Rage

    So I didn’t put anything on social media about my thoughts going out to the victims of the Pulse shooting, and I didn’t change my profile picture, and I didn’t write about it the day it happened. There are a lot of reasons why not — that such gestures feel disingenuous to me was a lot of it — but the chief one, the one I feel right now, the one I felt last night as I sat in a bar reading a book and imagining what it would be like if someone walked through the front door and blew the head off the nice-seeming hipster next to me, is that all I have is completely and totally impotent rage. The impotence and the rage go hand-in-hand: the former wouldn’t feel so terrible without the latter; the latter wouldn’t exist without the former. They are the parents of my silence.

    Maybe later in the week I’ll find something cogent to say about the way the fetishization of the founders and Scalia-ization of how we read the Constitution has turned the American right into a death cult more dedicated to lethal toys than sane regulation or living in world not completely diamond-plated in fantasies both dark and light; maybe I’ll pile stats upon stats, make an argument, worry less about how little will change, how nobody who matters will hear, and how it doesn’t even matter if they do — because the most important and powerful people in the world, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, already agree, and yet we are held hostage by the vile fantasies of a collection of venal, small, pathetic weaklings who imagine that their guns make them John Wayne, and that their exclusive desire to fuck women and only women makes them the arbiters of what is right and whole and good; they believe that those who neither tote guns nor participate in their oppressive fertility rituals really, on some level, are just borrowing our lives from them anyway, so who gives a fuck if a bunch of fags in some fag club get shot up? Maybe one day I’ll operationalize this feeling, but for now, all I know is that I would like to hit somebody, hard, and let them know that they deserve it as I do it. I won’t — I never have — but for the love of God I would like to. This murder could stop, if the venal and evil motherfuckers who refuse to stop it truly believed that people who are not like them were human. But it fucking doesn’t, because they fucking don’t, and fuck them all right in their smug fucking faces for it.

    This hits on every note in a chord of rage for me, fortissimo, because my family has been forever altered by the fact that my mentally ill foster brother owned a gun, a gun he used to murder his child and then himself; because I have been writing about, striving for, and just really yearning for gay rights since I was 13 years old; because those on the right who wish to pretend that this is not their fault have turned this into an almost literal crusade against those they consider alien again, talking about “radical Islam” as though any of this could be separated from the homophobia and gun fetishization that they preach on a daily basis; because, in a way that isn’t true of a grade school or a college campus or a military base, this is somewhere that I could easily have been, because that kid texting with his mother could have been me, because the dead lying on the ground might have been my friends, gone, erased by a murder machine purchased legally and deployed exactly as it was designed to be employed.

    Fuck it. In the way of the impotently rageful I have no conclusion, nothing useful to add. I just haven’t been right in more than a day. I’ve been edgy and impolite to strangers. I broke my smoke detector when it went off while I was cooking dinner, because I was so angry. This is over. These are my days of rage.