There Really Seems No Hope

 I wish I could believe in hell. Or karma. Or that everyone, secretly, has a moral compass that keeps them up at night when they’ve acted like monsters.

But I can’t.

Even when I believed in a religion, I couldn’t believe in a framework where “god is love” describes a vengeful god who would burn people for all eternity forever and ever without end. I mean, if lowly, short-sighted humans can forgive their rapist or the person who murdered their dad, then how could a god of love who can see all the nuances of everything across time forward and backward hold a grudge and dole out eternal punishment, ya know?

"Silhouette Narrative"

And I love ideas like karma where people get their lessons over and over again across lifetimes until they evolve and stop being monsters. This world certainly feels like a spiritual kindergarten: Don’t poke each other with sticks, children. Help each other, children. Be kind, children. Be humans, not monsters, children. And I guess if I were to subscribe to an afterlife system, it would be something like this. Something that allows learning, redemption, and evolution.

That would at least explain why monsters keep existing…that all the monsters being born and raised are souls come back for another lesson at not poking each other with sticks.

"Observatory"

And I also like the idea of “Oh I bet it keeps him up at night.” But no, it doesn’t. The monsters who enslave humans think it is their divine right. The man who brutally beats his children believes he’s doing the job of parenting. The mother taking her kid to the preacher to be tortured in the hopes of a “cure” for queerness thinks she is saving her kid from the "god of love’s" eternal fire damnation (despite those pesky statistics that show conversion torture increases child suicide rates). Those who exploit whole communities or nations or ecosystems for capitalist profit sleep sweetly on their soft beds on their humming yachts and pat themselves on the back for their cunning business acumen.

I think monsters with a muffled moral compass are rare. Most monsters do not know they are monsters. They might know that WE think they’re monsters. Quite often, they think WE’RE monsters, and they live on, cozy in their righteousness.

The fantasy of the deathbed atheist converting to believe or the deathbed monster suddenly admitting to and trying to atone for his monster crimes is often just a hopeful myth.

The monsters can live and die without ever seeing from our perspective.

"Light Speed"

So what do we do in such a monster-infected era? I can’t fantasize about them in eternal agony in hell. I can’t fantasize that someday in some lifetime they will eventually learn how to be human. I can’t fantasize that they are, in fact, suffering themselves because of their monster behaviors.

I can try to comfort myself by saying at least they’re showing us what NOT to do, how NOT to live, how NOT to parent. They act as a whetstone that we can sharpen our goals and beliefs and motivations against. When they bite and tear us to the bone, we can draw together in tighter community to defend and heal each other. We can learn how to better protect our human communities against their attacks.

But that seems a survival stop gap that doesn't solve the problem of monsters roving the planet.

They are a terrible catalyst. And we cannot count on saving them from their monsterness. We cannot hope they will change or become human. But we can strategically use them to build a more human world. And maybe, someday, the zeitgeist will shift, and the monsters will die off, leaving humans to thrive in a human world.

"Abandoned Portal"

I have zero hope this will happen in my lifetime or my children’s lifetime. Though some places outside of the United States mainstream show us that it might be possible, that cultures and communities can exist that do not devour their own people, but rather try (albeit imperfectly) to foster humanity and decrease monstrosity.

I guess my only hope is that we humans might stubbornly build a better world with the rubble after the monsters have blown this one to bits.

And I hate feeling so … nihilistic? misanthropic? realistic?

But I don’t know how else to survive these days.

"Gravitational Singularity"

((All photos by Tyler Barrett. You can see and purchase more of his work on Instagram under the name @memento.per.lumen for photography and @ch3x_mix for art.))