To Fight the World

     The time has come for me to exercise one of the few luxuries I have as the runner of a dead-end blog; complaining about my life to people who don’t care, and who wouldn’t care even if they existed. I hate living in a world that doesn’t see me as anything more than an object, a source of revenue, or something to be exploited for endless goods. I’m tired of having to give pieces of myself to every platform that I’m on just so that I can be taken advantage of by said platforms. I resent the fact that unless you’re really rich or have a broad social reach, there’s not a damn thing you can do about the problems all of us are facing right now. Our world is so fucked up that complaining about it has become a strong source of memes online, at least on the Internet that I tend to browse on. Things are so backwards that companies are using big social issues to try and move more product. Every June I see people saying, half-jokingly, half-bitterly, that companies only care about pride to move product, and the rest of the year they do nothing to help move the social needle on LGBTQIA+ rights. Hell, with the rise of the Alt-Right they’re actually pushing against LGBTQIA+ rights because supporting them, even superficially, is cutting into their bottom line. 

    Is it too much to ask that our world give us more of a reason to participate than just giving us more things to buy? Sure, there are a lot of causes that would improve the world, but those aren’t really about participation, are they? They’re about making you feel like you’re being virtuous or that you have more control over the bad things that happen to people than you really do. Also, let’s not forget that in a lot of cases the thing that helps people the most is just giving them more money. Everything revolves around money. Every. Single. Thing. If you don’t have a marketable skill, than you’re just screwed. Worse, most of the stuff isn’t even that good. I know a lot of people talk about supporting local artisans, but most of that is just to make sure the art people want to buy stays profitable. Companies will never understand that Art isn’t something you can mass produce. This is a problem if most of what you want to buy is art related in some way. Yes I realize that my writing is bad, but it’s still mine and I will defend my right to write whatever I want, just as I expect you to defend your right not to read any of what I post. 

     Yes, I want to fight something. I want to fight the world. Not anyone or anything in it. I want to fight our world itself and bring it to its knees, gasping for breath, begging for me to stop hitting its weak points. I want it to realize that crossing me this many times was a mistake, and if it wants me to let it go, than it needs to give me what I want, need, and hope for. I want to go toe to toe with the world in such a fashion that when it’s over people feel sorry for the world and say that I went way too far. 

    I’m not alone in this. Every person I see online, rich or poor, black or white, straight or not, has some sort of vendetta against our world. It’s so common that the corporations are using the hatred of white people for every other group to move product after product, lining their profits at the expense of everyone who isn’t them. We built this world bit by bit, grafting new pieces onto it as we ran into issues, but now that we’ve got something approaching a finished product we’re finding that we can’t stand it one bit. 

    I don’t have any answers for this. All I really know how to do is scream into a void that’s growing tired of hearing me complain. All I have is my right to speak as loudly as I want to. As much as I appreciate it, it doesn’t fix the exhaustion that comes with seeing more and more of my world gated off from anyone who doesn’t have the means to fit in. I remember a world that felt accessible, where even if you were poor you could still have a good time. Why do the rich feel the need to take that away from us?