"I wouldn't let what happened change the way I approached life"

Via The Council of Conservative Citizens

Salon's political writer Brian Beutler writes about "the shooting that nearly killed me."

The Council performs their duty, pressing back the orthodoxy that being a victim of a black criminal demands a redoubling of anti-racism. I don't disagree, but this rang a chord with me:

But the moment I woke up in the hospital I promised myself I wouldn’t let what happened change the way I approached life. I wouldn’t flee the city. I wouldn’t start looking over my shoulder.

I woke up the morning after my 31st birthday with no memory of most of the night or how I got home (my friend told me that the police helped drag me into my apartment) and in terrible, wrong pain. I realized I had to call an ambulance.

To make a long story short, after getting a catheter put into me, a scare that I'd been dosed with antifreeze and hours in the emergency room, I was told that someone had slipped me opiates and tricyclic antidepressants. I won't get into the urological details, but the drugs started a chain of events that resulted in acute kidney failure.

(I've suffered no ill effects since my recovery, which is a blessing. My kidneys shut down because they were working properly, not because they had been damaged.)

Needless to say, going through such an experience is a tornado of emotions. When I discovered that I'd been roofied, for lack of a better term, I had a brief moment of relief that I hadn't given myself alcohol poisoning. That moment passed in an instant, replaced by the gravity of the knowledge that someone had almost killed me.

(I believe the incident stemmed from recklessness, not malice. The person wanted me to get really, really hammered, probably. After all, there are more efficient ways of poisoning someone.)

I had a moment much like Beutler's. Once we had figured out what happened, after I was in the clear, they moved me to a private room elsewhere in the hospital. In the quiet, I had the same thought, "This doesn't change anything." My philosophy, the worldview I'd constructed allowed for anyone to be a random victim, even me. Especially me. I believed that the universe was mechanistic and random. My appearance in the world was happenstance and my exit would be, too. 

The important thing was that I already knew this. That I was a victim was no surprise--my worldview already told me that I was just another ant in a colony. I was reflecting on what happened to me and finding that there was no incongruity between ugly reality and what the world looked like to me.

So I know what Beutler is talking about. I hate to use the word but the feeling is very close to being smug. Something close to vindication but closer to some kind of martyrdom, like a pacifist allowing marauders to murder his family, pretending that his principles somehow make it all right.

That instant stuck with me for a while, more than the pain and more than when the doctor told me that I'd been dosed. Ultimately, I realized that it was hollow. Thinking that way made me a pinball, bounced around by impersonal forces; I can say that it unequivocally felt untrue. Looking back, I can say that it was the beginning of faith.

I wonder what's really gone on in Beutler's mind. I suppose it's too much to hope for that he's gowing through the same process in writing about it now. But we know that the Left has its own faith and that is to believe in a priori principles despite all evidence. 

But his mind can't be the same as before. What happened to him was much worse than what happened to me and, as much as I wanted to say that nothing changed, my deepest instincts have been altered. Several years later, I had a brief but intense bout of food poisoning. I was almost delirious and was convinced that the source of my illness was poison injected into me by an operative using one of those umbrellas with a needle at the tip used in the Cold War. I remembered it perfectly and, if I could only move properly, I could find the mark where the needle went in. A few years after that, I drank too many shots at a holiday party and went home to send text messages in gibberish, asking for help because I knew someone had put something in my drink again. When my rational mind has been stripped away, I'm convinced that an unknown assailant has made me a victim again. 

Since Beutler has made his victimization a parable of anti-racism, how will he react when the adrenaline is flowing?