Limits

One of these days we will be the sun we will go dancing with the moon, the stars will watch and applaud us as we claim our right to the sky.

The Morality Police

First watch this video

Rihanna - Man Down

Now what did you think? Is the first thing that popped into your head well she shouldn't have shot him? Was it something along the lines of that was unnecessarily violent? Did Mrs.Lovejoy's voice screech into your head beseeching you or anyone around you to "pleeeeease think of the children?" If you thought along the same lines as me that your view was entirely the opposite of this, entirely.

I say this only for context because do a quick google search on the controversy surrounding this video at how Rihanna has had to defend herself about this video, how she is being excoriated from all sides for the "senseless violence" of the video.

Let me make it clear I don't really care for Rihanna's music. I don't care either way if I remember her thirty years from now, it just isn't my cup of tea. I have no real feelings about her art or form and would not consider myself a fan.

Yet I feel compelled to defend her and her art at this point for three reasons.

The first is saccharine. If this was your daughter, sister, mother or a friend and they were assaulted in a manner depicted in the video, and they went and shot their assailant wouldn't you applaud them, or at the very least understand the motivation behind such an act? I consider myself a pacifist and do not condone violent solutions to violent problems but I would still have a hard time condemning someone for it and would empathize deeply with their reasons for doing what they did.

The second is Rihanna herself. In the last two years nude pictures of her were leaked online and more infamously her now ex-boyfriend Chris Brown beat the living tar out of her in an highly publicized incident, and he is now enjoying chart success once more with his new album. So put that in context. Even if Rihanna would never in real life shoot someone down, having been through what she has been through, does she at least not have the right to fantasize about killing someone who assaults her? Is the video not just really a thinly veiled allegory to the Chris Brown incident with Rihanna imagining what it would be like to kill a man she loved who stole her dignity and beat her to into a bloody mess?

The last point ties to the second. If this was Taylor Swift or Carrie Underwood and even if they hadn't been assaulted in real life, would their video not be viewed as a proper response to an assault on a female and an assertion/justification for second amendment rights? So isn't that the biggest problem? The fact that Rihanna is a sexually provocative black woman who shoots someone in a video and the indignation that follows that is just an old story of coded racism. The translation the the anger is this: Niggers are violent, even women Niggers, keep you children safe.

and that just makes me want to shoot someone. Pacifism and all.

Is it really simple?

More often than not our days don't happen as we imagined they would. We are elaborate in our expectations of movement and perfection that we wish to extract from the day and yet while we may gain all of what we wanted, it is rare it happens that way we imagine.

You get soaked in the pouring rain after days of wishing for a storm. You hear music and move in the rhythm of love and afternoon to a sound that is twenty years old. You lose your breath chasing yourself, coming to the knowledge that the pursuit of loneliness and solitary exertion are the foundations of your self.

Nothing goes the way it should but it goes the way you need. Some days it's easier to know this. Some days you see how small you are and how grand, how universal how eternal that is. Some day you keep promises, fingers into dirt, you dig and move the earth.