Texas and Ohio; August 4 2019

I’ve found that it really isn’t hard to be kind.

Most people don’t know – or suspect, rather – how angry of a person I am. There’s so much that infuriates me to the very core. I’ve gotten used to this feeling of rage just pouring into me, pressing against the inside of my skin like it’s threatening to explode. There are people who I interact with on the daily who have no idea how much distaste I have for them. I loathe some people to the point of wishing them ill, deep down in the forbidden recesses of my brain, and they will never know.

(Don’t worry. If you’re reading this, you’re not one of those people.)

The reason for this is simple.

My hatred, my anger, is my responsibility. I have a choice as to how I deal with it. If I hate you, there’s a damned good reason for it, rest assured... But the way I treat you or respond to my rage is a reflection of me. Not you.

There’s a lot of senseless hate out there.

There’s a lot of violence that stems from that irrational hate.

Yesterday, there were two mass shootings in the span of one day. People (and you know exactly which people) try to make excuses for the perpetrators. The ‘mental illness’ defence is the quickest one they leap to, as though there aren’t millions of mentally ill people who, every day, manage to not go on killing sprees. I’m one of those people, even. I’ve got a 100% success rate, re: not murdering anyone.

But, for the sake of argument, let’s say that these people are indeed mentally ill.

Maybe if we lived in a world in which men could talk about their illness, shame-free, they wouldn’t lash out. Maybe if psychological treatments were covered by free healthcare, they wouldn’t sit on their problems and let them grow.

The people insisting that guns are a human right deny that help is a human right.

It’s all nonsense, of course. Destructive, toxic nonsense. Mental illness isn’t the root of the problem. White supremacy among cismen, that’s the issue, and it’s running rampant across America.

But if you’re going to make excuses, at least address the problem you’re pretending they’re having.

To any resident of the United States who reads this, particularly those in Texas and Ohio... Know that the world is watching, and that we’re advocating for you. That if they block out your protests from the inside, they’ll find us screaming at them from the outside.

I don’t have another story segment in me, today. I apologize for that.

I just can’t imagine that a segment of fiction would matter when real life is a horror story.