The World Is Not Going to Take On Itself
2004-10-13 - 10:36 p.m.

“The world is not going to take on itself.”

He looked at me earnestly. He wanted some sort of a response. I wanted to agree with him, but his statement seemed so obvious that agreement seemed redundant. I gave him a weak nod and he continued.

“If we want to fight the world, and actually win, we’ve got to take some initiative. Take the bull by the horns, turn the tides, you know what I mean, man.”

I didn’t, and was a little disappointed that the revolution couldn’t come up with some new catchphrases.

“Society isn’t going to fight with itself. We’ve got to meet it in the battlefield, and we’ve got to be as merciless as it is. We’ve got to be willing to demoralize it the way that it demoralizes us.

“We need to stop winking and grinning, and fight. We need to end war, but history has shown us that peaceful protest isn’t the answer. If we want to affect change, we’ve got to do it by destroying the old guard, the ones who are too stuck in their ways to see that there are better ways to live. We’ve got to absolutely decimate them, because if we don’t, they’ll destroy us.”

I ordered another drink and settled deeper in my seat, leaning back and propping my feet on the bar. I asked him who the enemy was exactly, and his ears caught fire and his cheeks swelled like balloons.

“The enemy is everyone who is not one of us.”

Somehow, having this conversation had made the two of us brothers. To him, there were no longer to unique individuals, but now only the universal “us.” I didn’t correct him.

“You see that woman? She’s the enemy.”

I looked out the window, and saw a young woman, no more than twenty, passing by the front window. She looked harmless enough to me.

“I imagine she’s been with ten men this week, and soon she’ll get knocked up, if she hasn’t been already. As soon as she finds out that there’s a child growing inside her, she’ll be moving to put a stop to that, make no mistake. She’ll pay some amoral medical worker to violate his Hippocratic oath and end life instead of preserving it. He’ll rip out the child’s brains, throw the tiny body in a trash can, and both of them with go on with their mindless, selfish, careless lives. She’ll do this several times during her life, and no one will care. If I were to kill ten men, I would be a psychopath, but she can kill as many as she wants, as long as she kills them before they have names, and society will wink and smile.”

I tried to protest that his characterization of her was unfair, that he didn’t know her at all, and surely couldn’t feel justified in judging her. He shrugged off my protest.

“If not her, someone else. What does it matter? The point is not that she specifically is the enemy, but that the society that created her will create more like her, or, if your objection is founded, more who are worse than her. She may not be the enemy, but she is unwittingly consorting with them, and someday may become one.”

“But by your logic,” I said, “you and I would also be outlaws. We would be effectively opposing ourselves by being products of a world with which we disagree. We would have to defeat ourselves.”

He drew his face up into a squint.

“And we have done so! We have broken free from the world! We are products of it only to the extent that two humans were required to create our physical forms. In spirit, we are as separate from them as the east is from the west. See that man?”

I looked, and saw a man, forty or forty-five, leaning against the wall, smoking a cigar. His eyes were moving up and down the body of fine young thing that had just walked in.

“He’s some sort of a sex pervert.”

I laughed at his audacity.

“You laugh, but you’ll see that I’m correct. This society we live in tells us that sexuality is something to flaunted and shown off, like a proud parents shows off their suckling, or like a rich man would show off his new yacht. There is no sense of propriety, no sense of what is too far. We can see things on fifty-foot billboards nowadays that would have been mortifying in the bedroom fifty years ago.

“Right now, he’s looking at that woman, wishing he could have her. When she leaves, he will follow her, and he will take her, whether she likes it or not. He will take her, by charm or by force, to fulfill the need that society has brought to the surface and amplified so that he can no longer resist it.”

“But what about the girl?” I asked. “Even if you were right about the man’s intentions, the girl would still be an innocent party in your world of enemies.”

“No,” he said, with a patronizing grin. “Anything that happens, she has brought on herself. Do you see the way she’s dressed, the way she walks, the way she gives him bedroom eyes in public? She can hardly be absolved of all blame for her fate. It really is a tragedy, but both man and woman are playing both parts, that of attacker and victim. The woman is the victim of the man, but they are both victims and willing adherents of this malignant society.”

“You’re crazy, and I’m not joking. You think every woman is selfish, every man is a predator, and worst of all, you think that all tragedy is deserved. You see everything in black and white, but your own high moral ground is compromised by your violent solutions to the problems you see. I’m leaving now, and I’m going to pretend this conversation never happened.”

I stood, and he grinned sickly. His face looked like a skull.

“I appreciate your listening to me, young man, but I’m afraid I didn’t tell you this for my health. You see, nothing I have told you will ever come to pass.

“Oh, I see your eyes brightening, but don’t think that I’ve come to my senses, or rather, to your senses. It’s just that, for these people, nothing will ever happen again.”

With that, he exploded. He was right, it was the last thing that ever happened to me.