You're strapped in tight, the door is locked and barred, and every move toward jumping out trips a dozen shrieking alarms
And the wind is wild and howling and rabid, clutching and groping at you like an animal
And the ground spins dizzy below you, and the empty sky yawns hungry around you, and there's no one here to tell you you're doing the right thing
But you still have to jump from the plane
Maybe you've calculated the risks and they are high, very high indeed
Maybe you know the time to jump was long ago, and it's now almost too late
The plane has already descended to just a few thousand feet
There's no getting out of this without pain
You won't have time to safely clear the plane's wake before pulling the ripcord, not enough to slow your descent
You'll still be dropping like a stone when you hit the ground with a rattling crunch
You could die of exposure, in an open field, both legs broken, in agony
The time to jump was when the plane hit its cruising altitude an hour ago
When you were only on your way and not about to arrive
When you were still trying to tell yourself the plane's course could still be changed
The time to make the right choice was long before that, before the plane took off
You could have never boarded, you could have kept your feet planted firmly on the ground, safe and sound
And whatever seemed so bad about where you were before, you wouldn't have to jump now
But it doesn't matter
None of that matters
The past can't be changed and in the present you are here and even though it becomes a worse and worse choice with every second that passes jumping RIGHT NOW is still the only choice, it has always been the only choice
Because you know where the plane is going
You know what's going to happen when you land
You know who's flying it - deep down you've always known
And if they fail at their goal it's a guarantee of a horrible death by fire
And if they succeed, a life that's even worse
So you have to decide
And it's ultimately no decision at all
You learn who you are, when the plane is about to land
The same unconscious pulley strings that maneuvered you onto the plane in the first place undid your straps, popped the hatch, are leaning you into the wind
The adrenaline rushing through you burns like acid through rusted metal, you might crack, you might burst, you might die here and now, at the very end, simply from fear
But you will not turn back
You will not return to your post and complete your mission
That last step is a killer
Taking it will take all the strength you have
You may have nothing left afterwards, maybe not even enough to pop your chute
Maybe this is just suicide
And maybe if you live, it'll be a broken half-life, a death rattle, a decades-long sigh of regret
But you only learn some things, really know them, when the plane is about to land
And in this moment, teetering on the edge of the void, waiting to fall into gravity's cruel embrace, you know one thing
Not who you are, oh no
That lonely quest has only ever turned up dead ends
That's the kind of nonsense that got you on the plane in the first place
No, you're pretty sure, whenever you die, you won't know that
Maybe you're nobody, nothing, that's all you ever were
But you know what you ARE NOT
You are not one of them
You do not belong here
You are not going where the plane is going
And if there are only two choices, inside the plane or outside the plane, then there's no choice at all
So you close your eyes
You grit your teeth
You say a prayer or whisper a goodbye or hum a childhood lullaby
You clutch the ripcord and you clench every muscle you can find and you breathe as deep and slow as you can
Maybe you take a slow, dignified step over the threshold
Maybe you charge out screaming bravado and rage
Maybe, like a coward, you fall forward in a slow faint, limp and passive, letting the wind make the decision for you
It doesn't matter
No one is here to see
The result is the same
It only matters that you do it
So go
Now
Every hesitation makes it worse, and yet in the end it doesn't matter how long you waited to do it so long as you still do
I don't know what's waiting for you when you jump
A miraculous recovery without a scratch, perhaps, and a long and happy life thereafter
Or a hell of shattered limbs, severed nerves, scars and blood and aches and twinge, sleepless nights of chronic pain and awful dreams
Medals, honors, ribbons, a cheering crowd and a consensus of historians honoring your courage
Or ignominy, hatred, spit and piss running down the lonely gravestone of a traitor and a coward
Or no gravestone at all, a body eaten by buzzards and flies leaving no name behind
I don't know
You can't know
All of that is for later
Maybe it will end in an instant, too soon to notice, and all of this wondering will be for naught
But you DO know
You know where that plane is going
That's all there is to know
And no matter what, when the plane lands, you won't be on it
That's all that matters
That's all you need to know
That's all the peace I can give you
That's all the peace you need
Take my hand, if you need it
Imagine me here with you
Imagine anything you need to imagine
Imagine everyone you love, gathered in a circle, waiting for you to touch down, welcoming you back to earth, to safety
Imagine everything will, somehow, be all right
And then
Shut up and get over yourself and FUCKING LET GO
Sometimes
you
have
to
jump
out
of
the
plane
• • •
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"Mainstream" evangelicalism is always teetering on the edge of falling into some kind of cult movement -- local or global, big or small -- at any given moment
People outside have no fucking idea how common this actually is and people inside are disturbingly numb to it
Still remember listening to music with friends in high school who were like "Ah yeah I used to have a whole Metallica collection on vinyl before we burned it all in that bonfire three years ago"
Like that's just... a thing that happens, like bad weather
Sometimes you get in a car accident, sometimes an electrical fire breaks out in your house, sometimes a traveling preacher comes through and gets everyone all hyped up about how they need to purge all secular culture from their lives to get right with God
Dad under investigation from the FBI for insurrection threatens his own children with a gun to try to keep them from turning him in
Gets turned in
Okay so the whole "children informing on parents" stuff has become a right-wing outrage meme, and I gotta say
If you intend to call on bonds of loyalty and love to keep yourself out of trouble, you also need to not threaten lethal violence
You don't get to use both approaches
Like, I think you *shouldn't* threaten to kill your kids in general, because that's, you know, bad karma
But while some abusive dads may have completely normalized this kind of relationship with their kids, *springing* the death threats on them in a panic is just bad tactics
"Meaning" and "community" are extremely loaded terms, especially because a ton of the essence of fash ideology is bashing other people's definition of meaning and community as fake/degenerate/pathetic/childish/effeminate/gross/weird/stupid
The red-light districts of Weimar Berlin WERE a nexus of meaning and community, and the Nazis tore it all up and burned it all down because it was the WRONG KIND of meaning and community
Of course the world sucks and people are unhappy
What I am deeply suspicious of is arguments that everyone is less happy than they would've been in the Good Old Days, and gosh if we want people to be happy we should import some of those Good Old Days values into modern times
That old joke about the old Jewish guy reading Nazi newspapers because "In these papers we're always winning" resonates with me a lot these days
I get my hope from blackpilled Pepes whining about how "Joe Biden's presidency will irreversibly put us on the path to socialism"
"Sleepy Joe is just a figurehead! He's a puppet for that foreign agent KaMAla, who only pretended to be a law-and-order DA until she could get the chance to put her Marxist professor father's ideas into action!"
Yeah, that's it baby, you know just what to say, keep going
(The song is from the POV of dock workers loading the bananas for shipping, hence the subtitle "The Banana Boat Song"
So it's not technically a "sea shanty" but it's shanty-adjacent)
Seriously, one of the verses of the song is about how when you're exhausted at the end of your shift and tipsy because you've had a little nip to take the edge off is the perfect time for a tarantula to ambush you
I'm sitting here weighing the idea that you could get rid of a lot of what's toxic about the word "working-class" (as well as misleading, hypocritical, inconsistent, etc.) in ordinary discourse by just committing to saying "poor" instead
Yes I know that in Marxist theory etc. it has a specific meaning
I'm saying that meaning has been so messed up by the way people use it and bicker over it that outside of an academic context, "poor" works much better
It's just really grating hearing about "the working class" to refer to people who own giant ranch houses and huge pickup trucks and a whole arsenal and so forth, and who turn out to own businesses and have employees