I'm beginning to believe I don't know what affect I have on people, if I ever did. I certainly don't think I'm a kind person who cares deeply for his fellow man of any age or gender. I don't hate people. I just don't see the sense in investing emotionally in the other one way or the other. People are not in charge of themselves. That's why they're not reliable enough to invest emotionally energy into. People create models of behavior for themselves so that if they mimic those models, they'll become the kind of person they've been convinced they should be, and not have to be humiliated by the kind of person they think they are. It's not enough.
The species-wide flaw Sartre mentions comes heavily into play here on the subjective, individual level of Being. Homo sapiens can no more realize their own individual possibilities in real time than a herd animal, which they most definitely are. If the crowded theater they hear someone scream "FIRE!!' in just happens to be where they're located at that moment, they'll stampede just like a herd of antelopes at the first sign of a predator.
I saw a V-For Victory film while I was in the Navy about what happened inside the "showers" the Jewish victims of the Nazis were mass-murdered. There was a comment to the effect that there were always a number of people killed by the victims rush for the doors. The bodies didn't have to be dragged from the back side of the room. They were piled up at the doors where they tried desperately to get out.
I don't remember the circumstances or what needed to be there to see those World War Two films. As I recall, they were always shown in the mess hall while the ship was at sea. They may have shown them while we were in port, but I don't remember seeing them in port. They were a pretty gruesome lot. There seemed to be what seemed like "captured film" footage that was real time evil shit. All the films I saw of this type were contained within the "V For Victory" packaging that seemed like it served as the government's stamp of approval.
It was in one of those films that I saw one of the most impressive sights I can recall. A large hole had been bull-dozed into the side of a hill that over-looked what appeared to be a concentration camp with watch towers. Next to the large hole was a group of German soldiers protected by machine gun nests.
Leading up to the group of German soldiers was a long, single file line of people who were randomly dressed in prison garb with stripes. I think they were all men. When the man in the front of the line reached the German soldiers at the edge of the large hole, he would step up to the edge of the hole, and a German officer would put his pistol up to the man's head, shoot him dead, and his body would fall into the hole. It all seemed so polite. The next man would step right up. It went on and on for a good long while in the film. They showed the bullets exploding the men's skulls. Gone. Nobody ran.
I've never understood why the Germans filmed that scene. I guess they never considered they'd lose the war. I don't know why the Navy had those films on the ship. They were shown for entertainment just like regular movies were. Maybe in place of movies when no new movies were aboard. There were no women allowed to serve aboard ship back then. I can't imagine the Navy allowed those type of films to be shown in a mixed group. Even at the time I got the feeling it was a male-only sort of arrangement.
I've written about how I went through a period of paranoia for a month or so right after I was assigned to my first ship in the Navy. There was a real reason for my paranoia. It followed the occasion when I first actually realized I was going to die like everybody else who ever lived. I don't know if this happens to other people or not. I've met my share of adult people who still don't seem to have realized they're gonna die too.
For me, it happened like a package-deal. There was a distinct beginning, my wild-eyed reaction to that initial incident, and I finally got over it and learned to cope. I'm not all that sure what the incident was that made me realize I was going to die (and it could be any minute without expectation), but it may have had something to do with what i saw in that one film about those men lining up like that to die.
I couldn't look away from what I saw happening in the film. My mind analyzed it as the film rolled to satisfy myself it was not a contrived scene. The way the victims fell into the hole and bounced at the bottom would have been enough to convince me. I don't think they could have paid that many actors to get that skinny and emaciated to satisfy a certain look of authenticity. It was just another incident that has moved me to believed that human beings will do anything you ask them to, if you observe the right rituals, including lining up politely and stepping right up when it's your turn to get shot in the head. I only wondered a little about how the Germans could have played their roles the way they did.
