Disrespect of the Living
It’s hard to believe that so many people are dead. We’ll all join the majority someday, but it goes without saying that not all deaths are necessary. So much suffering is completely preventable—by mundane means.
I saw a man die because he had no health insurance. He had been having trouble breathing all week but didn’t seek care because of the costs, and by the time he brought himself to the hospital, his heart was starting to fail from being overtaxed, working so hard to circulate what little oxygen he had through the rest of his body. We had to call the rest of his family and tell them he died. He was a father, a husband, a brother.
You never forget a widow’s wails, because I know what that’s like.
That might sound odd to you, seeing a witch working in a modern hospital. That’s partly why I don’t attempt to ask kami, the living universe to intervene in wholly human affairs. First of all, it’s not their business, not their life, not their care. It’s unique human hubris to assume that a single transitory strand in the universe commands the attention of angels and demons and monotheistic deities alike. When a dog dies in the street it’s a tragedy for the family, but to everyone else, it’s a mess on the road.
“We’re all trapped in a maze of relationships, and life goes on with or without you.”
Instead of praying for people to get health insurance we should make healthcare accessible to everyone.
It’s completely unnecessary to evoke the gods when the solution is entirely within the scope of normal human action. It’s completely inappropriate to ask them to fight your own battles for you. When it hails, I don’t go outside naked and cast a spell or implore a god to make the weather warm and balmy. I put on a classy coat (of which I have several) and bring my butterfly umbrella… When Congress doesn’t pass pandemic relief measures for workers but continues to bail out company executives and boost the stock market, I don’t passive-aggressively hex them (or bind them) and remain pleased with my anonymous irritant. I start preparing for a socialist revolution.
I mean, they’re preparing. Look, I know magick is important, but there’s only so much candlework you can do before the police gas canisters fired at the head leave you with a traumatic brain injury and the taser electrocutions leave you convulsing on the floor. The cops don’t need magick to shoot autistic kids a dozen times in the back. They certainly didn’t need magick—or a warrant—to take my brain-damaged friend’s phone and threaten her with assault rifles. The solution isn’t a protection spell or amulet. It’s to get rid of the fucking cops and the whole system that perpetuates social inequality and the social violence—cultural, economic, physical, and psychological—necessary to uphold that inequality.
These are man-made problems with man-made solutions. We abolished slavery and won the 8-hour working day with bombs and cannonfire. Resorting to magick to solve these societal issues is lazy, and frankly disrespectful to the divine energies that so many practitioners supposedly revere. And the people who died for these victories.
Trump isn’t losing popular support because a Facebook group cast magick on him. He’s losing popular support because he’s killed at least 250,000—300,000 excess deaths not included—and sent hundreds of thousands more to food charities in this country over the past eight months. You don’t need magick to get people to hate him! Mass graves are plenty.
I don’t waste my spirit friends’ time with problems that aren’t of interest or relevance to them. The ancient redwood forests on the coasts don’t give a crap that I haven’t won the lottery. And I certainly don’t ask them to clean up the mess made when my own dog has shat on the carpet.
I live with them, I don’t beg them.