Blue Ribbons and Participation Trophies for those who Need them:

Blue Ribbons and Participation Trophies for those who Need them:

A request for decency and civility to return to civil service.

Not your usual work, but what can be at this hour on a Saturday? This isn't when people — at least not the people I identify as my people — have any business trying to do any real work. Yet, here we are, with a Government shut down and a Captain screaming he's going to go full speed to teach that iceberg a damn lesson. It's madness in all directions, a sobering moment under grey, New England, skies. It's a hard moment to be a patriot, to hang onto the dwindling fire of hope, and it's damn near too dark to try and pen any words at all. However, like the progress we so desperately need to start making, here I am. I'm trying, the same as I'm asking the rest of everyone else to do. After all, what's the point in asking for something that you, yourself, are not actually willing to do? 

This kind of spiteful thinking, that you've any right to ask for what you yourself would not give, is what's choking America out while the giant slumbers. Airports, something I consider of great personal importance as of late, are jammed. Tax returns are delayed, assuming they come at all, and the even the sun seems to be in active protest in the northern skies. Two days of it since October, and who can blame it? Coming out these days, regardless of how you mean it, seems a dangerous endeavor. From stepping out your door, to stepping into yourself, the world seems ready as ever to bite and bludgeon you just for being a part of it. This, ladies and gentlemen, boys, girls, and others, is not how we make it — and we've got limited days to do that as it is.

It's just that, the winding sands of the hourglass, the ever present black rabbit, that makes the participation so important. Man — and by that I mean humankind, not just Man in that, cotton-haired, raisins, who sit in fancy leather chairs making decisions without pay at the moment sense of the word — has got to be an active participant in change. There's no greater enemy of progress than apathy and nothing rots the ripe fruit faster than a plant who's not trying to grow. There's only so many hours you can while away in nothing, whittling down your existence without a passion to drive you, banking on the blind hope that things will go anywhere without you doing something. Sure, maybe you'll get lucky, maybe you'll invoke Chaos Theory and your sneeze will change the world in some unmentionable way, but why sit back on your laurels when you can do so much more?

You're a human being, capable of impossible things. You can think, adapt, and change. You can be more than your environment, you can be more than your job, your apartment, or your vocation. Even I, who would likely drown if not penning words in some fashion, can be more than a writer. Don't get me wrong, I must write if I want to have any hope of feeling fulfilled, but that's a personal assessment of the situation and likely the only recourse left to a human too bleary eyed and unsavory for "real work". It's an understanding I have for the life I want to live and what I must do in order to have that life. It's being an active participant in my own existence. It's taking the wheel and saying "This ride is mine, mine, mine." It's being responsible for myself and not waiting for all the lights on my path turn green before I even bother pulling out of the metaphorical driveway.

I wonder then, why so much of Washington remains mired behind red lights and calls that traumatic behavior any kind of progress. America has become the jester on the world stage, a peasant locked in the stocks and worthy of being stoned with rotten fruit for crimes to heinous to let loose from the mouth. If we're not the butt of the joke, we're Night on Bald Mountain; a piece of music believed to be the very work of the Devil himself and something that she be cause to cover the ears less the infernal malady spread to the heart and rot us from the inside out.

We're trying to shame people for dancing and, apt and inappropriate as it is, we're calling out Motherfucker in forums deserving of more respect. We're engaging in mud fights with pigs — slinging shit like arrows in the vain hope of striking some kind of bullseye. This kind of thing, it's not helping anyone. It's making it all just look that much worse. It's making the rest of the world see the American people as little more than rabid coyotes responding deforestation by taking to roaming the streets in packs. Just look at Hollywood. It's only a matter of time before the beasts figure out how to walk upright, get jobs as Baristas and begin feeding on the rich when they go to order a latte. Soon, the hills and heights of that city will be unlivable as they will be populated by little more than lycanthropes. It'll be hell for everyone on a full moon, worse than it currently is that's for sure, and we'll have no National Guard to call on because they're too busy being deployed to build a fence.

Shit's getting way too real on the West End of the world. Don't get me wrong, there are high spots. We're pardoning drug offenders in droves because we've finally figured out that those who want to get stoned by way of a plant aren't the same boogeymen as the stone throwers themselves.  We're electing rational minds to those same fancy seats and finally starting to see some kind of reasonable representation of our populace among our elected officials. We're shielding the flame against the high winds in this blizzard of shame, we're standing up and saying No more, not me, this is not enough. We're getting hungry and growing ill content to squabble over scraps — and all the while whole cities are going without water. 

Trickle down compassion only works when there's compassion to trickle down and, quite honestly, I don't know how anyone can be expected to cultivate compassion in a world that barely wants to participate anymore. We're in the age where no one should be feeling left out, where everyone gets a trophy just for playing in sports games, but adulthood and civil service seem like slogging careers with no real point but to line pockets, spin shit, eat silk, and die.  It's a fight over the color of a dress that's been blown to biblical proportions and applied like the broad stroke beginnings of a Bob Ross painting — only nobody's trying to fill in the shape with any kind of blending. Every line is a boundary drawn in the sand and nobody cares enough to let the water wash them all away. It would be an ironic thing, considering that if we keep on the way we are, we're all going to be underwater soon anyway, but the comedy ends when you understand that in the sea, we're not top of the food chain anymore.

