When the state puts a man to death, it is only because he decided to go to court and wait to be murdered on schedule instead of making a run for it and being gunned down in the street. For some reason, we don’t call that “execution,” and there are only protesters, riots, looting, and moral showboating when the color combination of cops and executed civilians can be whipped up by media race hustlers into something beyond nervous cops going Judge Dredd on uncooperative suspects.
Ego-inflating rhetoric is everywhere. At work, at school , and at the mall, Americans expect everyone to tell ‘em how special, talented and important they are. In our inverted world, the weak are somehow strong, everyone who survives a hangnail is “brave,” and every bean-counter who works for the Department of Defense is a goddamn hero.
Rape culture is a lot like racism. Maybe they should just call it “rapism.” It’s an abstract “evil” that a certain group, in this case women, reserves the right to identify and use to manipulate another group, in this case men, into increasingly defensive and impotent positions. As long as they can keep men apologizing, they can keep controlling them.
There may be a collapse. It could happen. It could happen tomorrow. Vengeful gods could hurl boulders from the sky, cleansing the earth with fires and floods. There could be blood in the streets and gnashing of teeth. A plague of locusts or killer bees, some Chinese flu, or the Zombie Apocalypse. Your debit cards might run empty and your "smart"phones might get real dumb. We may be forced to band together in primal gangs and fight for survival. We may be forced by circumstances beyond our control to rediscover lifeways more familiar to our species—to our ancestral brains—than this endless, banal sprawl of corporate parks and shopping malls.
Or you may just get that one day as a lion, to die like you were born, kicking and screaming and covered in someone else’s blood.
It has a certain appeal.