"I think you should shut the fuck up."

"Fuck you."

Lights out.

Wake up with blood flowing from your nose.

Experience the full reboot.

This happened to me last year.

Not this conversation. But the hard reset of getting knocked out. Visual cortex coming online as I'm already back on my feet, looking at the blood dripping onto my hands.

The fear and shame and fury.

It lingers.

Violence cannot be undone.

I rewatched Exterminate All the Brutes.

Also watched Enemies of the People, about the killing fields of Cambodia.

I went there when I was 20.

I saw.

I read the history.

But I didn't know. I hadn't yet unwrapped my imperial middle class, line-goes-up celluloid fantasy world.

We have a problem.

Which is that we cannot politely discuss

the suffering and violence and blood it took to get here

nor the suffering and violence and blood it takes to keep this system in place.

There is only one product of the industrial system of earth

that has risen in output

every single year

since the furnaces first began to glow.

(Except maybe from 1945 to 1946?)

That product is suffering.

When you consider the massive population increase of the last 100 years…

the incredible upward redistribution of wealth that has taken place over the last 40 years…

and the accompanying squeeze on working people..

the rise of factory farms…

the Military

and Prison

and Entertainment

Industrial Complexes…

We are seeing outstanding annual grown on global exports of Total Gross Suffering.

In stress and fear and shame and chronic pain and mutilation by bomb and gun and misery and trauma of a thousand other varieties, we are pushing up our numbers in every flavor.

We mass produce suffering. It's generated in almost every industrial task.

From the miner to the factory worker, to the farmer and the retail worker, the violence is there.

It’s there when you order a sandwich or buy a ring or ride the subway.

It's an ingredient in your ability to read this on the computer page.

It's an ingredient in our cognition.

So…

What if the primary product of the global economy is suffering?

Perhaps there's an off-world pipeline where it's pumped across the galaxy

to a beachfront bar under a purple sun.

And maybe in recent years there's been a spike in demand?

The violence it takes to keep this machine running cannot be undone.

In Gaza.

In DRC.

At Rykers.

Alligator Alcatraz

and Myawaddy.

And thousands of other places where people are being tormented and tortured for profit.

That is the backbone of the lives we lead. It is violence done far away and blood spilled out of sight. It's in the fucking walls and the plumbing and the cornflakes. Everything we do is drenched in blood.

But we don't want to look.

We don't want to let the pain into our bodies.

The man who broke my nose ran away.

But I have been punched in the face enough to know how lucky I am

not to have experienced worse.

I'm sure I don't have to explain to you the terror

of realizing how horribly

things could end.

Nothing changes until we acknowledge the blood.

The link has been copied!