My Cruelest Action

There are three things that factor into the choices that I make: what I want, knowing, and do. Though I believe that it is best for me when these three to work in tandem, I confess that the one that is most important to me is what I do.

I’ll explain.

I believe in an objective good outside of me. I believe that there are good and bad desires. I believe that there are good and bad thoughts. I believe that there are good and bad actions. I know that I like some things not healthy for me and I’ve had thoughts that I’ve later realized were wrong (in fact, this may be one of them).

I should aspire to have desires that are good for me and thoughts that are right, but I aspire most of all to do the right thing. My confession is my emphasis on my actions.

Because what I do seems to be inescapable to me, I find myself more strongly tied to my actions than my desires and thoughts.

Circumstance change how I feel and horrible diseases can strip away a person’s mind, yet there is a right thing to do. Make no mistake, those who lose their feelings or mind are in a dire position, one that I would never wish on anyone, but their actions are, nonetheless, permanent. A person who is hurt by someone who “doesn’t know any better” is still hurt, and the harm that I’ve caused when I’m sad is no less painful to the victim than harm that I cause when I’m happy.

I cannot change my actions. Once made, I can only react to them.

I call my emphasis on action a confession because I know that thoughts and desires are, in their own way, permanent as well, but I place my emphasis on actions because actions are the easiest to see.

As I think about my actions, thoughts, and desires, my mind is drawn to Charity: doing something good for someone who doesn’t deserve it. To me, that doesn’t make any sense, but I need Charity to not make sense to me. If Charity made sense, it would deserved. It’s logically deserved. At least that’s how it works for me.

I’ve begun to wonder if cruelty is the opposite of charity: doing something bad to someone regardless of if they deserve it.

I want to mention the cruelest thing I think I’ve ever done as an example of all this, but I don’t want you to be confused. By cruelest, I mean that I did something bad regardless of my thoughts and desires. I’ve done plenty of bad things because I’ve had bad intentions, but it is rarer for me to do something regardless of my intentions.

I once told a prom-date that I wanted to “just be friends” on the way to prom. That was pretty bad of me, but it’s not the cruelest thing I’ve ever done. The cruelest thing came a few days afterwards when we talked about it.

You see, I had been dating this girl for a while before prom, and I was done with trying to make the relationship work. No, that’s not quite true. I wasn’t trying to make the relationship work. I was done with it, but I didn’t have a good reason or feeling to end it. I didn’t think she was a bad person, and I certainly did not feel anything negative about her.

If you said that I dug my own hole, you would be right. There are certain things relationships need to flourish, such as intentionality, communication, commitment, etc. I didn’t practice any of that in my relationship; I preferred to just go with the flow.

The problem was that my “flow” was full of bad habits, a toxic river slowly polluting any and all relationships. Sure, the pleasant warmth emanating from it and friendly green glow made it very inviting, but it was incredibly unhealthy.

She told me she wanted to talk about our relationship (good intentionality!), saying that she didn’t think we could be in a limbo of friends who had feelings for each other (strong communication!) and, when I asked her what she thought we should do, she told me that she wanted to keep trying at it (A+ for commitment).

Quite frankly, that one moment should have shown me that she had an integrity that far, FAR outstripped my own.

But my bad habits had turned me into a bad person. I was going to do what I was used to, regardless of what my thoughts and emotions said about it, as I think both were screaming at me that I was in the wrong. My habits had long since chosen my path, so it wasn’t hard for me to break up with her without feeling bad about it.

Even if it wasn’t hard for me to do it then, it’s hard for me to look back now. You should understand that this isn’t me trying to take back what happened, but, rather, to explain why I think I made a cruel choice. The thoughts and emotions behind what I was doing didn’t matter to me, at least not in a significant way. If anything, I forced my thoughts and emotions to reinforce my toxic habits.

I see now that I was more concerned with keeping my bad habits than what was right. We probably would have broken up at some point afterwards, but I didn’t have any good reasons to do it then.

What I’ve come to realize is that, long before I make a choice, I’ve habitualized myself. Yes, choices are important, but choices have been informed by our day-to-day habits, both conscious and unconscious. No choice is made in a void.

I was cruel to a girl because I was a cruel person. The life I was living made cruelty my reality and all I knew how to do. I don’t think that I had two options before me and I chose the cruel one. I had one option before me: cruelty.

My pastor once told me that if I ever find myself fin a position where the only choice before me is a bad one, I messed up beforehand. If I am in a situation where I can only do bad, I lost the battle long ago.

