the_dunk_tank

Sincere post - am I doing something harmful to myself or my psyche? Am I being too insular in staying away from the mental sewer pipes of , twitter, etc in search of places where I don't see this shit? Should I desensitize myself a little to people like this? Because I tend to avoid people like this. In real life, I'm careful to only stay close with people who are, at their core, kind and loving and empathic. I also do this online.

I hate this person. I truly do, and every other sniveling, servile, cowardly, shithead like them. I don't like hating this person, and I don't like hating people at all. I'll always hate , but it's no moral crime to hate your oppressor. For this person, my hatred feels more real and visceral and it makes me uncomfortable.

A few years ago I visited White Sands National Park. To get there I had to drive through Alamogordo, a town that seems to mostly exist to service the nearby air force base. On the main tourist track that leads to the park, I passed a kind of mini strip mall set up alongside the road. It was all run-down buildings or shacks or roadside tents covered in native American symbolism with shitty names that I don't care to repeat, selling trinkets and baubles. The people working there all looked, at a glance, to be native American as well. An entire culture reduced to selling bits of "authentic Indian silver" or whatever to scratch out a living. The survivors of a genocide trying to make some money off of the bits of their culture that can be commodified. This is my first time ever discussing that sight, and it's still hard to articulate it. The feeling was so heavy, so suffocating, such a powerful sense of wrongness and injustice that it defies my limited powers of this language to communicate. An entire continent of people - dozens of cultures and languages and histories and peoples slaughtered and displaced and deposited at the edges of a new society that would prefer them gone and relegated to black-and-white photos.

So, GBU_28 is trying to handwave away what America did because Ghengis Khan did it as well. Native Americans weren't "noble savages" by any means. I'm sure they fought and inflicted cruelty and callousness on their fellow man just as all peoples have done. But we stole this place. In its entirety. This entire nation, as well as its equally savage brother-country to the north, ground up the first peoples' bones to use in the foundational concrete. Mods remove this if it's too much, but I truly hope that GBU_28 suffers in this life. I'm fully convinced that this person who I've never met and I never will should truly be subject to the worst agonies and miseries conceivable by the human mind. No physical or emotional torment could compare with what they're trying to "yada yada yada" away.

It can't be good for me.