I'm Equalized, Honey

The Equalizer's protagonist, Robert McCall aka Denzel Washington (let's be honest it's just Denzel, no one remembers his name's Robert when the movie's going), is ridiculous. On the one hand he tells kids not to cuss, keeps them in school and tries to help them stop selling drugs. On the other hand, he brutally beats people to death to the beat of a stopwatch. 

I'm also reading The Time of Contempt (one of the Witcher books). The Witcher is faced with lots of equalizing opportunities too. I love the violence. I love reading about the Witcher killing Ciri's pursuers or disembowling a Stryga. It's fun. Maybe video games and reading violent books is a nice little way I can unleash my own inner anger. 

I probably need to unleash my anger in real life a little more too. I repress that shit sometimes and call it "picking my battles". But let's pick some more battles. People piss me off sometimes and I need to express that. All this bottling shit up is probably unhealthy. 

I remember Mark Manson talking about how anger arises from the perception of being the butt end of some injustice. And I feel that. When these kids disrespect me while I substitute teach, I get angry at the thought that they disrespected me, and I can't disrespect them back without getting in trouble with the admin/parents. I just have to "take a deep breath" or "count to three". I don't like doing that shit. It gives me a sense of "that person just got away with disrespecting me and this situation deserves to be equalized". I need a personal Denzel to come in and diss them on Eminem's level. 

So I get where the equalizer comes from. We all would like to have injustices returned with justice and "make things right". Eye for an eye. Tooth for a tooth type shit. If we lived this way, perhaps injustices would be less frequent because people would know the penalties. Perhaps positive motivation can only take us humans so far. Gotta have that negative reinforcement to create the fear element. 

I hear people say "everyone's so sensitive these days". I disagree. I think that people's perception of injustice is just skewed sometimes. Like if a person presents as male, gets called "sir" and immediately gets upset because they identify as a woman, it's not a problem of them being "too sensitive". They just perceive an injustice that doesn't exist unless the misgendering came from some malicious intent to misgender that person. And I think it can be argued that we can judge people's intent (some people are good at hiding it though, so it gets tricky to judge by tone or facial expression). Like when Jordan Peterson kept calling Elliot Page his dead name and pretending he couldn't get it right, that was obviously bad intent. 

I'm getting away from the main conversation. How do we manage injustices? Forgive and forget and move on? Or maybe find a healthy blend of revenge/payback + moving on? 

I don't fucking know. I'm some dude with a Bachelor's degree and a penchant for raising questions without answers. I suppose we have the laws we created that give our society a sense of justice. And religions create an internal justice system that some people live by some of the time. Hell some religions send some people to hell for unjust behavior. That's a bit harsh even for me and the Equalizer. So no wonder Christians can smile at heathens. They're like "Oh just wait. They'll pay for that when they're dead." It's like they're watching an afterlife trailer, imagining the people who slight them burning alive. That sounds fun. Not gonna lie when I was religious I would imagine the people who pissed me off burning in hell. Pretty horrifying stuff, huh! Now I just try to address shit haha hahaha. 

If hell does exist, maybe I'll get to say "fuck you" to Greg Abbot.