A widespread culling spanning generations to mask the acceleration of the mortality rate. Festering newer headcases with each automized lesson plan, our overseers are live in the field. Each new massacre brought to you in real-time loses its sparkle before the next one has time to get the ball rolling. Toddlers tainted from day 1 for no longer getting a day off of school unless the death toll reaches 1000. Modernity’s true massacre is the faded varnish we paint each massacre in today. Las Vegas ran for under a week but the aesthetic sentiment of a crowd of country lovers mercilessly preyed upon like fish in a 10-gallon hat went unmentioned. It used to be a mass murder held its own, equipt with enough staying power to blacken the few lungs who really inhaled the fumigation released to the public, yet today’s countless banks of Sadism turned chic has flooded our youth with an overexposure so ingrained in nature no one can shock without first futile foreplay.
The line in the sand between mammals and mammalian has always and will always be sheer destruction. Decay by a willing hand to overthrow progress made by the whole and reassert nature into natural order. Man’s hidden agenda, most of the time being hidden from his true self, is freedom of maximum violence enacted upon his own special reflection. Strip away social constructs, preconceptions embedded from the caul, and all are left with the highest natural edifice of seeing red to recognize the self in the outpouring of another. Given the total freedom that is consented permission, be it in a sexually oriented situation or lawlessness say in times and areas of war, man’s mind pulsates with endless possibilities towards satiation of an otherwise repressed longing for physical manifestation of subconscious, or conscious in a select few’s desires. It just so happens we are in a constant state of a hypersexualized warzone.
Have you stepped outside recently? The streets are awash in televised massacre-dom. The trees bend to death rattles, fertilizing fresh grave dirt to coddle all those who trample their bedding. The dying breath of newspapers dragging their printers through the killing fields as if to climax together in an arterial outpour.
What seems to be the driving force for the widespread massacres “plaguing” our country in this year alone? Onlookers and witnesses spackle the crowds, questioning the impossibility of purportrating repetition like it’s sliced bread rearing its regrown head in ink. Without daring to refute the historical sentiments on classic cases such as Columbine or Charlie Whitman’s Texas Rendezvous, both of which are near and dear as I am willing to assume are to countless others of the generational lockjaw clenched between X and Z. The silent catalyst behind the influx of mass murder to date must be on the rise due to a more cognizant recognition of hate. A true acceptance, a welcoming bear hug to the prodigal son that has been ingrained in our DNA since the first hair-swathed ape utilized fire as a tool not for sustenance nor for survival but for sadistic personal fulfillment by way of harm. There is a sense that a mass culling is in effect, the target cattle being those willing to continue and propagate the Möbius hamster wheel we are birthed into.
A wave of exhibited indifference or fashionable socially related nihilism has spread through the current coming-of-age generation like a prerequisite for adulthood disappointment. The acknowledgement of such pitiless futures for the children has tinted the glitter-laden uncomfortableness of youth to a Lisa Frank caricature of Cioran. The rightful realization that the pit inside slowly grows with age is something now being force-fed to those unwitting enough to acknowledge their free will. It has culminated to the point of optimistic nihilism, taken from descriptors of such boisterous public presences, tainting the minority’s graceful distaste of a saving grace with such a sacrilegious juxtaposition of two mindsets that they are the least bit familiar with. Insulted as I may be with the prideful self-badging of the only philosophy I have ever found poetic sentiment in, it is not the titling I find inappropriate or undeserved but the sorrowful duping of unsuspecting minors unaware of the weight of such a literal apocalypse. To rose-tint the grave benefits only the grave-digger’s pocket lining.
Once able to spot the tide of detached interest in the wellbeing of the current coming of age — perfectly illustrated in the fantastical, albeit humorously absurd Tide Pod ingestion — one can lay the groundwork for youth’s martyrdom through succinct masochistic past-times. The nonchalance of self in itself has risen to the forefront of the socially prevalent youth. Their credo, neither earned nor consummated by themselves, but breathed into them by mass media annihilation of the senses. Very rarely does an individual arrive at nihilistic tendencies at such a prime age meant for shared enthusiasm, the depth of the pit usually gestating in the knotted intestines for years fed by disappointment in humanity as a whole and distrust of social, civil progress. To elicit such a widespread dismay of civilization boasted on social media is in itself the antithesis of isolationism that more often than not pairs hand in hand with the individual who has arrived at the nil mind as a sort of hail mary last option.
The killing of America is but an old concept, the self-destructive nature imparted by ways of overseas fleeing from tyranny. The absolution we sought by distancing ourselves from the inherent power struggle of opposable thumb wielders. This forever fear of “over the shoulder” parental control instituted in the American blood from the get-go is a form of moral masochism meant to allow us the illusion of autonomy. Whether the hope of self-sustained didacticism was the institutional offset of our forefathers or just an illusory masturbation of muscle flexing, the citizens of this fine mechanism donned Great unknowingly carry within them a separate, centralized trauma from that of evolutionary advancement.
