hex_m_hell

CW: gun violence, abuse dynamics

It is the immensity of the evil that summons for me this rage. More the scale than even the quality of the cruelly, and even more than that is it cruelty for its own sake.

The murder of Alex Pretty isn't a side effect, or an accident. To disarm someone, pin them down, and then, when fully disarmed, to execute them while helpless. That's the whole point. That's the whole system. There is nothing more. All of the organs of the system exist solely to inflict suffering, to sustain and grow trauma. The system holds a wolf by the ears, shaking and screaming, just to hold on for one more moment.

Without suffering, there is only death. When the system can no longer inflict enough trauma to subjugate it's victims, when the people numb to the beatings and rise, when there is no longer enough violence to trigger their freeze response, then the system will be destroyed by a wave of unquenchable rage.

This is the abuse cycle, where the victim kills their abuser or is killed by them. Can a whole country, a whole people, be killed? We're going to find out.

I am seven or eight, perhaps older, lying in my bunk bed, awake in the darkness. As I lay awake trying to sleep I start to roll over and time begins to slow down. I feel a presence float over me. I try to thrash free, but I am swimming in thick pine tar, stiff molasses arms ignore my frantic demands to claw, hit, escape, do anything. I thrash to not see, not acknowledge because by acknowledging I fear I may reify, this silken mist that darts and flows towards towards my face, staring at me through the tremendous vacant unblinking black orbs. I open my mouth to scream and the eyes become even more empty, empty always empty, with a mouth-less wraith hunger that grows as it feeds. The scream of my terror is silence, as it locks my gaze in it's evil eyes.

Then I am screaming, alone in my bed. Shaking, I sit up and scream again, scrambling out of the room. I don't know if the house was haunted or just my childhood, but I never felt safe during those years. Perhaps it was the trauma, perhaps it was the high power transmission lines we lived so close to you could always hear that faint buzz on a still evening.

Night after night, the same, until I finally refused to go to sleep in my room, in that bed. I think I snuck out of my bed, waiting until my mother was asleep so I could escape this place of terror.

I started sleeping on the couch. One night the same apparition came, the same terror demanding my attention. But as my body comes back under my control and the vision vanishes, I find myself on the couch instead of in my bed. It had always been a dream, and with that realization it never happened again. I had banished the wraith, or so I thought.

But the ghost escaped. We all live with it now, our stare locked to the horror we watch through tiny windows. It demands our attention now. We try to scream, with all our force, but millions of voices vanish into it's eternal maw. Mouthless and screaming, it feeds on our suffering, fattens our terror by on the suffering of others.

You grasp it now and we feel you cannot look away.