoble spirits. They are the creation of a special type of evil: Evil that thinks it is good, on the right side, and cannot see that by virtue of being human, it is capable of evil.
The cost of learning this is rejection and abandonment. By loved ones, family.
Is it worse that you did this to yourself because you actually were trying to do the right thing? It’s hard to know.
But fuck if the world hasn’t gotten cold.