I think that the only way I can do good when it doesn’t make sense is to habitualize doing good things the way I’ve done it with bad. Good is bigger than me, and I cannot say I always understand it. But it is there and it is my responsibility to conform to it. It’s my pleasure to follow it, even if I don’t always get pleasure from it. Like I said, I like things that are unhealthy for me, and either I can change or keep doing bad.

We do the things we’re used to. If I keep doing what is good, then maybe I can do that even when it doesn’t make sense. Maybe it can be such a habit that it even feels natural, like eating when I’m hungry or sleeping when I’m tired.

Maybe, if I’m lucky, I’ll simply do what is right.

Human Again

I wanted to be really clever at the start of this to somehow make what I’m going to say next be exciting and interesting, because it’ll sound cliche. But I don’t think it is, and neither should you. Since I am not a clever man, I'll stop introducing this and state my opinion.

I hate what the Twilight series has done to vampires.

I know I’m late to the hate-Twilight party, but I've noticed a disturbing trend in general that Twilight highlights perfectly. What I have against the Twilight vampire has nothing to do with their sparkle, immunity to wooden stakes/crucifixes/garlic, or surviving off animal blood (Buffy was doing that WAY before). It’s alright to take some creative liberties with the vampire myth.

No, my problem is that human heroine Bella wants to be a vampire. 

You could make the argument that she only wants to be a vampire because she wants to be with Edward, but you'd be wrong. At the end of the third movie, Edward confronts her and she claims that she wants to be a vampire not for his sake, but because it’s what she wants. So let us assume that she’s being honest there and really wants to be a vampire for the sake of being a vampire.

Here are cool traits of being a vampire:

1) Beautifully sparkle in the sun

2) Never die and never grow old (for a sensible person, this should be in the con list)
3) Super strength and super speed

4) Some superpower you get that is unique for you when you become a vampire

Here are the cons of being a vampire:

1) UNQUENCHABLE DESIRE TO FEAST ON HUMAN FLESH

2) Questionable if you even have a soul

Now, call me old fashioned, but I think it’s odd that you would potentially forfeit your soul for the things that I just mentioned, but since that’s a debatable point in the books, I’ll leave it alone. I find it simply wrong to willingly crave to feast on humans. 

Bella craves the power of the vampire even though it comes with the huge temptation of devouring human flesh. To me, that sounds like tyranny. No virtuous person craves power for its own sake, rarely do they even crave power. Even the main vampires in Twilight find human life valuable and avoid feasting on humans, but they admit that this puts them in a position where their immortality is only a half-life at best. Several of them even regret the fact that they are vampires because they hate the fact that they have this desire.

That being said, my main problem with Bella’s decision is not her desire for power at the cost of her soul/humanity. At the end of the third film, Bella says she wants to be a vampire because she never fit with humans. That’s all that is really said, so I think I’ll rephrase it to make it more clear.

"Gee Edward, I want to become a blood craving, potentially soul-deprived being because I don’t feel like I fit in with human beings, though I am, by nature, a human being. I'd rather have the taste of human flesh in my mouth for all eternity because, sometimes, I feel judged and like an outcast."

How come the heroine of this series is someone who is turning her back on her own kind? Even though the other humans they show in this series are nothing but kind to her and, which is more than can be said about people that I meet, trying to be inclusive and understanding, poor Bella does not fit in. Evidently, it would be better to FEEL included, even if it comes with the desire to devour your former friends and family.

No...wait....that's terrible. Probably even evil.

Maybe I'm just inhuman for feeling this way, but I cannot find myself rooting for their being another vampire in the world. That's the disturbing trend that I've noticed in films; people cheering for the not-human side. Don't believe me? Let me list off some other films them.

Lets start slow with another vampire flick: the Underworld series. The first film has you cheering for the werewolves because they were oppressed (keep in mind both werewolves and vampires devour humans), the second has you cheering for the vampire and her vampire/werewolf lover (unclear if they feast on human flesh, but I'm going with yes), the third/prequel has you cheering for werewolves yet also humans as both are treated wrongly by vampires, and the fourth has you cheering against the werewolves and humans because both of those are trying to exterminate the vampires. They also imprisoned the vampire heroine and her child, so I guess that was bad too. 

Though I might be able to argue that trying to bring about the extinction of vampires is a bad thing (emphasis on might), it makes sense to me that humans hate vampires, same with werewolves, because they've been enslaved by vampires for so long. But at the end of the fourth film, you find out that werewolves have secretly usurped the vampire and are secretly ruling the humans, so it becomes vampires and humans vs werewolves, which is kind of fine I guess. I'm a huge fan of learning to work together, but let's be real and admit that humans picking a side is basically, as they say at the start of the series, them choosing who they would rather be food for.

