A Double-Edged Sword of Your Choosing

Have you ever hurt someone? No, not in that raw, visceral way, like what with a golf club across the head. But in that hellish way; paved with good intentions, lined with aspirations for good things to come? A word, an action, a turn of phrase; a decision that hurt someone you care about as surely as if you had stuck three inches of steel in between their ribs. That way that only your wayward agency can. Well, you’re human, you’re reading, I’m going to have to assume that you have.

Sometimes choices really fucking suck…

Which is a conclusion that runs contrary to our current dogma, ‘innit.

We’ve been lead to believe in the power of choice. We’ve been lead to believe that it is a tool with which the common person was meant to liberate themselves. A function through which we were supposed to affect change over our circumstances. A mechanism through which we were meant to learn responsibility.

Didn’t really turn out that way, did it though?

More money is spent to control and subvert our choices than is spent on curing cancer. The quality of representatives of our choice for affecting change keep spiralling downward into an argument of who is the least worst. And people as a general rule spend more time and effort rationalizing their bad decisions rather than sifting through the pain of them to find lessons worth learning.

Turns out this whole free-will thing, choice, is a double edged sword. And people aren’t very good at wielding it.

It’s easy to come to the conclusion that it’d be better to be rid of the whole notion. To just march along to someone else’s tune. We do that. A lot. We pick an ideal, an identity, an ideology, once, and just stick with it. One choice once to rule them all, never to be questioned or criticised again. We take up a place in a machinery, keep our head down, and don’t question it. We talk about Analysis Paralysis, and the crippling effects of overthinking. And some of the least mature of us have decided to quite frankly just not give a shit.

The coping mechanisms of the overwhelming burden of choice are legion.

Choices aren’t easy. To make, to bear, to stand by. We suffer for them. But, with the risk of sounding Buddhist, maybe that’s the point. Instead of a superpower, like what our golden calves of capitalism are prone to try and convince us it is, and manipulate us with, maybe our choices are a yoke. A burden to keep us grounded. Humble. For I know nothing as humbling as the pain left in the wake of my choices.

I’m not saying we should give it up. That we should rescind our obligations of agency. To make like Samson and beg our beloved Delilah to shear our hair off. I wouldn’t want that. No matter how much pain I’ve done unto others, or others have done unto me, or will continue to. Because whether we like them or not, whether we appreciate the responsibility inherent in them or not, our choices define us. Not just in the making of them, but how we live with them.

And who knows? Maybe one day, we’ll get it right, y’know? And wouldn’t that be nice?

/Sebastian Lindberg 26/10-2021

A Parental Scapegoat

Here’s a hot take: It’s not the government’s job to teach your children not to want to run away to cult to murder people in the name of a 1400-year dead Arabic misogynist. It’s yours.

This week, I read a heart-rending report about how the Swedish government “failed” the parents of our some 300 exported ISIS-jihadists. These parents, along with a doctor from the border, supposedly pleaded with the Swedish government, the police, to do something about the young men and women that were on the brink of travelling to a Middle Eastern civil war back in the mid 2010’s to fight for a hostile foreign nation. And yet, the government did nothing. The police arrested no one. The young extremists left. Some returned for free health care and a vacation from war and death, only to go back and do it all over again. Some never returned at all. Some may still be down there.

The report was explicit in placing the blame. Through an interview with a doctor on the Iraq side of the Caliphate, the blame was squarely placed at the feet of the Swedish government. Why they didn’t do anything. Why they didn’t stop anyone from going. Why they didn’t heed the call from parents across the country to stop their sons and daughters from falling under the spell of this death cult nation.

Only… that’s not the government’s job. At least not ours. The government is sorely inept at raising children. Most often when it tries, it fucks it up. So much so that the government goes to extremes not to do that any more. Which is completely fair. Despite Sweden’s many socialist turns, it is not yet an absolute provider and authority on every single matter pertaining to the human existence. We have not yet devolved into a communist hive mind, where the individual human, the parent, only needs to breathe, eat, shit, generate taxes, and squeeze out a fresh new work force.

Long rant run short; it is still the responsibility of parents to raise their children. Not the government’s.

That’s not to say that all parents are capable of doing so. I frequently work as an upper elementary school teacher. I encounter parents that probably shouldn’t have been put in charge of childrearing on a daily basis. But just because you’re incompetent at your biological imperative, just because you fail to generate productive members of society and instead spawn violent hooligans, doesn’t mean that the responsibility isn’t still yours. It’s your fault. It’s your mess. If you didn’t raise your sons and daughters better than to run away to enslave, murder, and die in a foreign civil war, then that’s quite simply the bed you’ve made for yourself. No sympathy for the self-inflicted.

