Sorry, to myself, not to you the reader. I’m sorry that I don’t make enough time to journal about my daily experiences when I know it’s relaxing and therapeutic for me in particular to reflect on my experiences. Today wasn’t a particularly special day, except I didn’t have a lot on today. Life in the era of lockdowns is quite unpredictable. Some days I’m frantically going from appointment to appointment and others like today I have a couple of errands to run and the rest of the time to contemplate social media for far too long to be healthy. So I am going to write about a few musings from my day.
Firstly, today really wasn’t busy, I rode my bike for a bit since I don’t have to wear a mask if I am on a bike. The virus knows to leave fit people alone. I had a look around one of the housing commission areas. The attraction was the dystopian communist landscape that is public housing. I try to imagine it looking attractive in an alternative universe but I suspect there is something the size and uniformity of the structures that makes it almost impossible to imagine them as beautiful. My notable observations were an novel design of sewerage vent, evidence of a recent apartment fire, a drunk half naked man having a fight with an invisible assailant, a young woman drinking out of a 4L orange juice bottle that gave me a look as though she would knife me if I stared at her for a moment longer, and a skinny dirty old man reading a rotting paperback on his balcony seemingly enjoying the serenity. Mentally, I tried to figure out what was going through some of these people’s minds, and trying to imagine what public housing would look like if the people living in them owned the apartments instead.
For the drunk man boxing his inner demons, I felt like I could definitely relate. You know, I’m a pretty passionate person and often have to reign in my feelings for polite company. But when I’m alone I like to talk things out with my inner demons too. I guess what makes me different if that I don’t do this half naked in public. The main reason being I don’t want to frighten people or have them telling everyone I am crazy. After all, I was reading an article just yesterday that many people don’t have an inner monologue like I do and they wouldn’t necessarily understand why I find talking things out soothing, nor appreciate me doing in on their time. The woman with the orange juice is more opaque to me. My first thought was that she’d been bullied a lot, but maybe she’s just hypersensitive to criticism and thinks everyone is trying to bring her down psychically? But why did she have such a big orange juice container? What was she doing with it? Was it just orange juice or had she mixed something into it? If it was just plain orange juice did she believe that was her practicing a healthy diet?
After my ride I read an article about a woman who had murdered her husband but the court had decided she had simply killed her husband. This was because of some kind of plea deal her lawyers had made. See, she only intended to scare her husband by dousing him with petrol and then setting him alight. The 18 hour agonising death he experienced was completely unintentional. Honestly, from reading what little they had about the couple’s relationship, I don’t think she wanted to kill him either. I think she wanted to control him, and he was also into controlling her. The relationship was abusive in both directions, she had just escalated the mutual violence to the fatal level first. The thing that bothers me is this idea that intentions matter. I don’t think intentions really matter that much, and I believe actions are more important. The fact that she was capable of dousing a man with petrol and setting him alight after having an argument about staying late at a party is what frightens me about her, and why I feel uneasy with the possibility that her sentence might be shorter. Are we truly safe with such a person out and about? Especially if she turned out to be unrepentent? She had at least two children with the man she killed, just to bring to heart the full horror of this situation. Imagine being a child and your mother murdered your father?
Sincerely, I really don’t like the criminal justice system, prisons, or this idea of getting revenge at all. I say that knowing I don’t have a complete solution to every circumstance, but I suspect in this particular case that the woman isn’t a psychopath and will never stop dwelling on the crime she committed and that it would haunt her more than any prison sentence ever could. Which well she should. But even if she does get the maximum sentence for manslaughter, I just get a feeling of dread that a terrible crime has taken place, and we’re not collectively learning from this. The people in the comments section were furious she wasn’t being charged with murder, but manslaughter penalties are almost the same as for murder so I don’t think that’s actually a big deal. But what if she wasn’t a psychopath, a mutant with a deranged biology? What if she was a normal healthy person who was raised in a sick society? Who abused her husband because she seriously believed it was his responsibility to manage her emotions for her and to make her happy? The threats, the violence, the tantrums she put her poor suffering husband (and children) through were an elaborate form of Pavlovian conditioning to brain wash him (and likely her children) into serving her whims, which worked just well enough to keep the hope alive that she could “change him” into the person she wanted him to be for herself. I can almost say for certain that when she was pouring the petrol over him she was thinking, “this is it, if I just scare him enough, he’ll learn not to mess with me from now on.”
I want this woman to suffer. But I don’t want it to be a prison sentence or an execution, not floggings or other forms of torture. I want her to heal and see the error of her ways, that way she will suffer from remorse more than whips could ever accomplish. And I would like to see her touring the country giving presentations to young women about the importance of self control and donating any money she makes to domestic abuse shelters for men. Prison time just seems like a waste of time and money, and a guarantee that we will collectively learn nothing from an easily preventable death. Domestic abuse is common and ignored. It’s a problem that can be fixed and if fixed will greatly improve childhood and in turn improve our civilisation. A civilisation is only as good as the quality of childhood it provides.
Another thing I was thinking about today was that I was muted by an admin in a group that I’ve been spending a lot of time following lately. I was muted because I had complained about two other people being muted. My post outlining why I objected to this practice of muting people was also deleted. This from a group who pride themselves on giving people a voice to protest when it has been denied by the government during this lockdown. It troubles me greatly. Especially when they don’t apologise to me, but say that I misunderstood why I was muted and had my post deleted. It leaves me feeling very worried about the future when there are so few adults capable of making good decisions. How am I supposed to return to the group? Am I supposed to pretend nothing happened? Can I talk about being muted? Can I share my views freely now without the fear of being muted or deleted? The admins telling me it isn’t a big deal are just as reassuring as the government saying “it’s just for two weeks to flatten the curve.” The world has been infected with Marxist ideology for so long now I just want to live in a monastery far away to live and breathe free from people who complain about things that are so small and petty compared to the wonder of existing. On the plus side, being muted filled me with passion to create a new video today. I’m hoping it will help some other people to see the nature of madness in the world today.
Sophisticated Nonsense 