Blood on my hands

Blood on my hands

Samuel Bird

I have never been to dinner with a fool. Or at least, I have never been to dinner with someone who self-purported to be a fool. I have never been friends with someone who was abusive to their most intimate relationships. I have only once met someone who self-reported to be a defiler and a murderer. Neither have I done any of the above with a liar, a cheat, or a villain. However, the numbers just don’t add up. Such a percentage of the population are convicted of a given crime. Half the people in the world have below-average intelligence. Surely someone must be responsible for all the victims and oppression of all the people I meet because none of them are admitting they are adding this into the world. From this, we can learn that people do not report themselves as they are, but as they would have us believe they are. Tell me you commit violence to your children, and you know that I would enact a sense of justice on you. There is something more to this. I hear all day about how someone was trespassed against. More than just the celebration of martyrdom and victimcy in my day as if it had merit itself, it makes me wonder how everyone is oppressed, but no one is identifying themselves as being the oppressor. Is this because I happen to have just met the most wonderful people around? Far from it. In fact, in the consequence of these people’s lives, I have found each of the horrors they wouldn’t warn me they would commit. For this reason, don’t let the insignias and symbols of language catch you away into the realm of social posturing, and forget the very real repercussions of actions. With the moral system you carry in your heart, weigh what you witnessed them do, not what they told you they did. I wish I would have learned this lesson when I was younger so my psyche wouldn’t have had to detach from reality to believe what I was told over my own experience. Likewise men of old, I ask, is it I? Still, there is one more question to ask here. What blood is on my hands?

In privacy and darkness, I confront myself. The happenstance social rules melt away as I am left with a series of memories from my life, and an effort to resolve them to my sense of self. I fancy myself funny, but this joke in memory left people confused and uncomfortable. I labor to utilize my intelligence, but then when asked a simple question, I wonder if I ever had any to use. I work to be social and outgoing, but then a memory comes of me shutting down and being quiet. Finally, I carry deep in my soul this notion that I am of valuable effect to the souls around me. As both author and character, I seek to support people toward preparing themselves to say they valued their lives when it came to a close. For this reason, light, frivolous kindness is not included. What would be, is an effort to exemplify and promote meaning in their engagement with the world. And how do I fair? How many lives were not made the better? How many times was someone waiting for someone that had my mission to show up, and I failed them? Love omitted and distractions engaged as I allowed lower and baser values such as comfort and giving into fear to keep me from letting hard-earned greatness spill out to aid. I remember a memory that tears at my notion of acceptability. In a harshly impoverished household with a damaged soldier father and a substance-addicted mother, lived a blonde-haired little girl. I would visit them to see if I couldn’t do something to make their lives better. I would go, and they would cook up food from whatever turtle or raccoon they happened to find. The father was unstable and would discipline his daughter on a whim. A smack for crying made more crying and readied her for another slap. The scene tore at my soul as I cursed every law that prevented me from stealing that child away and giving her a safer and more secure life. I never knew what to say. Finally, I stood up to the father and told him that this would not continue. He was a soldier, but I was a cowboy. He looked down and away submissively as either from my physical threat or from moral embarrassment. This may seem like a win to you, but I began to be involved with them much less from this point. I think of that little girl often. Later, she would be placed in foster care and I would try to locate her to no avail. Samuel, you fool and weakling. The day will come that this little girl will remember a man that came by and knew better. This man would have the moral backbone and be in a position to help, but would only talk to your father sternly one time. She will wonder why someone who purported to be so good, somehow allowed the horrors to continue. You may ask, what am I referring I could do that I didn’t. I don’t know, but what I do know is that I failed to help this little girl and that she will not soon forget that failure. I recall neighbors who would walk about their houses as they heard the screams from me and blows from my father and did nothing. I worked to not hate them, but I find myself at least hurt. Wherever you are, I want you to know I am sorry. I wish that my character didn’t fail you when you needed me most. You deserved a great man to save you, and I found that day that I was not one. 

