A Battle Of The Mind and Soul

Sense Enough to Know It

I am not a Democrat.

I am not a Republican.

I am not an American.

I got sense enough to know it.

I am not a student of much of anything

except what the bodies taught me,

Gaza, Fallujah, the silence after,

the applause during.

I watched them vote for it.

I watched them not vote against it.

I watched them change their profile picture

and call it resistance.

I got sense enough to know the difference.

They ask me why I'm angry

like anger is the diagnosis,

like the wound is the problem

and not the thing that made it.

I am not angry.

I am accurate.

There is a difference between a man

who cannot control his fire

and a man standing in an actual fire

telling you precisely how hot it is.

I walk among them daily.

I learned their language, the small talk,

the weather, the sports team,

the careful nothing of it.

This is not connection.

This is archaeology.

I am excavating the minimum viable surface

so that I can survive the excavation.

My humanism says: they are still human.

My materialism says: so were the guards.

My history says: so were the ones who watched

and called their watching neutrality.

I understand the purge now.

Not as pleasure, never as pleasure,

but as logic.

The cold logic of a world

that kept choosing this.

I am not asking to be saved from my conclusions.

I reached them honestly,

paid for them in full,

with years and witness and the slow death

of every softer thing I tried to hold onto first.

I am asking how to carry them

without being carried under.

He said: if you and I were Americans,

there'd be no problem.

I say: if they were what they claim to be,

I would not be what I've become.

But here we are.

And I got sense enough to know it.

What's occupying my head

Both statements are reported as said by the same civil rights activist:

"I'm not a politician, not even a student of politics; in fact, I'm not a student of much of anything. I'm not a Democrat. I'm not a Republican, and I don't even consider myself an American. If you and I were Americans, there'd be no problem."

"I'm no politician. I'm not even a student of politics. I'm not a Republican, nor a Democrat, nor an American, and got sense enough to know it."

- Malcolm X

Either way, I identify with his statement. I am an immoderately inordinate third-era communist internationalist, a secular humanist, extreme anti-sectarian, and material conditions and experience have made me an activist-misanthrope. I am also a literalist and a totalizer, with a factual-philosophical-ideological mercurial neurodivergent cognitive and communication style.

Everything from the wars in the Middle East, to Trump's first presidency, to the Biden presidency, to Gaza, to Azov, to the Harris campaign, to the present day in 2026. I don't know how to live among, socialize with, and maintain relations with the majority of my fellow citizens. Moral redlines have been crossed repeatedly. Not only do I feel morally betrayed but morally wounded. My ideologies are a scientific secular political-philosophical faith. For me it's not about how do I build a movement with my fellow citizens, but how do I not see them as directly and indirectly complicit fascist genocidal dark triad monsters via their rhetoric and actions, or lack thereof? That is what I'm battling internally as a neurodivergent, as one with AuDHD.

I fully believe in guilty by association, becoming what we tolerate. Those who crossed my redlines I feel nothing but resentment and disdain for, while my humanist side says technically they're still human; yet with my beliefs, I understand the reason for gulags and purges. This activist-misanthrope struggle is hard. And I have sought professional mental assistance. I'm not asking how to build coalitions. I'm asking how to keep functioning while surrounded by people I've concluded are morally compromised at a level that feels unforgivable and possibly un-rehabilitatable. I'm asocial but occasionally I have no choice but to socialize and that's where my problems manifest. Masking has become a career...

When explaining the four types of misanthrope, Ian James Kidd said, "We might call the first of these the Activist stance. Misanthropes of this kind are motivated by hope. They see the entrenched moral failings of the world, and respond with determined commitment to change this. Their sense of hope shows itself in ambitious large-scale efforts aimed at reconstructing our collective condition. This may include moral teaching, religious preaching, or socio-political activism, or some combination of these."

This is part of my problem based on my material conditions and life experiences. I carry the Activist's structure but not its fuel. The architecture is intact: I see the entrenched failings, I respond with commitment, I write, theorize, and agitate. But the hope that is supposed to power that engine has been systematically burned out by accumulated witnessed atrocity met with popular complicity, from 9/11 to Trump and 2016 to Biden to Gaza to the Harris campaign to the present. What remains is activism running on resentment and moral conviction instead of hope, which is supposedly an unsustainable substitution. The result is Kidd's painful oscillation, not between hope and resignation, but between the drive to reconstruct and the misanthropic conclusions that keep undermining the premise that reconstruction is possible. And people wonder why I'm depressed.