There is no reason to dress this up or disguise it: I sometimes fantasize about hurting other people. I think that, for the most part, this is a normal reaction. Feelings of anger and frustration are natural human emotions, and it is also natural that we think about taking them out on people. The most tranquil and compassionate person becomes a dictator in their own mind the moment they have to deal with a bad driver. Little frustrations and world events have me grinding my teeth and wondering what the fuck is wrong with people and wanting to get revenge in some theatrical way. And to be honest, when I am bored, sometimes I design entire concentration camps in my mind. In fact, to urge myself off to sleep, I sometimes design entire dystopian hellscapes with barbed wires and machine gun nests stopping people from fleeing the sinking peninsula of Florida. If that sounds extreme, feel free to chip in for a white noise generator so I can have another way to get to sleep. But while the detail of my daydreams might be more than most people, I don't think I am that much of an outlier. If I am, maybe this little write-up will get dragged up sometime in the future to refute me being a "quiet neighbor".
But here is the thing: even at my angriest, I can't concentrate on totally bad things for long. Instead of straight revenge fantasies, these sadistic fantasies always resolve into lessons with dramatic irony where circumstances present people with a reflection of what they have done wrong. They become Twilight Zone episodes where people are forced to confront what they did wrong, or their own ignorance. Horror becomes a teachable moment. It is why I wrote a story set after the next civil war where the death is all virtual.
But here is the thing: things much worse than my darkest fantasies are happening right now. Could I drive into some small town in Tennessee, go to someone's house, and announce that if they kept lying, I would shoot their mother and make them watch her die slowly? What about their wife? Could I handcuff a man and make him watch his wife die? What if he had small children? Just go through a house and kill half the people while the other half watch? And then move on, laughing, callously, to the next house? And see who is available there? Of course not. In my own daydreams, when I am mad, it resolves into a "lesson" and people walk away better and no one gets hurt.
But in reality? This is what is happening every day in the United States. To fulfill parasocial relationships with media figures, people are sacrificing their parents, spouses and children to a preventable disease. I would have to be really sleep deprived and hungry before I got mean enough to come up with the idea of a woman giving birth, holding her child for a minute, and then slipping into unconsciousness and dying? Because that, and things like it, are happening. Children are losing parents, parents are losing children, all from a disease that is not terribly difficult to prevent. Every day, people are coping with grief I could never comprehend, let alone ever want to happen. And why? Because social media turned life into a game of "owning people" by being stupid. The pathology of winning internet points by saying something that is deniably wrong is another subject entirely, but for the sake of doing that, people are losing their lives and the lives of their families every day. It is beyond the greatest human evil, and it is a slow week of the natural consequence of behaviors that people are doing, in large part, as a joke.
And I guess I don't have a single other fucking thing to say about that.