Despite All This Malice

• Lori Palminteri
• Uncategorized
• October 15, 2023

It’s true enough I’m no optimist. I’ve been accused of being a pessimist and a Debbie Downer by most of the people who know me best. They weren’t being unfair in their accusations. It’s not just my sense of humor that is dark. My obsessive nature frequently spirals to final outcomes, which are never happy, really. Though I don’t see myself as a pessimist necessarily, even when I’m a drag. I’m more pragmatic and a nihilistic realist, if you ask me.

When you work in news and are basically a journalist, spending six days a week married to a computer and researching what’s going on locally and around the world, it truly can and does expose you to humanity at its worst. I have fear and doubt for the future of our species, and it will ironically be our own doing.

I do not feel it is my place to lecture my opinions on the most current hateful atrocities the Hamas committed and what will and/or must happen as a consequence. I have my opinions, my beliefs and most importantly, a broken heart for all those who will suffer undeservedly at the ripple effect of those evil doers who have pathetic lives filled with nothing but hatred. Nothing to live for. A false ideology that a god would reward them for slaughter. It’s a madness beyond anything I can comprehend, because I was raised with love, and therefore despite my many flaws, I am good. I do not feel the need to prove to man or god my goodness, because I know my heart, and I know my sometimes crazy head, and therefore even though I do not believe in a God, at least in a traditional way, I do not fear a God. Because I don’t have to prove myself to that entity either in my death.

While I like my job and my work and am grateful even though I’m sorely underpaid, it can and does wear on you to be fully aware of everything and plugged in constantly. It wears on me. There are days and nights I just cry. I cry for people I don’t know. I cry for my nephews and niece, worried about the world that they will grow up to. It pisses me off the leaders of not only our country, but globally, are greedy and selfish and don’t care about their people. It pisses me off there is so little justice. It pisses me off healthy people get sick. It pisses me off show business if full of snakes trying to fuck you over, or just trying to fuck you, and when they can’t, they fuck you over.

Is there balance in this world, of the light and the dark? Or does the dark have the upper hand? Has it always had the upper hand?

And yet. Here we are. Living our lives. Chasing rainbows. Hoping for love we won’t fuck up. Saving our dollars for days on the beach. When I sleep over my sisters house, I am woken up early by my niece, who then cuddles up next to me and hugs me. She tells me she loves me over and over. We’ll just lay there for an hour or so. In and out of sleep. But she’ll wake me up every ten minutes just to say “I love you.” And I wonder how someone so divine could even exist. And how this little angel of a human shines brighter than those dead eyed monsters of humans who have no souls. I wonder how awful their childhoods must have been to not care about the innocent. And only through my siblings kids could I fully understand what I mean to my parents and those who have loved me and championed me through my life. It is through this way, the cycle of the loved, that life is able to not just exist, but continue in a way that is worth it. To hold onto those so dear, and share all the precious moments between the hard days, shitty jobs, loss or suffering. Our minds can be like the night sky. Sometimes when it’s full of clouds, you can’t see the stars at all. But when it’s clear and you look up, and when you’re away from all that artificial light and shallowness of cities, you can see all the lights out there in the universe, and you know for sure, how much beauty there is, despite all this malice.