I say start handing out participation trophies to politicians — an idea I can't even take credit for, as it came streaking into my brain, riding on a lightning bolt like Slim Pickens riding the bomb in Kubrik's Dr. Strangelove — but only if they're actually participating. That's not to say pushing some team sport agenda, where ideas are color coded and burned at once if they don't match up with the side you want to support, but actually making a point to serve as a representative of the constituents who elected you. To those constituents then, I say, quit thinking it's all only about you. If it's a dog eat dog world, which is what your actions really seem to say, you've got no hope against those same roving packs of coyotes. Be civil so that politics, like police work, can return to being a civil service. Remember that it's it's a role taken on not unlike the firefighters and firefighters who don't do their job? Well. That's how everything burns when you're the one who neglected something and got it all caught on fire — and it seems to me that's just what we're doing right now.

I'm not saying it's all bad eggs and reptiles, the same as I'm not saying every badge and a gun lets it go straight to their head. I'm not saying no one's trying, I'm not saying that anyone is worse than any other, but let's be real for a minute and consider what happens to a bird who lets an argument break out between its wings. Let's look at what happens when our colloquial "boys in blue" bust down doors out of misplaced initiative and shoot unarmed civilians in their own homes. Let's look at when responsibility to the public overlooked and every call to go on the hunt for the boogeyman mobilizes the mobs. All it does is fan the flames, encourage Nazis to return to the streets, and little boys to take Supreme Court seats never mind get a seat on Air Force One. Let's look at what happens when the news works the angle of agendas rather than reporting actual news — whatever that even means anymore, I'm not sure anyone knows. Let's look at what happens when we're lynching effigies and then crying when people don't love who we think they should. Let's look at the way we, again, try and slander people for dancing or selling their bodies like any of us are any kind of moral authority.

This is what non-participation looks like. This is what happens when you're not contributing, or hell, even listening. This is what happens when you live in an echo chamber, where your right way is the only right way for everyone and you'll gun down any perceived threat to the contrary.  This is what happens when you can't live and let live, where every hill is the one you've chosen to die on, and you're pitching a fit about the way you're using your lives. This is what happens when civility has died and decency is the most uncommon commodity. This is what happens in a world where you're the only one who can ever be right for everyone, where lies that justify your bias mean more than truth, where the American way has become nothing more than consume, shit, shoot first, and die in a pile of money.

I don't know about you, but this isn't the America was taught to believe we were meant to be when I cracked open a history book at an impressionable young age. Absolutely there are arguments to be made for the fact that the road to Manifest Destiny is paved with corpses and held together with more blood than mortar. Absolutely, you can say that homo sapiens have been hardwired to murder and exterminate everything around them from their first days upright. Absolutely you can say that their side, is the bad side, that the Pandits — the wise of the world — have no real interest in it anymore. Absolutely you can say why should I bother, because nobody's going to bother for me...and that's why nobody deserves the trophy.

It's not you vs. the world. It never has been and, still, that's exactly what we've made it. The race we've turned life into has only one ending for all of us and no one here escapes that. No one. Not even Jesus cheated Death and, no matter your concept of what comes after or whose immortal soul needs saving, the notion that your only hope of going forward is to dig in your heels and antagonize everyone into agreeing with you? Well, that just fucks everyone and makes even well meaning pacifists want to take up sticks and start clubbing the villains. It robs the world of compassion and consideration. It closes the doors on churches during hurricanes. It locks up the hearts and minds and the whole damn population and gives us no hope of winning — not even all the stupid things we've chosen to wage war on.

 I suggest we step up and start living this notion that no one, actually no one, gets left behind. I suggest we be more than our petty bickering about who's right and wrong for you and me, but instead just let people do right for themselves. I suggest we leave behind color coded arguments and opt for politicians with monochromia. I say we stop wielding the world like it's a hammer and everything is a nail. I suggest we stop trying to be right for anyone but ourselves. I suggest we start being worthy of the same participation trophies we're teaching children to expect and stop handing out them out only to the team players on elementary school fields. I suggest you remember we're all on the same team. I suggest we stop seeing everyone and everything as your enemy and just start letting people live. I suggest you stop running people down for fifteen dollar manicures. I suggest, really and truly, it's high time we all get better and start trying to get along or we're all going to go nowhere.

The shit's getting high and nobody's got gills designed to filter feces. Please, let civility and decency come back. Please, step down out of your rage, even if the world's feeding you plenty of reasons to be angry. I'll step up and give you your trophy, but only if you're contributing to the tomorrow where we're not all jeering hunchbacks in the shadows. If you can't, or won't do that? Well, then I implore you to do the one decent thing people like you and I can do: Sit in the back and shut the fuck up.  

Which is exactly what I'm about to go do.

Yours truly, from under grey skies,

This Writer who thinks America's a whole lot less than it could be.