We’re burning up the words and phrases we use for comfort faster than out-of-control wildfires. We’re drowning meaning under flash floods of ravaging frequency. We’re dancing around sensitivities like so many angels on the head of a pin, ignoring that the pin has been smashed into smithereens by a sledge hammer. We keep looking for better angels of our nature to appear but they seem to have given up the ghost trying to reign things in. The time is out of joint.
The meaningless phrase of the moment this morning that has gotten my goat is “we have to do better.”
What the hell does that even mean?
We pretend that everyone cares about the outrage of political violence. Not everyone does. There are those that care only enough to use it to their own advantage and want to see more of it. Yes, it’s about power. But it’s increasingly become about the money, because you can make boatloads of it preaching hate and division. You know, free speech and all of that.
We have to do better.
There’s no “better” to do when it comes to language, because language only expresses what is felt inside. About self. About others. About domination. About fear. And when the “better” is about better profits… well, that’s the world we live in and at the moment it’s what’s making the world spin faster.
Step away from politics for a second.
When a sports team loses and coaches and players say “we have to do better” or “we have to play better” it means nothing. Of course they do. They lost.
When a business doesn’t meet its sales targets, they always say “we have to do better.” Unless of course they’re spinning losses into wins hoping no one pays attention.
Shift back to political world.
The spinning happens there as well, with a speed that can burn through the surface it’s spinning on. Yet, it’s a bit late to want to do better after the bullet has struck a target so broadly painted.
We can no longer expect appeals to better angels or doing better to work. It’s a naive call to a different past that in many respects never existed, even though on the surface it seemed to. We should no longer be afraid of phrases like civil war, because in case you haven’t noticed, we’re in one. People are being killed in their homes, at rallies, in schools, just about in any place. Sad fact of history, what we want to believe is random violence by extremists always happens before someone declares that a war is on. But hey, we’ve got a deranged lunatic of a leader who wants to meme one into being, while we spend so much time trying to figure out what we know is the why of it.
You can argue that the extremists aren’t the ones with the guns, but the ones with the big mouths and the AI bots at their command. No one is going to clamp down on the rhetoric any more than they are going to clamp down on guns, and it has already bubbled over into a toxic stew. How are you going to “do better” when all sides claim their way is the better way? I don’t have an answer for that question, because I’m afraid I actually know the answer and there’s nothing “better” about it.
The only thing we have to “do better” at is recognizing the horrors of the moment we’re in and facing it for the reality that it is. You and I certainly don’t want to see and hear what we’re seeing and hearing. But we’re too far down that road to not acknowledge we’ve arrived at a terrible place.
Hamlet says:
‘The time is out of joint: O cursed spite,
That ever I was born to set it right!’
I feel like we’re all caught in Hamlet’s dilemma. Wanting to fix it, but afraid to the point of cursing what will eventually need to be done.
You can also find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.
Life on the Wicked Stage: Act 3 