It was one of those little things, a thought not quite remembered. But it was somehow important, something that could potentially help me, if I could only remember it.
It’s been bugging me for weeks. Not that I thought it was the end all be all, but something that could help me surf these all too strange waters we find ourselves in.
It was philosophical, intriguing, and dead on.
Not only could I not remember the thought, I couldn’t remember its source. That meant I had no starting point until I remembered something the Marines call “The Suck”
Once I had that starting point I kept pulling threads until I found what I was looking for.
Don’t get me wrong, The Marines are 100% right about The Suck, we’re clearly in some serious suck. Thank God for The Marines. They have a way of expressing things that is awesome.
What I was looking for was something else that was more apt to our current circumstances and the way I was feeling in particular.
I finally found what I’d been trying to remember.
It’s from “The Expanse”
One of the characters is having a conversation with a spy. The spy is kind of slippery but he’s never encountered up close and personal someone like Amos.
The exchange is as follows:
Kenzo: It must be nice, having everything figured out like that.
Amos: Ain’t nothing to do with me: we’re just caught in the Churn, that’s all.
Kenzo: I have no idea what you just said.
Amos: This boss I used to work for in Baltimore, he called it the Churn. When the rules of the game change.
Kenzo: What game?
Amos: The only game. Survival. When the jungle tears itself down and builds itself into something new. Guys like you and me, we end up dead. Doesn’t really mean anything. Or, if we happen to live through it, well that doesn’t mean anything either.
We’re in The Churn.
The rules are changing, it’s beyond our control. The only option is to survive… or not. Either way it doesn’t mean anything, except to us as individuals.
Individually we may be lucky or not, but in the grand scheme of things, our presence really doesn’t matter.
The best we can do is surf the churn, allowing our survival instincts to dictate our choices.
The thing is, nothing will ever be the same again because our jungle is tearing itself apart. We can’t predict what the new configuration will be. We’ll only know when it’s done.
I’m pretty rule based. I can exist, even happily, in chaos but only by recognizing that I’m in a chaotic situation. I’ve been laboring under the assumption that the chaos we’ve been in was transient and things would return to normal next month, the month after, maybe the one after.
But that is a lie. It’s a lie we’re being told to keep us complacent and prevent us from fully engaging in The Churn. The effect is that all of us are attempting to live in some shared delusion that this will all come to an end and our lives will be returned to us, based on some external force.
If in fact there is a “New Normal”, a new jungle, then we all have to go all in. We need to stop nibbling on the barrel and accept it. If that means rejecting all the laws that have previously bound us, so be it.
We’ve all pretty much come to the conclusion that COVID while real, isn’t the killer, set your hair on fire and run in tight circles, that we’ve been told it is. But still people are obeying arbitrary and capricious laws, & made up regulations.
We’ve all seen live, that rioting is becoming more common over the slightest of perceived infractions. As the police departments are defunded they will be less and less able to provide the protections that they were established to provide. Leaving average people to fend for themselves.
While at the same time witnessing harassment of average people on the streets just trying to go about their lives. We’ve seen that protecting ourselves results in imprisonment while our politicians are telling us that they’re releasing career criminals due to concerns over COVID.
Rampant and obvious corruption is visible and yet the talking heads charged with providing timely and accurate information, are doing their absolute best to look the other way.
We know that at least one candidate to our highest office is unfit for the job and clearly ill. We’re living in a barely suppressed anarchy. Regardless of a vaccine, regardless of the election, regardless of changes to the police forces. This will not stop. We’ll never get to the old normal again. The only reason the anarchy is suppressed at all is because we’re all waiting for something to magically fix it.
Waiting for magic, is waiting for a train that ain’t coming.
We must recognize that the only way through this is full speed ahead and embrace the Anarchy. Someone screws with you while you’re minding your own business, punch their lights out, or punch their ticket to where ever they’re bound for. For good measure rob ‘em. It doesn’t matter anymore. Who’re they gonna call? You were strong enough to take their shit, it’s yours. If they die well they aren’t going to be needing it anyway.
We’re all predators, the only reason we don’t kill each other more regularly is because we’re generally law abiding and mostly polite. That doesn’t seem to be working for us anymore.
In The Churn it’s better to be the top predator than prey. That’s the law of the jungle and apparently it’s the current law in places like Chicago, Seattle, Portland, LA, Minneapolis, New York, and Pittsburgh, these days.
If the whole country is gonna be like these cities then fine. I may not make it, but I’m not going alone. Simultaneously, don’t expect to arrest me for doing what every other predator is doing.
It’s time to embrace it, time to let all that rage and predatory instinct out. Time to decide what do we really want. I’d be happy with law and order.
But I will not accept that I have to obey laws that are stupid or pointless while others are immune to those same laws.
If it’s to be no law, okay then, let’s all go back to the jungle en mass. When the blood and destruction reaches some critical point…
Then I’d imagine a new jungle will have been created, and the survivors will beg for law, order, and justice again.