No cute little intros about how great I am, you guys. Not this time around, if that’s okay with all of you. I normally like to keep my blog upbeat and humorous, but… I just can’t find that place right now. This post is going to be a downer, but I think it’s important that you stick around and read it.
Do it for the ol’ Gidman. Please.
I have recently and frequently (at home, at work, and during casual conversations with my friends,) been informed that I “don’t care enough about anything important.” This belief everyone seems to share about me actually surprised me. I’ve admitted many times to my narcissism, and my inadvertently selfish brain programming, but just because I care about myself the most, doesn’t mean I don’t care about anything else. That’s just not true. The problem, I think, is that I simply don’t talk about it, so nobody knows.
So, it’s time for a little soul-baring, and straight talk. Right now, everything is awful in the world, and it is inescapable. All I hear, all day long, are nightmare stories from the news, from my online media, everywhere I turn:
- A racist, monstrous, delusional madman is running America right now.
- People are dying in actual, honest-to-god concentration camps.
- Murderers and mass shooters are perpetually being defended, and their rights protected so that non-murdering people don’t have to work a little harder to get any future guns.
- American “health care” is so fucked up, people are dropping dead simply because they can’t afford to get help and treatment for very treatable conditions; and the people behind our medications are charging ten thousand times the cost of some of these vital drugs that keep many people alive.
- Social media has too much power, and spreads too much misinformation, hatred, and constantly spews idiocy and pointless bullshit. Every moron in the world has a voice now, and people are genuinely listening to them.
- Police and ICE are killing innocent people whose only real crime is their skin color. Standing on the “wrong” patch of dirt isn’t deserving of a bullet in your back, I don’t care what you think otherwise.
- Celebrities are constantly being revealed as racists, rapists, or spreading lies about anti-vaxxing, (Yes, still, for some reason. Fuck you, Jenny McCarthy.)
- Terminally ill immigrant children are being threatened with getting kicked out of the country, (despite being invited here for their medical treatments.)
- Climate change has a very serious deadline to be fixed before our death sentence is permanent, (Oh, and the clock just SHORTENED recently.)
- The Amazon rain forest is burning to the ground.
- I’m not religious, but if I were, I’d suspect a higher power is repeatedly trying to wipe Florida from the face of the Earth with hurricanes, just because… y’know… it’s Florida. (Don’t bitch at me, Florida—you know what I’m talking about.)
- We have real, actual commercials pointing out all the fear, terror, and tragedy of school shootings, because they are so frequent, they are treating it like standard preparedness for “back to school.”
…The world is genuinely playing out like the bad future you’d see in a dystopian nightmare tale, and that’s barely a fraction of the shit going on in the world as I type this. I can’t even tell you any of the crazy stuff happening in other parts of the world.
I have a question: Does anyone else go to sleep at night thinking, “Well, the world’s probably gonna end tomorrow… Guess I’ll act like I’m going to get up and go to work, and make life plans anyway, I suppose, just for the formality of it.”
I’m not joking when I say that, every day feels like it’s the last day for our little blue marble in the cosmos. Nothing lasts forever, and I’m starting to think civilization is at that point. It keeps me up at night, and I already get insomnia as it is without society’s help in that area.
I’m genuinely surprised every morning to wake up and learn that I’m not on fire, filled with cancer, or nuked into oblivion by some idiot. I don’t talk about it, because I don’t have a way to fix it. I don’t run into my girlfriend’s room every morning and shout, “Look baby! I made it to another day of pain and human misery! Huzzah!”
I don’t feel like I’m getting lucky, or blessed with another day. I feel like I’ve done something wrong—that my continued existence is offending the universe in some way, and all I can do is sit around and watch everything good come crashing down around me as some sort of penance.
There are three things that I believe run this world: Money, Power, and Influence. That’s not a stretch of the imagination, and I know I’m not breaking new ground with thinking this way, but those are three things I do not have. It makes me feel very helpless. Have you ever seen a weak-willed, soft-spoken teacher try to get a room full of a hundred rambunctious, hyperactive kindergartners’ attention? I feel like I’m that teacher. I want to just scream at the world, “STOP! EVERYONE STOP WHAT YOU ARE DOING AND SIT DOWN RIGHT NOW!” Then we all take a deep breath, take everyone’s pencils and pens away before we start drawing all over each other, and chill the fuck out.
