J.S. Park

Not Exactly Doing What’s Horrible, But Not Really Doing Much Of Anything

At times my deepest grief and frustration is watching people of immense potential drown themselves inside thick bubbles of complacency. It’s this sluggish fog of self-preservation, safety, and consumption where the bottom line is: I-Get-What-I-Can-All-For-Me-Always-Now. There is no jaw-dropping crime of horrible perversity, but a slow blinding spiral by imperceptible degrees into hollow nothingness. There’s a documentary for this sort of person called “Every Zombie Movie Ever Made.”

Often we think “the Devil” or “the Enemy” inserts tremendous lies into our feeble heads to move us towards Evil Violence, but it’s easier to dismantle us by simply extracting truth from our minds: to keep out instead of putting in, until we are hurtling towards an abyss unknown to ourselves.

It’s such an obvious trick you’d think we’d be above it. But no: we get played like those carnival chumps who keep paying to throw the ring on the bottle. Some of us spend large chunks of our lives in muddled, confused, halfway consciousness, lost in distractions of newer and better screens, the constant girlfriend-swap, a thick haze of pills and drink and smoke, a red streak of anger and political fuming and dying on hills of no substance. Meanwhile, real people with real problems need real help, and we could really help them. Could.

No one at the end will have wished for more generic imitations of pleasure, but for now, we think we can postpone reality. Since we’re in the YouTube Culture of Cheap Jokes and Satirical Irony and Let’s Point And Laugh At Everything, no one ever gets to have the Meaningful Conversation with themselves. Too serious, you know, but really because we’re too scared.

God pokes us for a moment with an existential panic, a touch of the Divine to see beyond ourselves, but most of us will allow the fog to seep back in and laugh off the whole thing. A lifetime of delays until we have sacrificed little, taken no risks, and stand before God with a vague estimation of our own good deeds that never offended anybody.

Is this really okay with everyone? Because it is not, it is not, it is not okay with me. And I cannot let it be okay for you.

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