Shoot Me!
Football and other major sports around the world have been replaced by a sport far more popular and for reasons similar to the popularity of boxing. This new sport is not a complicated sport at all, it doesn’t last for a long drawn out season, it doesn’t take much athletic ability, there are no lingering debates about who won, and the winner gets the ultimate visual success of seeing their opponent lying prone, no rematch, and all the anger of the moment is relieved as the contest has a genuine finality to it. Your opponent, so definitely, is now a permanent loser. No rematch, the triumph is final.
It’s not a civilized sport, requires only the mentality of a rabid dog, but the legality of it can be tricky. And even more attractive, we get to pick our opponent—but sometimes beating one opponent will not be sufficient to make our victory a media bonanza. While we can still make it a personal contest and pick out someone we despise, this will hardly make headlines. On the other hand, if we kill people at random, enough of them, and in the most outrageous way, sometimes making sure the least innocent of anything pay the price, then the rage inside us will be relieved the most, or it may be a ticket to Heaven. Most times there is no plan of escape; after the victory, you just want that ultimate moment of revenge, and then expect to be dead shortly, which means—finally, nothing else can ever aggravate you again. Some take heroin to alleviate the agony, but terrorists, if they die after their ‘dirty deed’ have a more permanent alleviation with their death.
In a world increasingly over populated, with more and more people living in dire poverty or sensing a dead end at every turn, with endless internet bombardment of information that keeps our blood boiling chronically day and night, it may become hard to remain emotionally under control. We know very well how some people live, here or far away, and we can’t accept how well they live and how poorly we exist. Sometimes we are so into our religious allegiance to an inherited religion of God’s chosen people, that it seems we need do God’s will and get rid of our perceived heathens. To die doing God’s will seems the right thing to do for the inherited God we love so well. God will be grateful. We helped Him out. We go to Heaven, virgins or no virgins.
Anyone can play this new sport. No endless training, no trying out for a team, no needing an athletic field or court to play on, no set rules, no set time or place required for the big game, just find the moment when you are emotionally strong enough to actually do it. Chances are you do not have many friends, so it is not like you lose in this category; chances are you are mentally or emotionally unstable and this torment needs to end; enough of whatever is enough. If this is what life is about then at least some larger number of victims need to pay the price for the hell in which you feel trapped. So you become a terrorist and seek the endless number of places and ways you can become one. Certainly most anyone can find a group gathering of those you despise and just take a wrong turn and plow right into them with your car or truck. Or if you want to really shock with your anger, just find kids in a school, or people in a theatre, or at nightclub, and so on, to massacre as many as you can in the limited time you have before all these intense feelings are permanently ended via your own death. This is not a complicated sport.
But maybe you really want to play the sport, but not really die as a consequence. There are people out there you don’t like—maybe their race, maybe their religion, maybe their culture, maybe their politics, maybe their affluence, maybe they are ghetto trash—whatever. You don’t want to die, you just wouldn’t mind if they died. That means you have to set it up, wait until the right opportunity. Most of us, with due patience, can find a situation in which we feel threatened by the kind of person we don’t have any use for. Finally, at last, we can stand our ground and kill them legally. As icing on the cake, all those who are like that person will be angry as hell but you have the law on your side. Tough, everyone has a right to defend themselves, and in America we use that right for more now than in other countries. We mostly lead the way in murders per capita, at least among the more civilized countries.
I wouldn’t want to be a policeman. Those raised like animals in ghetto like environments often, after years of such formative years environment, behave like animals, and it would be tough dealing with them day after day, night after night. Policemen have an advantage, and have for years. When I was young everybody knew the Chief of Police would shoot you if you misbehaved in his presence, not so much like if you were white, but if you were not white some policemen found an ego trip by treating minorities unfairly. That was kind of a well known sport back then. Not too many ran from the police in the old days, as they would sure as hell shoot you. Today this kind of thing has become a two way sport. Now both sides fear each other and this sport is growing in popularity. It doesn’t take a great effort to understand that both sides have reasonable reason to dislike the other. It is kind of useless to say “well most policemen are good policemen” or “most blacks, hispanics, poor people, and so on are good people”
To wrap this up: Legalized murder is on the rise now and rising at an exponential rate. Terrorism is on the rise and rising at an exponential rate. Politicians can talk tough, and do, about how they are going to teach the bad guys a lesson, but they more and more have less and less control over these new sports of terrorism and legalized murder. So, as is often the case, we have no real vision on where this carnage will lead. I don’t think I will try.
This musing was initiated by a mentally and emotionally disturbed student, who should, of course, have had access to mental health supervision, but this was left to the student and his parents. In a wide open space a mentally disturbed student (a normal student would not behave this way) slowly walks a considerable distance toward a group of police despite the fact the police have told him/her to put the knife down, and repeatedly/calmly tells the police to “shoot me”. There are ways to disable the student via chemical means, a prolonged standoff so the proper experts can talk the student out of his mental quirks, or they could shoot him/her in the leg or whatever, but to simply shoot him/her in the heart may be legal, and I suppose, shooting to death those mentally or emotionally ill, may be more humane than not providing them medical help for their mental/emotional problems. So we all take our pick, feel the way we feel, and no matter, these new popular global sports will grow in popularity, and if eventually bombs start getting thrown around as some sort of grand finale then maybe that will be nature’s way of dealing with human overpopulation.
We obviously cannot enforce responsible reproduction on ourselves, so Mother nature will deal with it, and she always wins, but often not without huge carnage and sometimes that carnage takes thousands of years before the evolutionary process continues forward. Probably more and more people feel ‘something is about to give’—like in a marriage gone bad, but if so, there is not much we can do about it ourselves or collectively either—too many things, for too long, have made us, ready or not, like it or not, behave like lemmings, and continue a daily rush to the edge of some evolutionary cliff which will end one age and begin another, while only Time stays—WE go over the cliff and into an unknown darkness, just as all individual members of every species have done since the beginning of Time. Tomorrow still has a future, Time wins, we lose, but in the end—fair is fair since death eliminates the possibility of anyone dead worrying about anything till the end of time, if there is any end to time. No one needs a helium tank, or to jump off a bridge, just grab a table knife, walk slowly toward a group of policemen, repeating “shoot me” and one of them no doubt will. In the absence of adequate medical help for a mental condition, this is more a mercy killing, and no matter what anyone else feels about the event, the victim is free from his/her demons. Just some sooner than others. None of us will get out of this world alive. Amen.
