Thought Is What Makes Us Non-Trump
I'm sitting on the Redline, going downtown. It's early in the morning and I'm slightly hungover. I leave the apartment early enough to ensure I get a seat on the El and when I get on the train at Wilson, there is only one unattended seat. And the guy next to it has his bag on it.
"Excuse me..." I mumble as I position myself to sit down. And he ignores me. He refuses to move his bag.
Were I a creature of pure and unthoughtful emotion, I would not hesitate to go with the flood of entitlement and anger and annoyance that overcomes me. I would grab his bag and throw it across the car. I would rail at him for being such a rude fucking asshole. If, inspired by the rising emotional response in him, the annoyance turned into serious confrontation, I might try to kill him.
But I don't. I pause. I put on the brakes. I THINK THROUGH THE FEELINGS.
If no one on that El car was thinking through and past their natural emotional responses, it would be like a scene from 28 Days Later or something. We would quite literally explode into a raging storm of ID - men casually raping anything they could stick their dicks into, people shooting heroin in their necks without pause, people fighting for any piece of commercial want. Carrying an iPhone on this car of NO THOUGHT would be a death sentence.
Humanity is an odd creature in nature. Unlike other predators, we don't stop when we have what we need. We simply stockpile food, sexual partners, stuff, until we have decimated the ability for those things to continue sustainability and move to another place. Look at a child. All want and feelings and tantrums and aggression and shitting in their pants and no regard for anyone or anything else. The child is humanity undistilled, unrefined. No lessons. No perception of consequences. Left to their own devices, children employ the Law of the Jungle. Inside every adult lurks the child from whence she came.
The only thing that prevents person to person mayhem is THOUGHT. Our ability to assess our surroundings and make decisions based on our perception of the possible consequences.
A man walks into a grocery store. He his hungry. He sees rows and rows of food. His emotional response tells him "Go grab some food, asshole. I'm hungry. Feed me, Seymour!" And then he thinks. "Oh. Wait a second. I have some money and can exchange that for food and then I won't be a thief and possibly go to prison."
A woman sees a man she wants to fuck. The urge is a bit overwhelming. The animal magnetism she feels for him is like a hammer in her chest and she gets wet just looking at him. Her emotions say "Go! Fuck! You want him, you go for it RIGHT NOW!" And then she hears her thinking mind say "Wait. He might not be interested. Maybe you should slow that down, go home and masturbate and call him sometime. Or at least go buy him a drink and see how he reacts first."
Driving down a street. You look down at your phone and blow past the red light. Blue flashing lights pop on.
EMOTION: Floor it! Get the fuck out of here now!
THOUGHT: If you do that, you will be hunted down and possibly killed and, if not, put in prison.
You turn on the burner on the stove. It's pretty and slightly blue.
EMOTION: Pretty. I want to touch it.
THOUGHT: That shit is going to burn you.
Politics of old were only effective because there were thinking people who saw that compromise (definition: no one is really happy with the solution but everyone can claim a piece of it) trumped raw emotion. Today, emotions sans thought rule the day and both the Unprogressives and the Woke openly disregard thoughtful compromise.
Thought is a tool. A stop gap from the very raw feelings of want and need and blatant selfishness and self interest that permeates every moment of being human. Thought is a double-edged sword - one side preventing each one of us from being destructive creatures of raw feelings and the other preventing us from living fully.
Without it, however, we descend into the madness of embracing our dark and needy feelings and becoming an El car full of hungry children with no one to prevent the madness of unfettered emotional need.
We become of nation built for Donald Trump.
