Je me souviens

It's not opposite day.

Pictured: the rules. Calvin and Hobbes is © Bill Watterson, Andrews McMeel Publishing. Used here in abject worship.

1. A bunch of rhetorical throat-clearing

First off… hey, we’re all terrorists now! Nowhere to go but up.

I took a long time to start this stack, despite the encouragement of others, because I felt I didn’t have anything particularly valuable to contribute to the real body of content on the topics I cared about. I despise wasted time, white noise, and the downward trend of quality that accompanies giving every single person a voice, no filter, and eliminating any and all barriers to an audience.

(Please note I am not saying that people should be silenced or that I should be an arbiter of who is worthy. I’m simply pointing out the downside of a true democracy that exists without standards.)

This feeling that I don’t have anything original or valuable to contribute to existing discourse made me stop writing for pleasure altogether sometime in my mid 20s, after which I mostly found cathartic outlets beating the shit out of things in the name of fitness and sport. But especially now, when the civilized world feels in more existential danger, I don’t want to waste anyone’s time.

There are brilliant statisticians, researchers, and other scientists putting themselves on the line. There are journalists with vast networks breaking stories and selling books.

I make dick jokes and scream outrage and argue with people in comment sections.

All this is to say that what I decided to write about today has already been mentioned and discussed by other, probably worthier, voices, also today.

Pictured: This fucking bitch.

This CCP spy, who starting a year ago began saying that people like me should lose our drivers’ licenses, be completely legally isolated from society, be made “miserable,” and submit to any and all COVID mandates to “earn back” my Constitutionally-protected human rights- who literally “feared we would enjoy freedoms” with no strings attached- is among the rogues’ gallery of shitheads and fuckwads backpedaling vaccine and mask mandates while simultaneously claiming that former President Trump was responsible for nationwide lockdowns, public and school mask mandates, and vaccine mandates that claimed the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands nationally while coercing millions to take a shot whose harms are just beginning to be counted if they wanted to support their families or send their kids to school?

Wen is just one of many. She’s just pictured because I found hers first.

These people have hated us- and called for their disciples to hate us- for two years, and have leveled every last bit of power they can muster to harm and deprive us in any way we can for our lack of submission.

2. !Insufficient memory

Growing up in NY, I learned early from seeing drivers from Montreal, our neighbors just over the border, what the Quebecois slogan “je me souviens” meant: I will remember. What exactly Étienne-Paschal Taché wanted people to remember is the subject of some mystery and debate, but in essence, it was a simple admonition about Quebecois identity: remember who you are. Remember where you came from.

In the 1995 cyberpunk classic Strange Days, a young Angela Bassett, playing badass bodyguard Macey, says to her perpetually beaten-down hustler friend Lenny (Ralph Fiennes), who is pining for his toxic ex-girlfriend (Juliette Lewis, of course) by playing full-sensory VR tapes of her over and over,

“Memories were meant to fade. They’re designed that way for a reason.”

And it’s true. From academic, professional, and plain-old real life experience, I can attest to the transience and unreliability of human memory.

But.

Our memory still makes us who we are. And while we may forget which person at the party 30 years ago introduced us to our future spouse, society- civilization itself- requires that a collective institutional memory be able to agree on what we call objective truth.

On December 7, 1941, the Japanese navy attacked Pearl Harbor. Over 2,300 Americans were killed.

We can argue about why it happened, whose fault it was, who the bad guys really were, whether the Japanese were justified in a surprise attack on a target crawling with civilians, and so on.

That isn’t what I’m talking about. We have to agree that on December 7, 1941, a bunch of boats and planes shot a bunch of other boats and planes and a specific number of people died. If we can’t agree that this objectively occurred, we are not agreeing to inhabit the same reality.

Typically, we prove objective reality with evidence: photographs, recordings, videos, and so on. We don’t have these handy for the vast majority of living that goes on: we rely on our memories to tell us who our mother and father are, what that thing is on the table, what flavor ice cream we like, and what that song we hear is.

