5th Avenue

CW: violence, guns, SV

With power as the only metric of success, there's apparently no greater joy than declaring yourself above the confines of morality. He could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and not lose a single vote. When you're a star, they just let you do it.

It doesn't have to be 5th Avenue, or a gun. It can be a knife in New York. A gun in Kansas. A gun in Vegas. A gun in Pittsburgh. A drone in Afghanistan. A cage in New Mexico. A saw in Turkey. A service weapon in Texas. A storm in Puerto Rico. Lead filled pipes in Michigan. A hand anywhere.

It doesn't have to be him. Anyone can make themselves the king of a street, a house, or a room, if only just for a few seconds. This isn't a mechanism of survival. It's predation, simultaneously clearly understood by many and ignored by many more, powered by the primacy of the rights we honor of not only to its adherents, but the rights that we give violence itself.

The violently ambitious and a warming planet with walls, chains, borders, and fear ensure we'll never lack for opportunities to defend and reinvent our worship to violence in my lifetime. But these are choices, not destiny or nature.

Our bodies are restricted by what we can consume, endure, and move them through. But so are theirs. We can set prices for water, insulin, megaphones, and guns. We can commodify violence as a luxury good, but we shouldn't. We can decommodify education, medication, and food, and we should. We can choose when and how to remind each other of our bodies and their limitations as well as possibilities, and we should, but carefully and selflessly.

We can choose a perception of ambition as natural and universal, but we don't have to. We can choose our identities our frontier and others' as theirs, rather than ground to our figure.

You have a body, and when you are shot, your body takes the impact of metal traveling at hundreds of miles per hour. Blood rushes to clot at the damaged place and protect your organs. The bullet might bounce around and split apart while it's destroying tissue, shattering bones, and piercing through some part of some necessary system in your body, itself a system that we can't always control perfectly, and some day, will lose access to. Our bodies are our connection to the world: our friends, our family, our distractions. Getting shot can easily sever this connection in many obvious ways.

And someone sees this vulnerability we all have, the mere ability to be damaged and die, as an abstraction around which he can boast his power. People are objects to be potentially shot or vote for him.

We will never be a country that didn't at one point build our frontier from stolen land and our economy on stolen people. And we will never be a country that didn't at one point empower an administration so clearly corrupt and rapacious.

We can choose differently in the future, but without reconciling the interplay of ambition and violence, we'll only find ourselves recreating less obvious incarnations of the same underlying horrors.