This type of incident happens a lot all over the world apparently. Maybe they're able to martyr themselves individually as it happens. Candidly, I don't think I would blow myself up for the promise of seventeen virgins in paradise. Maybe when I was young and dumb, and full of cum, but the powers that be have let me live too long and see too much for me not to at least try to bite my state executioner on the leg before I croaked.
I don't remember exactly why I remember this one brief period of paranoia at the realization I too was gonna die. It didn't last that long. The whole thing was over in a month. I do remember it happened during a period the ship I was on was home-ported in San Diego, and I was going to Tijuana every chance I could when I had any money. It was only twelve miles from downtown San Diego, and a city bus would take me to the border for a pittance.
I think I was around nineteen years old when I realized I was gonna die. I hadn't been off the farm or outta the small villages on the coastal plains of North Carolina for more than a year, when I realized some of those adventure stories I'd read in my youth about people who would kill you for nothing in a heart beat was getting more true with each adventure i took upon myself.
I was the epitome of The Ugly American to people who hadn't had my advantages in life. I didn't know I had advantages in life, and it took me an extraordinary amount of time to figure out I had lived a privileged life just by having been born in America.
I reached the bottom of my ugliness in Yosemite National Park in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California. I've described jumping off that cliff trying to kill myself and didn't get a scratch on me. It was after I did that and miraculously survived that I reached the bottom. I was already safe. I had turned blue all over from my rude exposure to freak snowstorm. I had eventually warmed up, but i was starving. I found my way to the large restaurant at the Park Lodge. I only had a dollar and some change to buy food. I bought a package peanut-butter crackers and a cup of hot coffee, and my money was gone. The refills on coffee cost extra, and gave the widow's mite for that second cup of coffee. Drinking that second cup of coffee after having barely escaped death was when I hit bottom. I sat there sipping that precious hot fluid plotting the savage murder of a group of young teen-aged girls sitting not five feet away from me. I wanted to murder them because they had trays full of food they were gonna piddle around eating while I was sitting next to death.
I didn't realize at first that I was thinking about murdering those innocent girls. I didn't realize it while I was wobbly standing up to go do that. I didn't have any weapons, I was just gonna rip 'em apart limb by limb, I reckon, but when I took the first step toward them I suddenly realized what I intended to do, and literally had to force myself to run out of the building instead. I'm convinced even today that if I'd take that second step I wouldn't have been able to stop myself.
That moment was the weakest physically I've ever been in my life. I'm fairly sure I couldn't have hurt those girls much before they whipped my ass and called the cops. But, if I had taken that second step toward them to exercise my evil intent I would never have been able to fight my way back to sanity.
I barely did. The reason I didn't have enough money to eat much was that I had asked a park ranger about getting public transportation off those mountains. He told me for $6 I could get a bus ticket to Bakersville down in the desert near the Pacific Ocean. I got on that bus. I liked to have been thrown off the bus by the driver because of how weird I was acting. I was near death physically and borderline psychotic at the same time.
I know that have been people who were just as desperate as I was in that moment who would kill me for no good reason in the same way or worse as that day I wanted to commit murder and mayhem on those young girls. I'm sure I have thrown money around that could have saved somebody's life right in front of them, and never even noticed their desperation no more than those little girls did mine.
When the bus finally did get to Bakersville and I got out of it there was a vacant lot across the street from the bus station, and I took what I had left over to it and literally laid down on that hot sand and let the Sun heal me from nearly freezing to death up in the mountains. I've never been back to Yosemite National Park. Every once in a while I'll read about hikers who get stuck in summer snow storms there. A couple of years ago, three Japanese hikers died right near where I had my misadventure.
There are probably more ways than I can recognize that I'm still an ugly american. I don't know how I could go to Jamaica again with feeling that way just because I only had enough to feed myself. Abject poverty is a sorry way to live without hope. Yet, there is a saving grace to be earned from it. It taught me to stay on the side of the lowly. It's better to be poor than killed for being thoughtless, ugly, and rich.
I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