So if you find yourself rooting either for vampires or werewolves, you're rooting for humans to lose, unless you neglect to notice the fact that both sides need to live by drinking human blood.

I've begun to realize that I'm all for people learning to cooperate, but I mean that just as I said it. Cooperation is not being alright with your people being abused nor wanting to abuse other people. Cooperation does not mean that your race is the best and has a right to rule nor does it mean that you should hate what you were born into.

Let's assume that you can be born a vampire and that it isn't just a cursed human, what it originally was viewed as. Cooperation would mean that vampires aren't trying to eat humans, humans aren't trying to enslave vampires, but both are working together and using their own special and unique talents to benefit each other (like how humans can be around blood without risk of getting into a feeding frenzy). That makes sense and seems good to me.

But lets get back to the movies.

The next film on my list I haven't seen, so I might be wrong in my interpretation of it: Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Now, from what I can gather, the film basically is about how mankind created its own worst enemy through cruelty and narrow-mindedness. The protagonist of the film is sensitive to the monkey's rights and tries to stand up for him, and that I'm fine with. But humans start to deny the monkey his rights, and then he revolts by making other monkey's super-smart  You get to some giant battle on a bridge with the monkeys fighting the humans (going off the trailers here), and I'm unclear if you're supposed to be rooting for the monkeys. I think you're supposed to be on the monkey's side as they were oppressed, but since this is a prequel, if you're rooting for the monkeys, aren't you simultaneously rooting for what's going to be happening in the classic film Planet of the Apes? To make that a bit more clear, if you want the monkeys to win, does that mean you're ignoring the fact that they're going to use that win to enslave humanity and strip us of our intelligence as an act of vengeance?

But again, I haven't seen the film. Maybe the part where the monkeys are ransacking the bridge and slaughtering humans is supposed to be taken as a kind of scene right out of a horror film. But from what I got from the trailers, I'm pretty sure you're supposed to be on the monkeys' side.

Last, and my personal favorite offender on this list, is Avatar, the one with the blue people not the awesome cartoon series on Nickelodeon (which you should check out if you haven't already). When I first brought this up with people, I was gently reminded that humans were doing bad things in this film, and you should be rooting for the blue people because they're being unjustly persecuted, and I think this is a fair point. That's not my problem with the film. My problem with the film is the ending.

In the movie, people are able to become an alien species by implanting their thoughts into a brain-dead  artificially created alien body, and they switch back and forth from their alien form and their human form. In the final battle in the scene, the hero gets forced out of his alien body and trapped in his crippled body as his home is attacked, putting him in a dire situation. There is this really touching scene where the hero's Na'vi lover saves him, and, as she carries his crippled frame out of the wreckage of the base, I think "Aww, look, she sees that he's a tiny crippled human and loves him anyways. Yay! Love conquers all!"

Oh, except that this feeling is completely discredited at the end of the film when you have the guy permanently leaving his human body behind so he can live in the artificially created shell forever. Turns out being a Na'vi is better than being human.

Now, I get that being crippled sucks, and good for him that he gets to walk again, but I wonder if leaving behind your humanity is worth that. I'm pretty loyal to being human, so I'm going with a no here, but I'd be interested in what people would have to say about this. It just seems to me that being human is means more than our physical aptitudes and mental prowess, and I don't know if I'd be comfortable giving up my humanity. I think I would feel like being a Na'vi would be like living a lie, knowing that I'm human deep down.

But then I also thought that maybe this was similar to Beauty and the Beast, where it is great that Belle loves the Beast when he is a beast, but it's a nice touch to let the Beast become human again. However, one MAJOR difference between this two is that the Beast was originally human; being a beast was a curse forced upon him. The Beast was trying to get BACK to his human roots, not avoid them. He and his castle gave up super strength, durability, and seeming immortality just to become human again. From that perspective, being the Na'vi would be the curse, and he should be trying to get his humanity back.

Yet when I watch these films, I feel like my view is the freakish one. I feel like I should want to have the immortality of the vampire, the weird ponytail of the Na'vi, or the strength of a gorilla, but I don't want any of that because I like being human. 

I said at the start I hate what Twilight has done to vampires, but I'll be specific here. I hate that Twilight makes people value vampires over their own humanity. It might be old fashioned, but I think humans have a lot to offer the world, and are worth more than just being nutrients to vampires or being vampire candidates.