Naturally, it’s not just the parents and families that suffer from the radicalization of their young. All of society suffers for it. Not to mention all the people that suffered at the hand of our (should state “former”) citizens. And even though there’s much to be said about the alternatives of ramifications to coming back from a sojourn of fighting for a hostile foreign government, no democratic government should be in the business of pre-emptive judgement. It shouldn’t be illegal to travel. It shouldn’t be illegal to hold to a creed, even though a murderous one. And it shouldn’t be illegal to degenerate to a fundamentalist. Judgement in a democratic society has to wait until actionable crimes have been committed.

To turn my condemnation into something a little bit more productive; considering how many parents fail to raise their children, just about the only bit of government involvement that I wouldn’t mind seeing in the process would be to introduce a child-having licence. If you prove too irresponsible to care for a new human being, maybe you shouldn’t have children. Because no: Having a child isn’t some universal right as much as it is (perhaps) the greatest responsibility that a human being can shoulder. Most mess up a little bit, but it’s not a particularly high bar to pass to not raise mass murderers (or as they’re called in IS-returnee interviews; “ambulance drivers”).

The onus isn’t on the government in this case. It’s on you, the parents. It wasn’t from the government’s care that these misguided 300 escaped; it was from yours. It’s easy to shift the blame and expect the government to pick up all your shit, but that’s not what this government is meant to do. It’s not what this government is equipped to do. Because even though I often disagree with this government, and it’s laws, it’s still a government of law. I would be absolutely horrified if this government introduced legislation that allowed them to judge and sentence people prior to the act. I would be absolutely horrified if this government introduced legislation that shifted jurisdiction over children away from the child’s parents. Because that’s not the sort of government I would want. And I don’t really think that’s the sort of government you’d want either.

Suck it up. Don’t shift the blame. It’s entirely on you that your children turned into fundamentalist murderers. Don’t compound your sins with cowardice and intellectual dishonesty. Get your own fucking shit together and stop expecting your government to do your parenting for you.

/Sebastian Lindberg 18/5-2021

A Hallowed Burden

I want to tell a story. A story about a woman who suffers from a sense of responsibility.

She works in a bar. She has always wanted to work in a bar. From the days of family vacations, she made not note of the ambiance or the quality of food. Her attention was fixed to ingenious ways to organize and streamline the barman’s trade. From counter layout to personnel communication by way of intercoms and walkie-talkies. For humanizing purposes, let us call her Brandy.

Brandy cares about her bar. She decides on the inventory. She decides on the menu. She works every inch of those three feet of mahogany. Her waking nightmares concern the state of the coagulated taps and the reservoir of syrups. Her worry extends to how much garnish is required for the coming week, and which people can work on what busy days. She raised her bar, in every sense of the word. Like a Mary Poppins of the bartender’s trade. Brandy loves her bar. She nurtured it, and the customers love it. They love her.

She doesn’t own her speak-easy. Brandy merely manages it. She cares for it. She is made to work for seventy hours a week. She waits a hundred customers herself, because her employers don’t think she needs help. She sweats blood and ulcers to make any evening the best her patrons have experienced. Not because she’s demanded to, but that she feels an a priori need to. And that she fears that her precious haven shall fall apart without her. That orders will be left unanswered. That tables will be left unmade. That her menu of carefully arranged, savoury alchemical solutions shall be maltreated. That the standard that she has lovingly made her customers accustomed to shall be left to the roadside without her supervision. Brandy loves her bar, and the bar is grinding her to dust.

Brandy, sweet Brandy, is not the first to succumb to this grinding wheel. The wheel that takes advantage of the people who love and excel at their craft. The people who feel an inescapable desire to take responsibility for their job and their trade. Such rare few individuals are snatched up by uncaring establishments and are milked dry like cattle. Instead of being celebrated like the everyday angels that they are.

The people that love the job that doesn’t love them back. Working the job that takes advantage of their passion. I do not know if they are a dying breed, but they are a hallowed few, who are made to carry their excellence like the burdens of a salt mine. By employers who could not grasp the virtue of sustainable responsibility if so the world would burn around them. I see them in the ministry, the agencies and the government departments. In the hospital and in the school. And right now, I see Brandy in her precious bar. A responsible person, that is held in passion-wrought shackles by her unmoved employers.

This is not a rant. This is not a gripe. Upon watching Brandy at her craft, I can summon neither rage nor anger in view of this particular injustice. Any outrage is for you, dear reader, to raise. This is a salute. To those weary few that uphold the professional standards of responsibility in this landscape of burning bridges and golden parachutes.

Ayn Rand immortalized your ilk as industrial giants. I spot you as unappreciated servitors. Whichever path you walk, I tremor at the day on which you shrug.

Hail, you taken for granted few. I salute you.

/Sebastian Lindberg 6/6-2017