And that collective civilizational memory of things that objectively happened is required for us to survive and advance as a species, otherwise we will be reteaching every generation which foot is the left foot and why you don’t eat poop or put other people in ovens, ever.

3. Do you smell gas?

I had an abusive childhood. Hands up anyone who’s shocked.

I might go into some of the gory details of it in a later piece, if there’s a good reason to. I don’t consider it an important part of my identity, so it isn’t something I trot out at every possible occasion so that it can filter people’s response to things I say and do and inform how they treat me, because that’s gross.

I bring it up because some of it was bad- real bad- and the worst part about it was not the events themselves, but the fact that the family members that abused me, when later confronted under completely safe circumstances (me confronting them with it in a private conversation with no witnesses, for example) completely denied those events ever occurred.

These were not “did the Japanese unlawfully attack the U.S. or were they pre-emptively defending themselves from incursion” questions. These were “did you slam my head into the wall until I lost consciousness” or “did you tell me for a week at age 8 that I was being secretly observed to decide whether or not I would spend the rest of my life locked in a mental institution as an elaborate scheme to elicit good behavior, when nothing of the sort was in fact going on?”

Whether or not your head hits a wall is not a subjective question. Whether or not you are locked in an empty room is not a subjective question.

It doesn’t help that, for the most part, I’m cursed with an extremely sharp and comprehensive memory, often remembering the entire script of a recent conversation or email, visual details, and so on. (I’m spectacularly shit at names, though. Go figure.)

This sort of bullshit at a very young age makes you very jealously guard the validity of your memory and of objective reality when there is very little room for interpretation. It makes people like me EXTREMELY angry when there is a Dumpster fire in the parking lot and you stare us directly in the face, with the flames reflected in your glasses, and say “there are no fires within 1,000 miles of this location.”

The Internet has been a godsend to people like me- we can confirm that, in fact, the thing we remember from the book, movie, news story, TV interview, research paper, and so forth IS, in fact, EXACTLY WHAT WE SAID IT WAS, not what you wanted it to be. But the reality is, every single one of you is, for moments at a time in your lives, exactly like me- an angry, beaten-up kid who is pointing at bruises and saying “god damn it, this happened, JUST ADMIT IT.”

We know what we remember. We’re not crazy or stupid or bad at science or evil or forgetful or biased.

You said vaccines stopped transmission. You said masks stopped transmission and protected others, not the wearer. You said this was harmless, that was life-saving, this would buy back our freedoms.

You fucking said it and we heard you and the Internet is forever.

4. Call To Action

This is what finally helped me get off my ass and listen to the people telling me to start a stack: I don’t have to be Wonder Woman or The Greatest Scientific Mind of Our Time for my words to have value. Substack saved my sanity by validating my thoughts and feelings but also of making sense of the things I knew to be right and true, and not everyone doing so were the .000001% of the human race with PhDs in related fields who simultaneously have large media platforms.

I can comfort. I can inspire. I can entertain. Maybe I can enflame and enrage.

So. Here’s the CTA for this post.

REMEMBER.

Don’t let the waves of relief if you’re lucky enough to live somewhere that your leaders are returning the human rights they stole from you let you “put this all behind us.”

These are not bruises. These are scars. Remember what was stolen from you financially, socially, professionally, emotionally, medically.

You don’t have to stay angry- but angry helps you remember- but if you are in this fight, really in this fight, you are not allowed to forget.

Here’s the bigger ask.

DON’T LET THESE MOTHERFUCKERS FORGET EITHER.

I’ve mentioned here and there that I’m on no social media at all besides Substack, and it’s true. But a lot of you are, and a lot of you are media savvy as it relates to these platforms in ways that I’m not.

Gather the evidence. Build your own collections of every single thing these tyrants and abusers and fascists and psychopaths have said as they lied, cajoled, dissembled, and persuaded us for two years, and throw it in their face EVERY TIME THEY TRY TO CLAIM THE OPPOSITE.

“The Science” has not changed, and positions don’t change without an admission that a previous position was wrong or misguided.

Every time they say B, remind them they said A. Every time they claim they were always right, show them they were left.

It is not Opposite Day, motherfuckers.