I Don't Want to Human: A Rant Against Human Violence

 

I Don’t Want to Human

A Rant Against Human Violence

 

Not long ago I saw a thing online of someone saying they don’t want to adult. They don’t even want to human, they said. They want to goat. Jump around. Eat whatever they want. Headbutt anyone they don’t like. I thought OK. Makes sense. Living like a goat must look pretty good to most humans. But this little piece didn’t have the person say why she didn’t want to human. All we can do to try to figure out why she didn’t is to look at the things in human life that are other than the way she described the life of a goat. Be where you’re supposed to be when you’re supposed to be there and behave with decorum. Eat only what’s good for you. Don’t be violent, don’t even be rude, but be nice even when you don’t feel at all nice. OK. Fair enough. I don’t like those things much of the time either.

I don’t want to human either, but I have a much more profound reason for not wanting to human. I don’t want to human because I’ve had it up to my back teeth with human violence. I’ve seen things online about the most dangerous wild animals in my country. Hell! There is no wild animal whatsoever that is nearly as deadly as human beings are. Maiming and killing people is what we do. Just turn on the TV news, local, national, or international, any time of day or night, and you’ll mainly if not exclusively see stories of violence. Part of that truth is the fault of the media. “If it bleeds, it leads” certainly seems to be true. But our news is filled day and night with stories of war. Of mass shootings. Of domestic violence. Of hate crimes against Jews, Muslims, Blacks, gays, transsexuals, and others. Of the state-ordered murder we call capital punishment. Israel kills over 30,000 Palestinians in Gaza, and my government sits on its ass doing nothing about it, probably because of the political power of American Jews in the Democrats’ coalition. Russia invades Ukraine, causes the deaths of tens of thousands of people on both sides of its illegal war of aggression, and there is no apparent way to stop the killing. My country spends obscene amounts of money on the killing machine we call the US military. The US Supreme Court says a constitutional amendment designed to protect the ownership of muzzle-loading muskets protects the ownership of semi-automatic weapons that can kill hundreds in the time it took an eighteenth-century musket to kill one.

I have, so far, never been a victim of violent crime nor have I had to go to war, if only because of a medical condition that kept me out of the army during the Vietnam War. But I live in a culture awash in violence. I live in a world awash in violence. I am a Christian. I try to follow a savior who proclaimed and lived nonviolence though it got him crucified. But countless millions of others who say they follow the same savior support American militarism and claim that owning guns of a type the only purpose of which is to kill other human beings is a perfectly Christian thing to do. I am surrounded day in and day out by news of human violence against other humans, and I’ve had it. I’m sick of it. I’ve had it with being a member of a species of animal so inherently and apparently incurably violent as we human are.

And there’s not a damned thing I can do about that either other than kill myself. But that would just be another act of violence, the kind of violence I’m so sick of being associated with because I am a member of the species homo sapiens. What the hell is wrong with us? I wish I knew. I don’t, but I know there is something diabolically wrong with us. Perhaps at some level we know collectively that there’s something wrong with all of our violence. We go to elaborate lengths to make service in the military killing machine honorable. We salute the military at football games and have airborne killing machines fly overhead. We drape the coffins of dead soldiers in American flags and trot out military honor guards for them. We call them “fallen” not “killed,” which is what they really are. We convince young people that joining the military killing machine is their duty and that it is a good career move. Hone your tech skills we say, usually failing to say hone your tech skills in support of killing people, which is the only thing the military exists to do. We spend immense amounts of money and immense amounts of human skills for the production of ever more effective and efficient ways to kill people. Our culture says sure, go ahead and spend your life producing weapons of mass destruction. After all, we’re Americans. We’re the good guys, we claim; so there’s no moral question there. Like hell there isn’t! Or maybe there isn’t; but if there isn’t, it’s because doing so is obviously and undeniably immoral not moral.

And all I can do is rage against the killing machine. Rage against my country’s militarism. Rage against my country’s madness over guns. Rage against human violence across the globe. Get mad as hell at the Russians, whose history I have studied to the PhD level. Get mad as hell at the Israelis, though of course I know and am appalled by what other humans did to the Jewish people in the Holocaust. And all it does is keep me upset and not wanting to human. So I rant. I rage, and it accomplishes nothing. Oh well. I’m stuck being mad as hell. I’m stuck being depressed as hell. I don’t much want to be, but I’m stuck being human. So be it, but: Damn!