I’ve been purposefully avoiding writing many serious posts on the blog these days. It’s not because I haven’t been having serious thoughts. If anything, I’ve been having far more of them than in the past. I’m following the events unfolding in our country and our world with an ever increasing sense of real horror.
What does that mean, coming from someone who’s written horror (or at least horror-adjacent) books for a living? It’s the difference between encountering something in fiction and seeing something in real life. I’m fully aware that the things I write about could happen, but then again, I’m also in control of what’s going on in a book in a way I’m definitely not in the real world. And seeing something actually happening is just so, so much worse.
Case in point: this morning I saw that the official White House Twitter account had posted a video that starts with footage from Call of Duty (a popular video game) and then proceeds to show a series of missile strikes in the Iran attack, one after another, adding point values to the screen each time something’s blown up. (Buildings, fighter jets, ships, etc.) I’m not going to share it here, but I found it disturbing in ways that are hard to put into words. I’m a gamer. I’m all for going around blasting bad guys on the screen, but I also recognize when I’m doing that that I’m not actually blasting anyone. Those missile strikes the White House was depicting? Those were actual strikes, potentially killing actual people.
I don’t find real death amusing or something to treat lightly. And this entire effort to bomb Iran and come up with a good reason after the fact is . . . horrifying.
But as soon as I try to write anything about topics like this, it’s like I can already see how it’s going to play out in real life. There will be people who will agree with me and sympathize. And then there will be people who tell me I’m wrong, and insist that what I’m seeing and watching isn’t actually happening, or at least that it’s not happening in the way I see it.
It must be nice, living in a world where you can reduce everyone down to a simple, single role. “Good guy” and “bad guy.” That’s not the way I view the world, and I have real difficulty trying to reduce it down to that. I see tragedy hit someone else, and I see how that same tragedy could happen to me.
I generally write blog posts for a reason. It can be to review something, to entertain, to work through a difficult topic on paper, or to persuade. Current events these days aren’t entertaining, and I’ve generally worked through their implications long ago (much in the same vein as my posts around gun violence evolved over time). So the only reason I have left to write is to persuade, and in this case, I continue to feel like nothing I can write will persuade the quarter of the country that still strongly approves of what Trump is doing and how he’s doing it.
And so . . . I just don’t write anything at all.