Life is the most important thing

I haven’t updated this site or put anything on the blog in the last few days. Before the last few days, I was thinking about writing a short piece about storytelling in video games, but I haven’t. My days have become extremely regimented, and I haven’t been very productive because of it (I assure you that babies are the natural enemies of industry), but enough about that.

I want to get to why I wrote this post in the first place. It’s the protests! And it’s about everything else, really, but the protests are really the inspiration. It’s this: life is the most valuable thing in existence, and we should do our utmost to preserve it at all time, above property and rules. I’ve had a lot of time to meditate on this. You should know that I was in a coma when I was 18, and I’ve spent my whole life since then contemplating those eight or nine weeks.

A little background. Before it happened I had just come out of high school before this and was extremely aimless. I had the luxury of being so, though I had no idea how to enjoy my freedom. I was probably going to go to college, but what was I even going to study? Why? Then the coma happened to me, and recovery gave me a mission. I proceeded forward to recovery, and I had no choice in it. It was wonderful, to be clearly denied agency at such a young age and have no choice in it. At the time I hated it, when I left the hospital I hated it, and now that I’m older I hate it. It was good in the sense that it taught me how drab living life to exist is. It is horrible to suffer but not much better to live a bland existence. The most desirable of all things is to live with a mission and a passion that colors existence.

We are born and slowly come into recognition of what reality is. I’m seeing it with my son. He has no idea what anything is, and it’s because of his brain. It’s small and literally doesn’t have the processes required to understand reality. I know I didn’t until I was about 25, at least not in the way that I do now. I’m sure in five years from now I’ll be talking about how little of existence I understood at 30. It’s the beauty and doom of the human condition, at least mine, that I cannot stand a situation that’s just the same endlessly.

It may seem ironic for someone who studied Classics to talk about resisting the static or for someone who’s been living in one place for the last four years of my life. I’m not a particularly adventurous person either, but what I’m saying is I’m writing something new and reading something new all the time. If I didn’t have that, just did a 9-5, tuned into relaxing when I got home and not try to produce something, I’d go crazy. I think everyone has an outlet like this (they even talk about it in Madame Bovary so post-revolutionary France), or at least I’d hope so. I don’t agree with the ‘free spirit’ people who believe that to be in a relationship, stick with a job or live in one place is to be so. We exist so we may taste the many flavors of life. Emotional commitment and multi-year projects are a part of it.

Now, to get to the relevant part of this blog. What does this have to do with the protestors? I don’t think it’s too far of a logical stretch how these connect. What I believe of myself should be true for everyone. I think that everyone deserves a life where they can eat, be healthy, be happy, get medicine, have electricity/heating/water, have a computer and internet, have access to transportation and have an outlet for their expression as a baseline. It’s not exactly a revolutionary new thought. People have been saying it for centuries and probably much longer (okay, maybe not internet/computers/heating/electricity/etc. for centuries but this sort of thought is in the Sermon on the Mount).

Then the next thing we must ask ourselves is, does the world we live in allow that? It isn’t the world we live in or the laws we have created. None of the things I listed are free or guaranteed. What is required to get them then? Money, of course. How do you get money? Performing some work or service. The transactional basis of basic necessities serves to do a few things: 1. commodify a human’s time, necessarily obligating humans to trade it for what they need, 2. make it limited as in not infinitely available and 3. to give people an incentive to work, as in the fear of having those things cut off.

So 1 is how capitalism works. We’re enshrining it. What’s wrong with capitalism? Well, nothing necessarily, but it is pretty much never fair. If you’re being hired as a minimum wage worker (or any worker at all), your boss is necessarily making more money than it costs to have you work. So you’re not being paid the value of your labor. You’re being paid a percentage of that, presumably, but how much? Given that you don’t have access to expense reports of the business that’s hiring or anything of the sort, you have no idea.

So, this can be more or less apparent. When I worked as a tutor, I worked for the university and for a private company. The university paid me minimum wage, but they weren’t being paid for the tutoring. However, it was one of the side benefits of being a student, is the access to tutoring. When I worked for a private company, my boss basically skimmed 10% off the top of whatever I charged, so I was getting 90% of the value of my labor presumably. But that situation was even more tricky because I had no idea if I was charging too much or too little. Was I providing a valuable service in either case? Was it in demand (because those are two separate questions)? It’s really hard to tell. I don’t think I had a big impact on anyone’s life, and that’s fine.

