There are instruments that cut and instruments that cure.
Often they are the same instrument.
A scalpel does not become a weapon because it opens flesh. A needle does not inject a virus because it pierces skin. Fire cooks, cauterizes, and razes cities to ash without ever developing an opinion about which task it has been assigned.
The hand matters.
The dose matters.
The purpose matters.
Context, inconveniently, matters.
But context is expensive.
It requires the terrible labor of looking twice.
Much easier to build a little box, slap a warning label across the lid, and throw everything vaguely resembling danger inside.
Hazardous.
Do not touch.
Do not ask questions.
Do not give it any oxygen.
Then stand back and congratulate yourself for surviving the complexity of the world by refusing to acknowledge its existence.
There is a unique violence in presumption. Not the kind that digs out every organ and runs them all through a wood chipper. Cleaner than that. Presumption walks into the operating room, sees the knife, and arrests the surgeon.
The patient can bleed out on the table.
At least nobody compromised the principle.
I have watched people build entire fortresses around old evidence. Fair enough. Some lessons carry a price paid in blood. See enough people immolated by fire and eventually smoke itself begins to look guilty.
I understand.
Really.
But there comes a point when protection petrifies into doctrine. When experience stops informing perception and begins dictating it. When the past is no longer evidence but scripture.
And scripture, once canonized, has very little use for new witnesses. So everything gets translated into the nearest available catastrophe.
A tool becomes a weapon.
A strategy becomes surrender.
A temporary triage becomes addiction.
A differentiator becomes denial.
The accused can explain until language frays in the mouth. No matter.
The predetermined verdict has excellent precedent.
Meanwhile, on a smoke break somewhere just outside the courtroom, hypocrisy takes another leisurely drag.
Funny creature, hypocrisy. Remarkably adaptable lungs. It can happily inhale whatever poison has already received a personal exemption.
This is medicine because I understand it.
That is poison because I do not.
This intoxication has context.
That one has consequences.
Mine arrives carrying a permission slip.
Yours must be escorted from the building.
The goose should be summarily exonerated!
The gander should get the death penalty!
Here I stand. The supposed patient zero in a laboratory outbreak that nobody is willing to talk openly about. Never mind that there was never a sterile field in the first place. No sanitation protocol. No clean implements. Everyone had been licking the fucking equipment long before I arrived. Still, apparently, the infection began with me.
There must be a single altered variable to blame. There must be something foreign introduced into what was an otherwise pristine system. There must be a reason the room suddenly feels wrong.
Fine.
Point.
At me.
Human beings do love a specimen. Pin it down. Label it. Add enough Latin and eventually nobody notices the test subject is screaming.
But “contaminant” sure is a rich accusation coming from people stagnating in their own toxicity, feeling superior because they have mistaken familiarity for cleanliness.
I am the only one tracking dirt into this house?
Nobody enters unblemished. History. Fear. Habit. Chemical crutch. Inherited reflex. Old grief fermenting quietly behind aching ribs.
We smear the residue of our damage across everything we touch and call it personality because it has been there long enough.
Then an unfamiliar stain appears and suddenly somebody calls fucking Hazmat.
How dare you alter the environment?!
As though the environment arrived sterile.
As though any of us did.
I am tired of purity tests administered by filthy hands. Tired of watching frightened people mistake resemblance for recurrence, one familiar feature for an entire identity, precedent for destiny. Tired of seeing nuance prosecuted as an accomplice.
Tired of watching context summoned lovingly to explain one person’s dysfunction, then dismissed as an excuse the moment it might acquit someone else. Certainty this incurious does not protect anyone. It just chooses who gets carved up.
And there is no blade better than a closed mind. It cuts away every fact that complicates the conclusion until only something convenient remains. It does not need to prove itself right. It only needs to remove enough of what proves it wrong.
Trim the motive.
Shave off the circumstance.
Chop down every meaningful distinction.
Keep slicing until the person in front of you finally looks exactly like the monster from your memory.
There.
A perfect replica of your inner demons now.
Much easier to dehumanize.
Never mind what had to be amputated to make the simulacrum convincing.
That is the killing blow.
Not disagreement or difference of opinion.
Not fear.
Not even judgment.
Reduction. Dismissal.
To offer the whole of yourself and then be deliberately rendered smaller because somebody else’s understanding lacks the dimensions required to contain you.
And still they will call the mutilated version accurate.
Hold it up.
See?
Fits perfectly.
Of course it does.
You cut it to size.