But, I can’t scream enough to make it stop. I can’t help. I can’t fix any of this mountain of doom towering over us all every day. I literally don’t know what to do with myself anymore. I keep writing, and I keep making plans to get published someday, but it all feels very hollow. Like, I feel as if I’ll get something out there, start my career, and then—BOOM!—the world is destroyed by something. (Which thing? Pick one. There’s a sizeable list, folks.)
So many of the people in power are afraid of change, that they will let the world burn before they step down and let someone else step in to fix the dumpster fire we all started. None of our hands are clean in this, no matter who you are. We all drive pollution-spewing cars, we all take the quick and easy route to do anything, we will always opt for the easiest, most pleasurable way to get along in life, because of course we do. But guess what? A LOT of that shit is KILLING US now. We know it is. But people don’t want their big companies to go out of business. Auto companies, oil companies, tobacco companies, hell, even cell phone companies and online mega-companies… they all want to keep their incredible mountains of money, and maintain the status quo, because it keeps them wealthy.
But things HAVE TO CHANGE NOW. We absolutely do not have wiggle room to keep playing the Game Of Life as fast and loose as we are anymore.
We have to stop killing each other. We have to stop hiding behind a misinterpreted second amendment so that we can have access to guns many of us don’t need and shouldn’t have. We have to stop letting money dictate what’s right in the world. We need to put down our weapons, put away our anger, (and our stupid Tweets,) roll up our sleeves, and get up to our elbows in the shit, or it’s not going to go away.
When I say “I wish I could do something!” I frequently get told, “Well, get out there and vote!” and don’t get me wrong, voting is something we should all be doing. But, I also feel like the system is just rigged to where I’m picking the lesser of two evils. I’m being given choices between two options I’d never choose in the first place. Like, someone says, “What do you want for dinner; chicken or fish?” and I’m only given those two options because I can’t go to the store and pick out a frozen pizza for myself.
Regardless, voting is important, but I’m not here to preach about that.
We have to get politicians in power who aren’t interested in getting rich off of big lobbies for things that are literally killing us all. As long as someone can make money off of human misery, there’s going to be someone who does it, and that needs to stop.
We need to take action. Right now, this feels like my best avenue for that action. But, also, it feels like I’m shouting at a hurricane. Complaining about a mountain of problems I can’t fix makes no sense to me, so I generally just keep my mouth shut and try to soldier on with my life. So, when people don’t see me being very vocal about the world’s current state, they confuse that for a lack of interest. It’s not that I don’t care, it’s that I genuinely don’t believe I have enough money, influence or power to do jack shit about it. I feel like talking out loud about all of these things is just pointless, and I’m impotently adding noise to an already noisy room.
I don’t know what to do, I can’t do much of anything to help, and that is a very scary place to be in. Everyone wants to know how I feel about things, so here it is:
I try to stay confident, and I try to keep my sense of humor. I act aloof, and make like I don’t care, because it’s my only way of battling back the fact that I am literally terrified of our situation every single day.
I care, deeply. But, I’ve always felt like bitching about a problem I can’t solve is pointless. Maybe I’m wrong, and hearing me bitch can help the people who feel the same way I do. I’ve always believed, “If you don’t tell people exactly what you think about things, nobody will know what you think about things.” I guess complaining about things I can’t fix falls into that category, too—so, I’m going to give it a shot:
If you feel the same way I do right now—if you’re terrified every day, or you feel like you’re just waiting for the world to come to a terrible end, and you’re lost and confused as you just try to make it through the next day, but the next day just seems even worse, I guess the most important thing I can tell you is that you aren’t alone. I’m here, too. There are plenty more where that came from, quietly trembling ourselves to sleep at night. You aren’t alone, you aren’t wrong to be afraid, and maybe pointlessly complaining a little bit out loud to others isn’t such a bad thing.
You’re not alone out there.
Thank you for humoring my depressing ramble, everyone. If you made it this far, I mean it—thanks. I’m going to go back to filtering my pain through a lens of humor now, but I just needed to get that moment of reality off my chest, and set the record straight.
…I mean it, Florida—you’re why we can’t have nice things.