So 2 is undoubtedly the most important component of this and where the hypocrisy comes in. How readily available are things? Well, far more than what the cost of these things dictate. Everyone should know it by now that private health insurance is charging many times more than what medicine is worth. Food is being thrown out, not because it’s spoiled but because it can’t be sold at a profit. It happens every year, regardless, and this year is particularly bad. There are brand new cars sitting on lots to rust under the sun, not because they’re defective but because they can’t be sold at enough profit. Again, it happens every year, but this year is worse. Electricity? Well, I haven’t studied up on the subject so I won’t speak on it. There aren’t as many computers as people in the world, but a reasonable amount could be produced to remedy that. The internet is wasted often, and there’s poor infrastructure in the US, not because of lack of government spending but because our oligopolies refuse to do anything about it. What I see is not a lack of resources but a lack of will. This is not an accident, and those who have the ability to dispense resources don’t want these things to be given because then they cannot use 3 (the stick) so they can keep 1 (the carrot) going.

What’s to be done if you don’t agree with the system as is? Well, there are fundamentally two answers: the socialists and the communists, that is either reform the system from within or from without. From within means elections, voting and such things. It puts its faith in the ability for our votes to fundamentally change the outcome of things. However, Obama’s presidency should demonstrate that the democrats don’t fundamentally change things. I really started being aware of this after Ferguson (thanks to my privilege) and the execution Michael Brown. Bernie Sanders promised that he would help things, but he won’t be a presidential candidate (at least of now, the end of May).

The other solution is, as Kennedy says, “those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” And that’s what we’re seeing now, is that people are asking of the system what it cannot provide, moderate, meaningful change. It’s asking for cops to be held accountable for their actions, to go to jail if they murder someone. Right now there is little recourse since their testimony is vital to how our court system handle criminal cases (I’m not even going to get into the judges who get kickbacks from private prisons for sentencing them there, where they’re exploited as slave labor). I read an article about a law professor (https://qz.com/890425/traffic-ticket-turns-into-constitutional-law-trial/) who fought a traffic ticket from one of those traffic cameras. The story’s not too important except for this (actually, there are a bunch of important details, but irrelevant to the present topic): a cop perjured himself, and everyone acted like it was no big deal.

I wanted to leave the following part out because I think many have said it more eloquently than I ever will, but to not say anything is cowardice, isn’t it? It needs to be said explicitly because the time for subtle hints is over. What I see right now is that cops are targeting people, especially people of color, and brutalizing them. They’re attacking them when they’re defenseless and killing so many innocents. And even if they weren’t innocent, why does a cop get to kill someone? We don’t allow execution anymore because of the preciousness of life so why can cops, extrajudicially, do the same thing? It’s wanton, malevolent evil and nominally in the service of the above-mentioned capitalistic system, to preserve the order and not ask for change. No person of good conscience can end another’s life and condemn them to non-existence or the afterlife. I felt like I got a taste of it during my coma, and what I experienced is the most horrific thing I can imagine. And it’s being done for nothing! To people just because of how they were born! It is a tragedy perpetrated to maintain a system that isn’t just or equitable.

It is not that much to ask that everyone be granted an opportunity to prosper. It breaks my heart to think about how many people of color not only don’t have the opportunity at any point but won’t even reach the age I was when I went into a coma, when my life really began. And what’s really ridiculous is that the reason why I had these opportunities was arbitrary. It wasn’t by my merit or ability. And the systems in place reinforce allowing some people to live and do well while others don’t, for no good reason.

I see these people say ‘but oh, look at the property they destroyed’, but I will say this: no amount of property is worth a human life. We are born and exist in a brief moment. The entire universe exists in our cognition only for a brief moment, and it will never come again. Necessarily, we cannot experience the afterlife (if you should believe in it) with our memories and perceptions intact. Our memories are chemical connections in our bodies and corporeal. Idem for our ability to see or read or understand. So no matter how much property the protests destroy, it is not worth a human life. No matter how much property the protests destroy, there is a reason to fight. Even if there were ‘outside agitators’ how does that diminish the message and its importance?