The Inevitability of Violence

Now is this golden crown like a deep well
That owes two buckets, filling one another;
The emptier ever dancing in the air,
The other down, unseen, and full of water.

I was just thinking about the inevitability of violence in the modern world, or at least the extent to which it makes its presence felt. There are all the fears and preparations, decisions made under the weight of the threat of Iranian nuclear weapons, neighborhood crime statistics, terrorists with bombs in their shoes, but I didn't really realize until Wednesday what I'm really afraid of. Whenever Al Qaeda comes to get me, or the Iranian nuclear suitcase bomb, or a giant tornado, or the ever growing army of the undead I'm fairly sure one of my ex-girlfriends is raising in the pacific northwest (you have no idea how scared I am of that girl), I can accept that.

The guy who really scares me, who I will definitely change my life to avoid, is not Osama bin Laden, or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, or George W. Bush (commonly called a terrorist) or anybody you've heard of. It's the guy I met on the way to the Twins-Indians game (the Twins lost 11-0, but while Brad Radke's current form may be frightening, I'm not changing my life to avoid him either). No, I met a guy on the bus. Who hefted his bag and announced to me he'd just bought a new machete. Because he'd watched the most recent video footage on the internet of a man getting his hand cut off (from Pakistan, I think?) and it gave him some ideas about "some motherfuckers he had to take care of". This was before he started in on our ethnic backgrounds, and the crimes that I as a representative of all white people throughout human history, had perpetrated against his people and him personally. He backed off a bit when I told him my people didn't actually live in this country when most of the damage was done, so hopefully he found some descendants of Jamestown settlers to go machete or something, or at least the driver of a Mayflower moving truck.

Oh, and when he got on the bus, a lot of black people had to get off, which he loudly protested was "discrimination", apparently putting no weight on the fact that we'd arrived in transit hub and they were obviously changing to a different bus. The bus driver also knew the guy by name, and didn't push the point when the guy didn't pay his fare (didn't want to get his hand cut off, obviously). So I for damn sure won't be riding the #14 bus for a while, even if the #7 pulls up with Slobodan Milosevic driving (he's not dead, he's just out in Den Haag having a pancake and a shmoke).

(PS - that's Richard II, Act IV, Scene i... READ A BOOK!)