I feel like I would feel significantly less insane and incomprehensible if I weren’t aware of how mad I sound. If I weren’t so self-conscious. If I had what Kim Rhodes described as ‘an audience that has your back.’ Maybe self-awareness is its own trap. People who are self-ignorant seem to get along fine, albeit with periodic epic pouting about not understanding why people sometimes just snap and go crazy or up and leave. But then forgetting the next moment and running out to play again. Secure in the sense that this will never come up again, never happen again, like a small child, easily getting over hurts because they’re not patterns of abuse, and because no one else is holding grudges, and no one in particular is consistently being scapegoated or targeted for unfairness. So when does it start? Kids aren’t born prejudiced. It has to be carefully taught, to fear and hate and single out particular characteristics, and erase everything about that person but their skin colour, diagnosis, mannerisms, differences (assumed or actual). Sondheim told us, “Careful the things you do, children will see and learn. Careful the tale you tell; that is the spell. Children will listen.” So many people learn how not to listen, how to tune out, some form of selective deafness to navigate the world. Although it’s an easy thing to get addicted to, deciding to ignore what others say, and dangerous. Are we educated, or socialised out of not listening? People insulated with more privilege can afford the luxury of listening less, for they can afford more mistakes, greater risks, and still have either money or social capital/implicit influence to pay or perform their way out of legal and other consequences. The further down the social pyramid, the more load we bear to consider the balance of people above. The more we are trod on, burdened, holding up people who perhaps climbed up us like we were handy architecture to come out on top. Sin, wrote Terry Pratchett, starts with treating people as things. Money makes this easy, to measure someone in static externally determined cost/benefit terms. How much is a life worth? How much would a wrongful death lawsuit or life insurance policy pay out if this particular person died? If someone becomes disabled, how much are they owed monthly to live on, based not on actual costs of living and expenses related to their disability, but a fraction of what they were making when they were able to work. What about people never able to work, due to how they were born? What of them? Universal Basic Income as a concept is universal — for everyone — and ‘basic’ could mean like ‘base pay’ that everyone gets and can make more on top of or ‘basic’ in the sense that it covers basic needs. Food, housing, health care, transportation, hygiene/household products, that sort of thing. There’s too little love, but humans are fickle and inconstant, prone to dependency on extrinsic rewards and external influences. What the world needs now is baseline equal access to basic survival needs. When those needs are met, we improve as individuals, as a species. Generations of abandoned children can stop abandoning each other and fighting over scraps while licking the toes of hedonistically powerful parental figures. Less sacrificing each other under a social human pyramid, please. We are all tired and afraid of each other, and addicted to fear, its delusion of keeping us safe by telling us who the Enemy is and what the Enemy will do to our most vulnerable — as if we’re not doing even worse things to children, the elderly, disabled. There should be simpler ways to say this, but people tend to mouth platitudes and go on doing the same crappy little things. Really, let’s all unfuck it up. Are you sooooo busy you can’t do one little thing to help unfuck it up? Something new, perhaps? Something… difficult?