i’m drunk and i wanna talk about orcas.

Listen, if you didn’t read the title — I can’t help you here. You remember when I got high and looked at cat photos? Now you do.

Do you know what the proof keeping humanity alive on our thin thread is? Orcas. Killer whales.

Every day, the inner sanctums of humanity become more and more barren. More cruel, visceral, laced with torment and pain. Humans are animals, and no greater than any other animal at that. Yet, we live, thrive, and have spread everywhere.

You know what else has? Orcas.

Humans - we view our relations to others as proof of weakness. Vulnerability. We call each other idiots and hold the sacridity of our small life with the shaking hands of irresponsible kids. We’ve been given this great playground of Earth, and yet we never relish in it.

But, isn’t shit bad? Shit’s always fucking bad. Whatever. You know what’s fucking real? You know what orcas mirror to us?

Orcas are the most supreme predators on the face of this Earth because they cooperate. They are the killing machines that swipe sea lions from beaches, seals from glaciers, and schools of fish from fishing nets because they work together.

They know that the key to survival is in numbers. It’s in getting our shit together and working for the common goal. Shit’s always bad, but we have to get our fucking heads in the game. You think all orcas like each other? Probably not. They have to eat and do orca shit, so they put it aside.

I think one of the things that has lead to the death of pride in America has been the diversification of funding public projects to private companies. Now, it’s no longer “NASA has landed on the moon”, or “NASA has done crazy space breakthrough”. It’s now “SpaceX has docked with the ISS”, or “SpaceX has done this”. My tax money fucking paid for that, but I don’t take pride in funding private companies. Orcas have pods and we have our tax dollars funding stock buybacks and corporate malfeasance from Boeing.

NASA was beautiful because it was ours. And now, we have nothing — we have pride in corporations, not our nation.

We’ve collectively lost faith in our unity. Orcas don’t struggle with that. They just keep the unity. We have a lot to learn from them.

When one of them dies, they swim around with the deceased one on their head in an act of mourning. Sometimes, I think humans are the only ones who build meaning around their cruelty. Orcas know what they are: they’re fucking killing machines. They smack around a seal for training purposes and leave it to die.

We know our cruelty is social unacceptable, so we fashion reasons around it. Worlds of hatred and reasoning to our base emotions are created, even without justification. We need a release for our cruelty instead of owning it.

Humans are fucked up, and are really mean to each other. Yet, we don’t own it. We excuse it. Sometimes, we should just say “I’m fucked up and I’m sorry about it”. When we build structures of reasoning around our false arguments, we spend more time dismantling the structures than the false statements.

Orcas don’t do that. They own their cruelty because it enables survival. We know what survival costs and I wish we would say it fully. Yet, we hide it and put layers of disguises on it to hide our hate for people different than us. Own your shit, and if you have a terrible opinion, then be sentenced to public opinion for it. Your intellectual racist intricacies will not protect you from the harm you justify.

There is no limit to human cruelty. Anything can be justified, and justification enables dehumanization. Yet again, orcas beat us.

We took these beautiful, intelligent creatures and we put them in a pool for our gain. People made a lot of money charging other people to look at beautiful creatures. Maybe humans will get what we deserve. Maybe justice is a concept we’ve created to add emotional structure to feelings of wrongness that otherwise have no cosmic retaliation attached.

I wonder if I’ll ever get justice for my assault, and then I know that time in jail means nothing. What I really want is for it to have never have happened, and no justice can restore my peace of mind. What justice often is can be summarized as forgiveness in exchange for pain.

His pain won’t make up for the death of my dream. There is no justice, there is just silence — sometimes that’s the worse punishment.

I hope if an orca met me, it would know how long I have kept them in my heart. It would know how long I have thought about them, and know that I am someone on their side. I’m gonna sleep surrounded by orca plushies tonight.

I went to Seaworld as a kid and I’m sorry about that cruelty. I don’t ever want to hurt anyone. I think a lot about the people I have hurt. I hope I’m a positive etching on the people I’ve scarred. I hope I’ve never scarred anyone. I stay awake at night and wonder if I’ll ever succeed. I hope orcas don’t have mental illness.

I wish I had a mom who liked me like orcas do. Instead, I just have a women who birthed me that I haven’t talked to in 5 years.

I want some semblance of unity to pick up from the divided burning crash-site known as American politics. The only things that unite in America is war and fear of other. Both of those are interchangable if you truly listen. I don’t know if we’ll ever hear the cohensive resonance of a fulfilled America again. I hope we do.

I wish humans take care of a world that we share with creatures as beautiful as these. Orcas survive because they know more than humans that survival in groups is key to dominance. Maybe we say we’ve learned that, but I don’t think we have. I wonder about the people who make wealth off of America and I feel alone.

It’s uniquely American to be as anti-social and individualist as we are: we continually despise other humans for their existence without realizing their existence grants us the luxuries we drown in. Other people made our food, keep our supermarkets running, fix our cars, and wire our internet. We cannot live on this Earth alone.

We live in a world built for us, by other people. The least we can do is build a better world for them. You don’t have to like people to want better for them. We have to put up with others’ shit not only our survival, but our blossoming.

I love orcas.