Start A Fire: We’re All So Shitty, We’re All So Beautiful

I don’t mind if we disagree, but I’d like you to consider thinking.

I’ve a rebellious spirit. That’s not to say “I’m James Dean coooool” or anything. Cool is that other, unquantifiable thing that only people desperate to live at a great distance from their desires for themselves are able to identify. They’ll spend all day talking about it if you give them half the chance, specifically with the intent of telling you how uncool they are. Those kids are the real rebels, am I right?

No, when I say “rebellious” I’m really talking about a sense of intense discomfort with the way things are. And more importantly, with the way things are considered, discussed, portrayed or delivered. My mind spits and hisses at me all day. It groans like your bowel after a particularly good Indian curry. Still, there’s only a little internal conflict going on between me and this fiery thing because, I figure, if it’s a part of me it probably deserves to be treated with the same integration tactics I use on my sappy side, my self-serving happy side and all the sides in me that I’ve yet to discover.

If love’s an all-encompassing emotion I may as well learn to love the part of me that disagrees with me.

Start A Fire is supposed to be where I express my vitriolic side and my intense dislike of status quo to the point where I even disagree with myself. The way I imagine things, we’ve evolved through various belief systems specifically so we could stop seeing the world through a single lens and start seeing them as infinitely more complex than we did before – from polytheism to monotheism to atheism to, I don’t know, hypertheism maybe? An all-encompassing, all-accepting belief system that acknowledges the rightness and wrongness of us all. Or maybe that’s just me, seeing the simple things as hyper-complex systems again.

Anyway, I was talking about rebellion or something, right?

I suppose it’s just the way rebellion’s been processed and prepackaged for all of us over the years, but I always imagined I’d get to my mid-20s and still be spitting fire against government, church or academia like I sometimes used to on the campus lawn? I mean, I still can or could if I felt like it, but my perspective’s shifted a bit in the last few years (or maybe just months).

It seems there’s a lot more discourse surrounding political power, media power, nuclear power and the power of the human mind than when I was younger. Or perhaps I’m just more aware of it now than I was then. Either way, it takes me back to scribbling doodles all over an ANC flyer for Jacob Zuma’s first presidential election back in a photography lecture; a subtle angsty, almost passive aggressive rebellious thing like the work of those folks who put up “Holi Shit” stickers all over Jo’burg recently.

It’s not that I was particularly anti-ANC or anti-Zuma at the time, but I suppose the news was full of hate directed at that guy and so I was more aware of what a shit he could be sometimes. And I do stress the “sometimes” here. I suppose in the back of my mind I imagined my rebellion might always be an angry discontentment with the same structures everyone else seemed pissed off with, and that I’d find new ways to display that same vitriol for years to come. I’m well aware that’s true of some people, and as always I appreciate their artistic self-expression, if not the ultimate sentiment of yet another angry revisionist discourse that still lacks the potency of the first time you figure out the real depth of the message of, say, The Clash’s White Riot when you’re in college.

Man, that was a shitty sentence. Whatever.

The other day someone I know posted a photo of a car license disc on Facebook, accompanied by the message (or something to this effect): “Yes it’s been paid. Fuck you! Go fix some potholes!”. On the surface there’s some vital commentary on the bad(?) state of our suburban roads despite the near-constant collection of fees by the metro police at roadblocks. I couldn’t help but point out, with as much smug nonchalance as you can muster when replying to someone online, that the metro police who check our license discs at roadblocks and piss us off with their ever-present vigilance over the speed limit as set up by a government we elected (or didn’t elect, I guess) don’t actually repair roads. The response I received was the supremely logical, “Yes! But the government that pays them does!”.

My point isn’t to use this space to harass my friend, of course. I know in their heart of hearts that they’re irritated and that sharing that image gave them some brief gratification and perhaps satisfied their own fiery inner demons for a moment longer. Their own discontent was catered to when they saw something they could get behind and agree with and seek solace in. It’s the human way. Bears hibernate and we tell our friends how significant it was that we gained 150+ twitter followers in a day. It’s about making meaning to feel comfort.

My real problem is that I find, more and more, that we as people are lacking in compassion.

Compassion which is, as Russell Brand put it in his recent piece about the death of Margaret Thatcher, “just another word for love”. We use words a lot – I use them a fuck ton, in case you hadn’t noticed – to encode our lives with meaning, but we can also become lost in them and lose all sense of whatever core reality exists somewhere underneath all the damn coding. We refer to “them” and “they” and “the fucking metro”, which is as accurate as it is incorrect, because “they” are really just “us” and we’re pretty shitty sometimes too.

I know it’s tough to admit but we – humans – are all incredible dicks a lot of the time and we’re also all incredibly kind. I’ve made people cry for hours on end and abused them with my physicality in a way I didn’t believe I was capable of doing. But then I’ve gone home to my mother and given her a kiss on the cheek and told her I love her and “thanks for dinner, ma” because it was that other thing I’m also capable of expressing.

We’re all capable of doing both but when we take the moral high ground sometimes we lose touch with how shit we can be. I’m telling you now that I’m an arrogant, self-centered lout with very little patience for moronic, seemingly endless middle class discourse about searching for meaning in Democratic Alliance pamphlets about whatever’s hot this Tuesday, but it’s because I’m aware of that that sometimes… sooooometimes… I feel it’s only fair that I actually listen to other human beings and try to understand what they might be going through, and I give out hugs and I kiss people and I tell pretty people that they’re looking pretty and I decide to eat a meal in relative silence and spend some time contemplating nothing at all.

So yeah, there it is. My rebellion’s started to eat its own tail. I want to hug everyone I hated. We’re all so shitty, we’re all so beautiful.

Is this thing on?