Some of us breathe toxic water. We inhabit a place where the water we breathe is toxic. If we are fortunate enough to have jobs that pay a living wage or better and don’t have a grievance or a malady, then we are the problem. It is because of the normies that there is so much hate. We owe a debt to society because of our whiteness and privilege. DOWN WITH NORMIE HATE AGAINST THE DOWNTRODDEN!!!
I left home at 19 because I believed that my Dad’s hard work to build generational stability and a seat at the table with the grownups was toxic. His house wreaked of toxic water, said my young self. He was mental, anti-revolutionary, and suspiciously bougie. I was sure of this. So I left and found myself in a very different fire from the frying pan I left. His toxic water had a sourceâmy paternal grandma.
Listen, if you are struggling and feel that therapy will help, get help: https://www.betterhelp.com/. Also https://988lifeline.org. You have a purpose, there is a mission to fulfill, and a vision for your life. Even now when it all feels nihilist.
Grandma sorted me out in under a minute. But that’s a story for another day. All this animous against normies gravitates to states and localities where the dominant religion is Imperial Rome rebranded as Socialism. The saints of the Woke True Folk are Marx, Mao, Che Guevara, and Castro. These WTF have covert home shrines to Augustissimo Imperatori Obama and his Sacculum homo Biden. Their exegesis says that we are not all sinners and that the world isn’t broken. Instead, it is the privileged that are the sinners causing injury to the world. To restore the world to its pre-fall utopia we have to battle privilege. NORMIE PRIVILEGE IS EVIL!!!
My son, in keeping with family tradition, moved from Virginia where I live, to Lexington, MA. Like me, he sought to escape his parents’ toxicity and find peace. Also, like me, he discovered that he’d jumped from the frying pan to the fire.
The Emperor’s Toxic Harbor
Boston, Massachusets is an Imperial city. There are temples to the four Saints of the Way there. Lexington is where the citizens of the Empire commute. They keep their families a safe distance from the Imperial City. Why? Because allegiance to the emperor is for other people. They, the unwashed, are the cause of all evil. So it would be unwise to live among the unwashed.
My son escaped the toxic masculinity of his father and the brutal Chinese energy of his Mom by couch surfing in his Aunt’s living room. Before that he spent a summer living with another of his Aunts who says she’s bipolar. Anywhere but here. When the water we breathe is what we’ve been breathing our whole life non-toxic water makes us choke and gag. Cold turkey feels like death. So my son escaped in stages, first to a new harbor full of toxic bipolar water and then to his current anchor in my OCD sister’s ambient anxiety living room.
Whatever, right? Maybe. But I chose to write 1500 words about toxic water. So it must at least be important to me. It is. Because at 19 I couldn’t figure out what was broken. Maybe my brain was broken, maybe it was the water I breathed. I only knew I wanted out. So my first move was to the Navy where I discovered how much I hated to be miserable.
Change the Water or Change Yourself?
You can stop reading if you got this far. The next thousand words are more blah, blah, blah of this popular aphorism, “You can’t always change the circumstances you find yourself in. You can change how you respond to them.” I love that aphorism. It is so counter-revolutionary. The WTF believe to their core that peas and hominy for all will return once the bourgeoisie are eliminated. Theirs is a perpetual war against privilege framed as a battle against the *ism of the day. It is blasphemous to suggest that the battle is unwinnable, that the battlefield is within our hearts and minds. Such ideas are so toxic the one holding them must be put to death.
The WTF want to change the water. Once the water is changed they claim we will all be happy and can breathe easier. Except, at the core of their pseudo-religion is hate. Even if they succeed in changing the water to its spoken perfection their hearts will still be dark. So the quest is futile and destined to fail. This doesn’t stop them from continuing the fight.
Something about the WTF. The fight is the point. The fight is the purpose, mission, and vision. They have no idea what to do if they ever win. Most of the time they self-destruct so they can continue the fight. I am a boomer with pink-leaning red diapers. My Dad’s parents were socialists and communists. My Dad, because he took the shot at being bougie by graduating with a degree in Electrical Engineering from UC Berkeley and then working for RCA in their missile & defense systems division, became anti-revolutionary.
