Insomnia is useful sometimes. Up next: Steal This Book. I’m not done with “The Mole People” yet, but I’ll probably wrap it up tomorrow. My personal opinion is a lot of it is exaggerated if not outright fabricated. At best, the writing is sensationalist. Maybe I’m cynical, but I find it hard to believe a young, attractive woman wandering the underworld of New York City would weather through the experience relatively unscathed and come out with the stories she did. Yes, go ahead and call me cynical. I prefer the term “realistic.” I also hate the way proper grammar deems that the period should go within the quotation marks on that last sentence I wrote. I usually knowingly shirk that rule.

You know, I think it’s one thing to know something and then actually see it in person. Like for example, you know people die. Death is an inevitable force that all have to acknowledge. However, it’s completely different to know that people die vs. seeing someone die. It’s completely different to know a crush you have is dating someone vs. seeing them out on a date with that person. I don’t know why acknowledgment isn’t enough sometimes for the mind to fully appreciate a situation.

Abbie Hoffman was crazy. I don’t think I have the personality to become a revolutionary. It could be because I don’t feel oppressed enough, or at all, for that matter. I’ve had stray thoughts about this: I’m not sure I’m the sort to not go along with rampant fascist nationalism if it occurred. On a smaller scale, I don’t feel like I’ve ever had a problem with doing anything anyone in a position of authority has asked me to do. I’m not sure if that should be comforting (with the idea that I’ve been ordered about by relatively moralistic people throughout my life) or extremely distressing (given that maybe I should question things more, if I’ve never had a huge problem with anything anyone has ever asked me to do). Here’s an aspect of me that’s not so cynical - I’m more apt to believe the former of that previous statement than the latter. I’m neurotic. I think that my massive guilt complex would have kicked in if I wasn’t okay with things that were (or are currently - especially at my job) asked of me. I think this is segueing into a question of what imbues morality into a person. Am I okay with doing things because someone has told me such things are “right” or am I okay with doing things because my own flavor of morality (gained through life experience) validates what I do? Hrm.

I think some things transcend through the basis of humanity. I’d be hard pressed to bet that the vast majority of people on earth (excluding those with the appropriate mental disorders/psychosis) wouldn’t initially feel guilty over killing someone who didn’t oppose an immediate threat to personal safety or the safety of those they love. I’d like to believe that initially, humans value life and see the loss of it something to grieve over (making the conscious decision to take someone else’s life outside of a survivalist situation a universal moral dilemma). It gets pretty relative beyond that though. Throw in a few years of indoctrinating ideals and saturating someone with rhetoric, you have a good, willing solider for participation in the Crusades or jihad or Holocaust. That initial sense of slaughtering hordes of defenseless people as not the greatest of ideas becomes the only moral solution for a now conceived problem. In fact, you would not be living a righteous life if you didn’t pick up your sword/molotov cocktail/gun and participate in whatever agenda is laid out before you.

The pastor of the church I go to sometimes (it’s a great church, by the way) used the argument that God has to exist because of an innate sense of morality He instilled into people. While I do not question that God surely has given people a general sense of Him and while I surely do not doubt that He exists, I wouldn’t consider that the strongest of arguments. We have free will to do and believe as we please, or to even not believe - free will is a somewhat difficult thing to argue against and more of a constant than some idea of base morality.

To get back to what I initially started with: I don’t know if I’d be that great of a revolutionary. I don’t know where my guilt complex would be if I was the average German citizen in the 1930s. The idea freaks me out.

Why the hell is Che so damn iconic? I need to pick up a biography.

By the by, no one I know has recently died, nor do I currently have eyes for anyone.

This post went a lot of places without any seeming connection. My thoughts are disjointed. I don’t feel the need to apologize about it; I’m just owning up to it.