I often see quotes from people like Fred Hampton about how they’d willingly die for the people. Or engage with Huey Netwon’s concept of reactionary and revolutionary suicide, or see how people like Daisuke Namba looked death in the eye and readily accepted it. And I really just…don’t get how they did it
I…I’m a coward. I know it. I don’t say it to myself enough and I don’t work on it like I should. But still, I can’t conceive not fearing death.
To start I dont want to fear. I don’t like the paralyzing sensation, the absolute inability for me to do something. When I was…more depressed than I am now, I often contemplated (i guess if im being honest, reactionary suicide). And what stopped me was not only my connection to society, but also just being afraid, afraid of what might come next. Is it nothing? Is it reincarnation? Am i eternally damned to some hell? What would even be the good option? I feel like a coward every time I sit down and contemplate that I didnt do it. And then I feel like more of a coward for wanting to take the easy way out. Nowadays it’s not that I want to die…its just that I wish I was never born in the first place.
But moving on. It’s not just fear of the unknown. I don’t want to hurt people. Not just people. Everytime I think about it, I imagine my cats wondering where I’ve gone, why they can’t see me anymore. Why I abandoned them. I wonder about my mom, about my family, what they’d think. Especially if I ended things myself. Would they hate me? Would they hate themselves? I don’t think they even know the extent of how I feel.
It’s basically every night now that I think about it. I think “what if this was it. What if I died now? What if I went to sleep and never woke up?” And I feel immensely scared. There’s so much I wish to do, wish to learn, places I wish to go. I feel like a failure for being so insulated, that if I died now that I wouldn’t have changed the world in my years of existence.
I’ve been watching 人民的名义 recently, and in one episode a charecter went over the details of his life in the sino-japanese war, about how he joined the CPC to carry explosives and use them against the Japanese. And I sat there watching and asking if I would do it. Would I have carried explosives under fire to destroy Japanese pill boxes or joined the Guomindang’s Dare to Die corps against the Qing? And honestly I couldn’t definitively say yes. I understand the inevitability of death, I understand that one day I will die. But I don’t understand how I accept it.
If you’ve read this, thanks for letting be honest. I know there’s more to the world than just me. But I don’t know how to tell my brain that…
Don’t beat yourself up about being a coward. Not everyone needs to be willing to die. Most of us have more useful things to offer than our lives.
It not that those people don’t fear death, it is that they fear the continuation of the status quo even more and in some cases they know that their death will further their cause.
For many people being under the continuation of the white supremacist imperialist patriarchy is a fate is worse than death. Its a trade off and the less you have to gain and more you have to lose the less sense that makes.
There is always a risk of death and suffering in any moment. The risk rises when you decide to be a vocal advocate for opposition to the white supremacist imperialist patriarchy. The ending of that system decreases the chance of death and suffering moment to moment for most people.