If this was as far as my offenses went, then let it be so. However, there are just the failings by omitting to add value. What about all the woes I have committed? Young desperation led me to steal food as I could. You could make a case I was desperate, but it was not the fault of the local grocier that I was. The chaos of my early years equated to a powerful anger that kept me warm during cold nights and alive during violent days. This survival method had the unintended consequence of harming those who didn’t deserve so. The cruel words hurled at a younger sister, the tactical retribution of my enemies, and stealing away of power from those around me, each created their own hurt. While I am no utilitarian, I consciously wish for no pain that is not for the betterment of others. However, at this time my situation made it difficult to have this reflection. All the sharp moves I made in the night to secure my existence stole away the quality to which others could possess the same. Surely I could excuse the taking of resources from them that had much. No, for I had brought no value into the world to merit that acquisition. There is one more particular commission that keeps me from sleeping; the girl I once loved so much, I only found out my heart was so large when I found how many shards it left behind. This person was once preeminent in what I cherished. When I found that my greatest fears about myself were confirmed and that something about me was not of sufficient value for her, the hurt overflowed my faculties and began to affect those around me. I secluded myself from all of society and began to curse the very things I was lived for. I remember in the last words she heard me say, I said that I regretted her. No matter the pain this caused me and late nights with toes over cliff’s edge, how could I say this? How could I lose the greatest thing I thought I had ever been a part of, and then wish it ill as it went away? What ill does this now speak against me? 

The point I am trying to make here is not to self-punish more than is necessary and valuable. The point I am trying to make is that for every way that I am affected, I affect. My father would often scream at me as a child and wait for a response that had no right answers to prevent the next screaming. Once he waited pensively for my retort, with ringing ears I would tell him what I thought was most accurate, even if it meant the volume would sway to violence. Somehow in the extremity of the moment, I would find myself talking too loudly. He would then accuse me of yelling at my own father and remind me that this sort of disrespect would not be tolerated, as if there was something else about me that he would tolerate. I noticed something here. He was acutely aware of how I was affecting him, while having little cognition of how he was affecting me. I have since gone on to see some degree of low awareness of hyper-sensitivity has placed people where they speak more evil into the world than they hear. In a strange irony, these same people often are first to publish their woes with no asking. This then became my goal as a young man. I wanted to do less evil than was done to me. As this is relative to what I experienced, at first it allowed for more vitriol as needed. Now as I have found some degree of safety, my effort to do more than is done for me has allowed me to do some wonderful things for some incredible people. Of course, work to be aware and see yourself outside of yourself, perhaps through another’s eye like God. Additionally, it would help to learn to soothe your soul against the ways that it is sensitive to being treated. However, keep in mind that all the evils you see your enemies doing, may just find some equivelancy in what you breathe into the world. For this reason, you can at minimum be comforted by the ratio of value taken and expelled. In the effort to do so, I find that excuses are the exoskeleton that the soul won’t shed to become bigger. Strike me a thousand times, and I still hope I don’t speak evil on my way away from you. If you seek to be great, hold yourself to a standard that only the great could meet. Then, find a way to work out in your mind your failings as you will find them many. 

You will notice I stay away from specific ethical theories as they each flow out from a given Esse Maxim, and only seek to discuss Esse Maxim and its possibilities with no assurances. There is one ethical thought experiment that finds the perceiver looking down to see a trolley that is before a fork in the track. On one side of the fork is a single person. On the other side is a series of people who currently have the track switched to come to them. In the assumptions, you can’t go down to get the people off the track and the only controlled variable is the switch. Esse Maxim allows for a series of preeminent values that would then necessitate a specific action. However, this is one thing that Esse Maxim would necessitate that you do. You would at least shake, cry, and lament as you tried to figure out what to do. I have no answers to the many ways we think things should be. However, at the least, we should be worried, concerned, and engaged with the process. I am aware that my actions fail my values. I am aware that there are people who’s life have been made worse by my being a part of it. While time and causality don’t permit me to act once I receive the information after the event is over, there is one thing that I can do that keeps me honest and gives me the best chance I can have to do well. Whether or not I can wash it, I can be aware that there is in fact blood on my hands.