Your words are deeply considered, heartfelt, and well-chosen. I thank you for making the time and having the patience to articulate the shape and the boundaries of this great matter. I believe I understand them, as I have considered these things myself–probably not thoroughly enough, but thoroughly.
If you are willing to listen, I will share with you what happens in my body and consciousness when I hear your words, and what I am forced to reconcile in this body, as a person who loves.
If things are simple, and clear, as you say, it seems then not expedient to reason with evil, knowing its ways, but instead to exercise a duty to humanity to excise it from our midst. We should have our swords always at the ready. It is clear, simple, transparent–we get hints from people’s words and actions, and so warned we can look them up in the directory, and seeing their names, take them out quickly as they exit their homes. In doing so, we are protecting the future from their influence.
Just like in Rwanda in 1994, when people who were once subjugated rose up in a great paroxysm of cleansing, healing justice, leaving behind no trace of tyrrany.
Today is no different. The lines are clear, and were not drawn by us, but by nature itself. We see the world clearly and know on which side truth and justice is embodied: colonizer/subjugated, privileged/disenfranchised, cruel patriarch/thwarted nurturer, terrorist/protector. These distinctions are clear and mutually exclusive–it is not possible to inhabit overlapping spaces. To consider nuance only serves to allow evil to infiltrate every space, and cause the righteous to suffer ever longer.
I have considered this narrative deeply–as it is deeply compelling. We even have more examples from history that seem to affirm it’s rightness:
The French Revolution, where the impoverished masses–unwashed and taunted to just eat cake–exploded in a chaotic but righteous, joyous triumph over a parasitic class of princes that didn’t consider them human; and then arranged themselves into the shape of The Republic;
The Bolshevik Revolution, where long-suffering peasants, who worked the land yet lived on one turnip a day for generations, stormed the Winter Palace, forever ending the Empire of the High-Blooded, and leaving in its place a blanket of cooperation that covered the land;
The Cuban Revolution, where enlightened and thoughtful students of Marx led the long-subjugated campesinos to overthrow a brutal dictatorship fueled by the Imperialistic industrial capitalism of the United States, and nurturing an alternative paradise of health care for all and respect for different opinions.
In all of these cases, the lines were clear, were they not? Lives were lost, but the end justifies the means, does it not? Should not justice prevail, where evil is overcome? Knowing our rightness, as we consider the mistakes of the past, are we not immune to them?
Considering this, as I observe the world through the lens of history, as I bear witness to the chaos and division that surrounds me, seeing through the misty cloud of nuance and whataboutism, I now recognize my hesitation, my stopping to reflect:
and it is more terrible than cowardice.
Were I simply a coward, my hesitation could simply be seen as a momentary pause, an eddy in the great, overwhelming tide of cathartic, healing justice, that will then allow itself to surrender finally to this righteous, cleansing force. No, my hesitation is something much more damning than cowardice–it is moral blindness, ignorance, craven disregard for truth, which makes my failure to act more willful and undermining of the revolution, and of justice itself.
The matter being as simple as it is, and the delineations between fairness and tyranny so clear and apparent, I realize, as I stand in the street, sword in hand, wearing the armor of my isolation, as my neighbor exits their house: I don’t recognize their nature. Having read, understood, and internalized the directory, my mind fails to recall if my neighbors’ names are in it.
And worse than that, I see, animating the movement of my neighbor’s limbs, some gentle spark, some faint, hovering quality, that almost resembles humanity.
And I understand now that this failure is nothing but a betrayal of the revolution, of good, and of the pure justice of nature itself.
Arising from this confusion, doubt, and malicious disembodiment of nature’s pure purpose is a question:
What place is there for me in this world?