9/14/2023 0 Comments Space haven alien infectionSay what you will about philosophical extremism, at least it’s an ethos. After all, it was the lapses into fashionable normalcy that took me closest to destruction, and discussing things you can’t say with trusted comrades that set me right. Statistically speaking, this leaves us especially vulnerable to extremism. Engineers take for granted that we can systematically understand the world. My own drug of choice was homebrew extremist ideology-anarchism, primitivism, transhumanism, monarchism, you name it. Some kids didn’t entirely fit in, or fit too well into the wrong thing, and so they died. Is art the problem? The subcultures were mostly an opportunistic infection, maybe just an aesthetic expression of the despair and confusion we didn’t know how to feel. Nor does music explain the stories I’ve heard from the next school over where half the art scene is dead. And anyway, most people don’t die when they listen to the wrong music. You would also have to blame punk, alt-rock, and grunge. And between the personalities and the producers, rap is much easier to blame on someone else.īut not everyone was into rap. In the case of many of my friends, it did. Rap is almost deliberately concocted to lure kids into delinquent self-destruction. It’s not polite to notice, but you couldn’t honestly deny it if you saw the fatal descent up close. You would be closer to the mark to blame rap music. It doesn’t explain the insanity or the suicides. But that doesn’t explain how these kids got into drugs in the first place. You might blame the Chinese drug lords trying their revenge for the Opium Wars, the Mexican drug lords pulling one over on the gringo, or the corrupt officials who let either of them push their poison into our country to begin with. Maybe half were ultimately killed by fentanyl, whether laced into other drugs, taken deliberately for a high, or used for something darker. It started with weed, alcohol, and cigarettes, and escalated into party drugs, psychedelics, and street drugs. In most cases, the immediate cause was drugs. Outside of a few cases, there was no wretched poverty, underclass heredity, bad neighborhood, or particular institution that killed my friends. Some of these kids were in gifted programs, others were homeschooled, or in various alternatives. Our schools were decent, with a high rate of university admissions. They were executives, officials, professionals, and small business owners. If something is going wrong beneath all this, it’s hard to say what. I go back occasionally and it’s still like that, a beautiful little slice of apparently happy civilization. Our relatives, neighbors, and longtime countrymen presided over us in government. Our neighbors were mostly Anglos and Greeks, with a multicultural smattering of others. There were plenty of kids and little crime or overt social dysfunction. We grew up in a desirable middle-class suburb near the beach, a 30-minute walk from downtown. I don’t want to paint too bleak of a picture. Pour libations for the dead homies, but let’s give them their privacy. I could tell you their stories, but we’d be here all day. Some are surviving and recovering others, I don’t know. Of the survivors, many are strung out, violently insane, living on the street, in jail, selling sex for money, or just too whacked out to be talked to. Unexpectedly, it includes that promising and beautiful girl who gave a great speech at a rally. Not too unexpectedly, it includes that one kid in elementary school with a single dad. It includes the guy I looked up to in sixth grade, who mentored me in my social development. Those dead also include the brothers, sons, boyfriends, and girlfriends of those close to my family. The worst instance is the loss of two of my best friends that I spent countless hours of adventure with. Many of my friends from high school are dead.
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