A long time ago I watched a matinee of the movie Bonnie and Clyde in an old theater in Baltimore. The audience was sparse. Such matinees were becoming a thing of the past. At the end of the film, when Bonnie and Clyde are murdered, a boy in the audience, no doubt playing hooky from school, spoke aloud to the screen about the murderers.“They cold,” he said. The words have stayed with me, which is to say I have spent a lifetime trying to come to terms with those words and have not succeeded. Probably I wouldn’t want to succeed. I don’t know.

I do know that the boy’s gut-level response made sense, not easy to do given how we humans tend to be senseless creatures. He put his instinctive finger on the failure of warmth to animate human proceedings in any sort of helpful, heartfelt way. This strikes me especially at this moment—to cite one among many wretched instances—when people are being removed from Medicaid who are going to very much suffer. Some of them, fellow citizens and fellow humans, will die through no fault of their own. This, apparently, is okay with the ruling party which will spin it in whatever ways it chooses to spin it or not even bother, will simply ignore the consequences and move on to the next “issue” of the day. If I were to say these people are murderers, just as much as the people who gunned down Bonnie and Clyde (who, for their part, were no strangers to violence) they would take much umbrage. How dare I? Et cetera. Some people, regardless of political outlook, live to take umbrage, Self-righteousness never goes out of style.

Given that the nation has plenty of money for bombs, one has to wonder whether the nation is on the side of life or death and the answer seems clear. Life, though an often sanctimonious fuss is made about abortion, must bow down to the power to murder and not just murder, but to murder en masse, to kill many people (to say nothing of whatever other creatures are killed) and piously declare the beneficence of such murders along with having the capability to perform such murders, the capability that resides with those whom Bob Dylan labeled “Masters of War.” Within this death-dealing stance resides a coldness that is taken for granted in the way many vicious human stances are taken for granted. Numerous so-called reasons can be brought forward to buttress the stance about enemies, security, vigilance, power, and duty. On the other hand, anyone who wants to think twice can look at the First World War, also known as the Great War and the War to End All Wars, and wonder how humans can so palpably deceive themselves with their rubbishy reasons. I have looked at the photos cheering the announcement of war, including the photo in Vienna that includes Adolf Hitler among the crowd, and have had a hard time getting over the sickening feeling. Somehow we refuse to translate one set of circumstances into another. Expedient reasons always present themselves as justifications.

Human beings want to go on, want to thrive and flourish, and they keep having children, but the death warrant does not go away and keeps announcing itself, as with the Medicaid cuts, in different forms. It’s a rare person who will say forthrightly that coldness is what appeals most to that person, that the person revels in the ability to quash any feelings of warmth and compassion. Yet plenty of phrases indicate otherwise, as in “He’s all business” or “She doesn’t let her feelings get in the way.” We can ask what “business” and what “way” actually mean but typically all we will get is a sneer or a shrug, as if we were children who persisted in asking silly questions. To me this attitude seems particularly appalling because we have no way in the sense, for instance, of the Tao that leads us in this world and that governs our daily doings. We cleave to whatever the official national moment offers – “The War to End All Wars” – and are swamped by that moment and the sense that some other moment will follow that one in an endless, if mindless, procession. For many, some shard of obedience will not budge, a shard whose coldness is considered a virtue.

The crowds in Vienna and London and Berlin and elsewhere were cheering. That time has largely gone by. Thanks to missiles and planes, nations often do their duty in a more remote fashion these days as they prepare continually for more wars, including the nuclear one that does have the ability to be a war that will end all wars but not in any peace-creating fashion. Rather the outcome of nuclear winter is an ultimate coldness but one we would, understandably, rather not contemplate, though some have and have written about it. But, as the present day indicates, you can get rid of people in other ways. Money, for one, can offer its reasons, however spurious and makeshift. The human gist here is that a person can become so locked into coldness, that despite whatever trappings the person retains – love for one’s spouse or children or church attendance or taking care of a pet (Hitler liked dogs) – something is missing in the person that the society applauds.

One personification lines up behind another. Money is cold. Power is cold. Guns are cold. Ideology is cold. Calumny is cold. Humiliation is cold. Many discrete human actions fall into one or more of those categories, actions that are considered routine because, indeed, they are routine. The idiocy of the news cycle works to the favor of whatever powers-that-be since it cancels out the possibility of pausing and asking why something is happening, much less calling out the coldness for what it is. Much organized human life is cold as metal on a winter day but we are somehow supposed to whistle while we work. That boy in the movie theater understood a reality that underlies each headlined day. Who knows what he did with that insight, or what that insight did to him.