Collective Crazy

Dear Yous,

Yesterday was weird.  Another massacre, this time in Las Vegas, and I'm at a loss for words.  Like, how do you talk about this stuff without starting up all sorts of debates on gun control and whatever?  It all seems crazy to me.  We all seem crazy, collectively.

Now, I have cred, official crazy cred.  I know my crazy and I know my sane and the world around me, by and large, feels way more like my crazy than my sane.  In fact, I will flat out proclaim that I inherited this craziness from the rest of the world, like everyone else.  It is what it is, but I at least can seek to change my own crazy mind, which spins and spins negative thoughts like that its job.

I saw a TED talk the other day.  The speaker personified their inner critic and made friends with it.  They said their critic will never go away.  It will always be there.  I agree.

The crazy I own will always be there.  The potential for my mind to spin in that direction is always there.  Trying to get rid of it, fighting it only makes it worse.

Now, I see the same crazy on the national level, the global level, as I do inside myself.  My thoughts are specific to me, but the underlying mechanism I see as the same.  In fact, I don't see a multitude of separate mental conditions as the DSM would define it.  I only see one condition, the human condition, and it is the same for all of us, manifesting in different ways.

How do we exist to begin with?  What's all this about?  Yous, I wish you could tell me, but I bet you don't fucking know either.   Why do we exist?  How do we exist?  And how do we exist together, sharing the same space and resources?

There are, of course, 1001 methods for existing, getting on with day-to-day life, connecting with others, etc.  But take away your system, take away some of the lower level things maybe you don't think about most days - food, shelter, water, intimacy - and I bet you'd start feeling crazy, too.

Live in fight or flight long enough and that becomes your world.  There are plenty of our own citizens living in poverty, struggling day-to-day as their existence.  There are plenty of people who, day-to-day, get shit just for not being white.  Or male.  Or straight.  Or able-bodied.  Or any group other than what our society favors.

The thing that always gets me, though, is that the people living in this country are mostly our own fucking citizens, but we treat them like they are other.  Privilege, to me, means not having to worry about that.  To live in a bubble where the bad side of town exists, but it's safe enough being far away or safe enough riding thru in my certified pre-owned.

And even the people here illegally are still fucking people who must exist day-to-day.  Now that may not be anyone's individual responsibility and it's easy to slink off with that excuse, but I say it is our responsibility, collectively.  Why can't we fucking have healthcare for everyone, huh?  Please tell, me, Yous, because I fail to see why we wouldn't want to help humans as humans.  Why must it be unbalanced?  Why do we not see ourselves as ourselves?

Life is what it is.  We're born into what we're born into.  But man, at some point, will enough of us wake up and look around and go, "wait a second, what the fuck are we doing here?"

I don't know, Yous.  Hope you have a good one.

Love,
Casey