Generation Z they have been anointed, or donned rather, the final culmination of all past generations to garner a title catchy enough to reference. The last of the Greeks, barely distinguishable from their predecessors, anthropoid by design, the final kerplunk into obscurification being fronted by the blind leading the blind, or rather the ignorant meandering meaninglessly. Social change being the hip accessory to pair with their trending diets, a protest sign hung neatly on the mantle to declare their willingness, no aptitude, for grassroots evolution. By purportrating, either consciously or by default, the “evolution” they are influenced to march towards, they are actually slyly masking the devolution desperately needed to subvert the storyline, creeping while we’re sleeping, snapping synaptic ley lines throughout the century-old topography that is mankind. While their execution is half-hearted and directed in quite the opposite outcome than our society is tethered to arrive at, I feel their outcome shall outweigh and overshadow their process.
Being anti-social in today’s world means keeping on brand with the destitute aesthetic. Contrary to classical anti-social character traits, now it is meant to delineate between stylistic choices in street wear. Baudrillard would have had a field day with the simulacra shit-stain our labels have been reduced to. What descriptors once held staying power and seriousness in their connotations have now painted the porcelain bowls brown with a muddled mash of words that hold nothing but marketable prowess. Celebrities are hermits. Internet influencers are gurus. Lifestyle accounts are social activists. Content creators are The Messiah incarnate. The brand Anti-Social Social Club beautifully illustrates its exclusivity among the masses, a hip identifier that no longer holds its weight in words. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were true anti-social ideals. Kaczynski was anti-social. Thoreau was anti-social. Any individual willing to broadcast their introversion externally abuses the term individual and should thus be reduced to the verbal equivalent of handling Stretch Armstrong.
The default of mankind baselines at violent tendencies, when stripped of the fleshy constructs, all included revert back to the sociological symptoms of recognition in polished mirrors. To be conscious, that is to fully recognize our insignificance as a species, carries with it the inherent hatred of smallness. That admission of insignificance, not only as an individual but as a whole, acts as the stepping stone to the welcoming admonishment of granting significance to any creature damned enough to hang themselves at the sight of angels.
2018: American carnage cocktail hour or assault rifle trifle. Be it known we see the tide turning, the open arms of arms in open spaces. The bringing forth of vestigial feces flinging, long left in the days of Cro-Magnon. Caves these days are steeped in shadows, so obfuscated by the blackness of tales it delineates no contrast to differentiate. A pious stage spanning the entirety of the country proves provisional soap boxes of brain matter an effective microphone. The only humanity shown following each pumping-lead propaganda put forth is the humanism attached to each incident. Every trigger finger the son and/or daughter of a parent with enough humanity hoarded to conjure an obsidian slate in newsprint. The connotation of absolute evil attributed to a member of the clan led astray placates enough to help us sleep at night. It takes a level of depth to evaluate our collective maladies that we can’t afford, it being a quicker removal of the bandage to label and discard the purporter as a fluke, a one-off, a mutant among otherwise successful specimens. When taken as a whole, the mass collective foul mouthing themselves into a society must be well adjusted and content with the ebb and flow, otherwise we would be seeing more Kaczynskis, more McVeighs, more Koreshs in the headlines.
Instead we see more and more surfacey pointless killings in the name of nothing. Martyrdom absent from all headlines, the massacres we know today are without reason. Bloodshed bountiful enough to cascade our inner lives with unanswerable antiquities perverted modern enough to attach a brand name to it. Every utterance a death rattle, we confabulate to exhaustion how such a thing could take place without extending our darkest hidey holes into the faintest of light. Without lending ourselves to the understanding of man’s deep-seated obsession with annihilation of the self, we are condemned to ponder the dominoing of first the individual’s mind, then body and finally environment. Understanding our inherent hunger for oblivion by obliteration is the key to making sense of the foray into cataclysm.
The refusal to acknowledge our inherent leniency towards self-destruction only perpetuates the bewilderment of such unfathomable incidences. They stay unfathomable because we as a society refuse to openly display our vacuums in public. The unspoken law, “stay hidden for fear of unveiling the vain.”
A killer lies dormant in us all, not fully abolished from our DNA structure as the DSM V would have you believe. Primal proclivities peek their hairy brows still at intervals sanctioned by the time clock. We hunt in checkout lines, reproduce or rein reproductive rites, allowing carnal contortions their few minutes of expulsion. Perversion is still looked down upon because it fills the void without procreation and procreation is still akin to God’s flesh. Mass murderers, junkies, non-cis population, they are all of the lowest caste, refusing to partake in the propagation of nature. The true evil as seen by civilization is the refusal to tow the line, to contribute, to alter decay with absolute failure.
Recognition of the complete pointlessness, the publicly elusive nil mindset, is the one key to unlocking a general understanding of the overexposure our directionless martyrs have been gaining at such a spike in momentum. To recognize in the clandestine minority their unending gaze into our structural sinew would not materialize an easy fix of the issue at hand but would rather present a problematic solution. That is, there is nothing to be done in regards to the wild west cowboys of the 21st century if we as a civilization agree to continue inching onwards in hopes of longevity. As long as we uphold the simulacra moral diatribe that is America the great, there will always be those hellbent on destruction, craving decay in the public eye, sprouting rot from city squares, seeping iron through grated vestibules, invoking degradation in the white-wearers.
Long live the rot, for it is without bias.