A Means to an End (Thanks, Joy Division, for this Title)

It is such a difficult time to be writing about the world around us from a fictional standpoint. Anything that I could possibly come up with to write pales in comparison to what is going on in the real world, and it is a constant bombardment of absurdity.

This country went from having the illusion of freedom to full on fascism to being the fulcrum point of what appears to be a full out world war three scenario all while maintaining a bombardment of an attempt at covering up a president who is clearly a rapist and pedophile. All while people are still in support of this nonsense. The mental gymnastics people have to perform in order to justify this behavior is so fucking insane, too, that it really can't be touched with any logic or grounding in reality.

The amount of times I have sat down to begin writing a short story or to attempt to continue on with the novel I have been working on without the ability to gain a footing in anything that feels substantial is beyond absurd. I just sit down and begin to put words down only to realize that it ultimately says nothing and goes nowhere.

Which takes me back to the first term of this nightmare. I began writing a satirical novel about a clown that is so ego driven that he ends up destroying the entire profession of being a clown by forcing everyone attached to it into feeding his ego or being relegated to obscurity. The anchor point of that entire story was a woman who rejects this clown, but he is so egocentric that he just believes her to be resisting her own desires for him. Playing with the disconnect from reality was going to be the driving force of attempting to explain how someone could make such horrendous choices, and justify the choices to themselves and those around them.

It became too hard to write. As dark and depressing as I can be, I don't like to write from a place of justifying villainy. I have before, sure, because all roads to hell are paved with good intention or whatever. I prefer to say it like this - everyone does what they believe is right at the point in time that they make any choice. It may be an ill informed decision. It may be a decision made because someone needs the immediate satisfaction of their choice. It could be a decision made because they feel like the consequences are worth it. It could be an action made inside an emotional state that they can't gain good perspective within. Or it could be an action that a person cannot foresee the consequences, but regardless - every choice a person makes is the choice that person feels is the best choice for them to make within that moment in time, and them telling themselves or anyone else any differently is just them disconnecting from their reality.

But when it comes to someone, or a group of people, like those in the current administration, they really don't deserve justification. They don't deserve understanding for any other reason than to learn how to prevent it from happening ever again, but sadly, I just don't believe that humanity will ever be able to truly rid itself of the plague of this kind of mentality, but I honestly don't believe that is truly possible - as I've stated.

Life would be significantly better, though, if we didn't allow those who are so egocentric to rise to any kind of power. Though, I would be hard pressed to believe that anyone would want that kind of power if they weren't egocentric to begin with. I suppose that on rare occasions that people could step up to points of leadership as a means to balance the scales, but I think that even they would have to be egocentric to believe they would be special enough to make a difference.

Any way you look at it, however - we live in a world where entire cities are on fire because oil reserves have bled out into sewers, a world where entire cultures are being wiped off the face of the Earth so that the ultra rich can put up luxury resorts in their place, a world where officers of the law are capturing people off of the streets they are supposed to be defending, and a military who is now being claimed to be in honor of religion. A world where the rich are so fucking rich that they could lose 99% of their wealth and still have billions while people are dying on the streets because they are starving to death. A world where artificial intelligence is being shoved down our throats so intensely that we can't even be on the internet without it interacting with us in some capacity - whether it be half the comments you're reading on an Instagram post or what shows up on an internet search before you get the first actual result to your inquiry.

In the pursuit of convenience, we have handed over all of our humanity to people who are so egocentric that they would destroy the entire planet in the pursuit of proving to everyone who can see them that they have value.

And here I am, just wishing I had the ability to come up with writing that felt clever enough to be worth writing.

-Dustin S. Stover