Give Me Anti-Revolutionary
I am the son of an apostate father and Communist grandparents. My Dad just wanted peas and hominy in his house. He hungered for and achieved the mid-century American Dream. If he could change the water then maybe his future and the future of his family would be less toxic. It almost worked. You can take the family out of California. Taking the California out of the family? Well . . .
It worked well enough. My Dad achieved a lot in his life. I published a link to his obit here. My grandma put family ahead of ideology and so I knew her as a round, warm, loving woman. We were six, My Mom, my Dad, and the four of us kids. But . . . and sorry to speak ill of the dead, that cantankerous spirit in our family found its way to me. Something was off and somehow the thought that I was the problem took root in my heart.
It flowered in a deep bitter root judgment that the answer for me was more therapy. If I just self-confessed more deeply about my whiteness and privilege, if I just kowtowed to Mao more passionately, our family could recover its honored place as party members in the Woke True Folk. At 19 I knew two things: I hated to be miserable and it couldn’t be my fault.
Toxic Water is So Revolutionary
My mid-century, boomer, bougie self understood WTF values intuitively. I was entitled to freedom from misery and accountability as a child of the revolution. Or so I thought. This was the epiphany, “maybe it isn’t my fault. It is my problem to solve.” The insistence that codependency is revolutionary is a self-immolating folly. At the end of the day, it is us in our own misery that must sort out how to rise out of the mire and find peas and hominy. There I said it and made you wait for 1100 words to read it.
Fortunately, we are not alone in this. The challenge of misery inspires many more better writers, religious figures, and philosophers to publish their wisdom. We can ignore the WTF claim that we can’t study history and literature because it is bougie. Others have gone before us and left behind words of wisdom and comfort.
None of that should be news. Start at the local library. This isn’t a pitch for local libraries. It is the worry of a father whose son said that his brain was broken. Maybe so. It seems that to be socially accepted among the WTF you must identify as having a grievance and a malady. So my son says his brain is broken. I don’t know what his grievance is. Whatever. Not my circus nor my monkeys.
The King’s Circus
It is my circus. I’ve made my choices and benefited or suffered from the consequences. At the start, I shared with my Dad’s Mom a core statement that I was against it. Against what? Dunno. Everything. My Dad was bougie and anti-revolutionary so to be against him I had to be revolutionary. That went well. đ
I hate being miserable. Being revolutionary results in misery. Damn. So my life has been conflicted. I want to be against the bougie life of my Dad. But I don’t want the misery that results. So I live in a shitty two-bedroom cottage in a bad neighborhood working as the 2022 version of a cab driverârideshare. I’m divorced with an adult son. My boxers are barely pink, much less red.
My virtue signal is on a deplorable frequency. But . . . it’s my life and I’m good with it. The WTF life requires that I remain angry at things I cannot change. It demands that I declare a grievance and a malady. I’m 60+. I have the usual boomer maladiesâdiabetes, obesity, and sub-optimal cardiac health. Grievances? Hard pass.
A Non-WTF Monkey
So my circus is underwhelming. The monkeys are fat, lazy, and throw shit at the audience. The clowns are not funny. Elephants? None. No lions, tigers, or bears either. Our fat lady doesn’t sing. All she does is sit in the center ring and smoke Marlboro Reds. Sometimes she’s in a mood and cusses out audience members.
What of it, though? So the world is a shitshow. And you were born into misfortune. It feels like God takes special pleasure in pissing on you. The WTF tell you that the answer is to battle God, the world and anyone you feel is the cause of your misery. Fight them and force them to detoxify themselves and the water they make you breathe. Seems right, right? This is the fight of a drunk and a power greedy sleeping pill addict. It is itself toxic.
What then, if not a fight? Stand tall. Take a nice long drink of that toxic water. Then get on it. Find your mission, vision and purpose. Pursue these and never mind the toxicity of the water or the level of asshat in those around you. Listen to the wind and not the cat fight cray cray shouting at you through the Tubes. The water has been toxic ever since Eve defied God. The Shit Show is at least as old as recorded history. The Fat Lady isn’t going to change. Don’t ask her to sing. She’ll beat your ass for asking. Feel worse? Good. Now go be the awesome person God made you to be.