The Conveyor Belt

There’s a dead person. That’s what starts the conveyor belt.

People don’t just die anymore. Unless you’re a hundred years old with cancer and dementia and doctors gather around remaking about how incredible it is you’ve held on so long, death is murder.

People are murdered by their greedy next of kin. They’re murdered by corrupt businesses. They’re murdered by drugs that are fun or helpful, occasionally the drugs that stop the murderers themselves from suffering.

People are always murdered by an enemy of some kind. The enemy can be disease or lightning, but if it isn’t, the enemy is a person. When it is, we often still look for a person to blame.

The person we find is guilty. The person must die too.

The person needs to die in a cell. Or the state needs to kill him. Or her.

It’s a conveyor belt that carries the person to his or her death. After it starts, it doesn’t stop.

The state’s machinery of death must be purifying. Everyone goes in grieving and upset. They act like they’re going to come out feeling like it’s all okay because death has a face.

It’s the worst in all of us that seeks a face for our sorrows. It seeks something easier to understand and to explain at a cocktail party than the universe and our place in it. It has to be easier to grasp than the fact we’re all going to die.

The easiest thing in the world is to point fingers. Pointing a finger is simple. It seems like it might bring back the dead, but it never does. Everyone somehow feels better.

Our inability to grasp the complexity of the world in which we live and the nature of what’s surrounding us makes us look for simple solutions to the infinitely complex problems that arise when death is involved.

Sometimes no one needs to pay.

How do you turn that into a campaign slogan though? How do you convince people to give you power when all you give them is a little bit of truth?

Truth is free. It’s out there already. Why should people elect you to give them the truth? That’s why Google is there. Give them promises instead.

If truth is what you want to give them, then you probably don’t care about power anyway.

It’s wrong to want to hurt people. It’s hard to let go. It’s harder to know that bad things happen because good people do things without meaning bad. Sometimes without doing bad.

The system doesn’t care though. The system processes people through the system.

If we shut down the conveyor belt, no one else would die because of it. Lots of people would live.

It’s wrong. Right now, it’s wrong. We’re killing people because we want to kill people. We don’t have to do it. We don’t have to do anything.

We are slaves to our imaginations. We have an imperfect system, but we let it make irreversible decisions.

None of this should even be worth writing, yet the conveyor belt rolls on.