Thoughts
This past weekend I went through a particularly bad spell and wound up in a dark place. My sister fell ill, I had a heavy run-in with business partners, my womanizing collided with my world, commitments went unfulfilled among other things.
So, in this tender, exposed moment i took a look about me for solace... and found little. Since then, Things are coming 'round, but after a bit of hand-wringing I have decided to lay my thoughts bare in this forum.
I might be anonymous, but I am honest. Now, Iam no poet laureate... more akin to a pimply 14-year-old railing against the sodding planet, but it should make some sense. Feel free to comment.
Today I awoke to find the world crying.
I realized that not only have our children and fathers lost their way, but the return to the proper path may be difficult as it is overgrown and difficult to find as it is no longer in use. But the path is not yet effaced. A trace may still be left, but one must look carefully, and if it does not become well-worn once more I fear it may be washed away in the acid rain or taken away on the poisoned breeze.
The massive industrial expressway, black as death, seems our only future.
I wake in the morning to not a new dawn, but to a permanent midnight. It goes deeper than the self, deeper than the flesh... it pervades the bone, the structure, the shape. Looking out the window to the smudged horizon, the lonely grey towers, the failing trees, I feel little hope. We see no further than the now, and who can blame these poor souls, when tomorrow seems like suicide?
We rape our young for material gain. We are the pornography generation, twisting and perverting the beauty of youth until we are nothing more than a writhing mass of poisoned flesh. Our children deserve more hope than this.
The soil is giving up on us. The glaciers retreat from us. The ocean rises against us. The air wheezes and gasps above us. The food poisons us. And still we defy them.
We lock our doors and suspect our neighbors. We lock away all we covet from the world in hopes that these items will give us happiness. It is an empty house and an open heart that will bring happiness.
We covet. It is us, we are inseperable from this desire. We fight wars to maintain the levels of greed and waste we are accustomed to. We view competition as strength, cooperation as weakness and condemnation with passive hearts.
We defecate where we sleep, we foul the water we depend on for life, we inject poisons in our precious veins and we spew death into the air we breathe. Because we covet. We covet material goods, so industry murders us with kindness, greedily catering to our unnatural desires. What good is it to devise a burning iron box to visit nature if it is that very paradise that is fouled by the process?
Those tasked to represent us dance in some macabre masquerade, in which they do not represent us at all. The cancer grows as they wear their tattered robes of public office, through which we can see the corporate branding, and they make deals with the devil behind closed doors, selling our children’s blood for plastic baubles.
What good is it to find new lands and usurp them? To force them by political and economic means to adopt our ways? To force them to give up their soil due our mismanagement, to give up their water since we have used ours as a public toilet? We go not to other lands with the open arms and laurel as friends and equals, but as conquerors and parasites. We stick our steel spikes in and suck the earth’s blood beneath their feet, force upon them our shoddy goods and beads, rape their children as we have our own, push our icons… and recoil in horror when they push back.
We brutalize the earth, our neighbors and friends, our families and ourselves because we covet. The deeper we look within, the wider the abyss, yet we stack broken furniture and old clothing against its walls in a feeble hope to fill the mocking emptiness, instead of lighting the fire of paradise and filling the void with the warmth and light of human understanding, love and compassion.
We cannot love paradise because we do not love ourselves.
now, back to happiness!
So, in this tender, exposed moment i took a look about me for solace... and found little. Since then, Things are coming 'round, but after a bit of hand-wringing I have decided to lay my thoughts bare in this forum.
I might be anonymous, but I am honest. Now, Iam no poet laureate... more akin to a pimply 14-year-old railing against the sodding planet, but it should make some sense. Feel free to comment.
Today I awoke to find the world crying.
I realized that not only have our children and fathers lost their way, but the return to the proper path may be difficult as it is overgrown and difficult to find as it is no longer in use. But the path is not yet effaced. A trace may still be left, but one must look carefully, and if it does not become well-worn once more I fear it may be washed away in the acid rain or taken away on the poisoned breeze.
The massive industrial expressway, black as death, seems our only future.
I wake in the morning to not a new dawn, but to a permanent midnight. It goes deeper than the self, deeper than the flesh... it pervades the bone, the structure, the shape. Looking out the window to the smudged horizon, the lonely grey towers, the failing trees, I feel little hope. We see no further than the now, and who can blame these poor souls, when tomorrow seems like suicide?
We rape our young for material gain. We are the pornography generation, twisting and perverting the beauty of youth until we are nothing more than a writhing mass of poisoned flesh. Our children deserve more hope than this.
The soil is giving up on us. The glaciers retreat from us. The ocean rises against us. The air wheezes and gasps above us. The food poisons us. And still we defy them.
We lock our doors and suspect our neighbors. We lock away all we covet from the world in hopes that these items will give us happiness. It is an empty house and an open heart that will bring happiness.
We covet. It is us, we are inseperable from this desire. We fight wars to maintain the levels of greed and waste we are accustomed to. We view competition as strength, cooperation as weakness and condemnation with passive hearts.
We defecate where we sleep, we foul the water we depend on for life, we inject poisons in our precious veins and we spew death into the air we breathe. Because we covet. We covet material goods, so industry murders us with kindness, greedily catering to our unnatural desires. What good is it to devise a burning iron box to visit nature if it is that very paradise that is fouled by the process?
Those tasked to represent us dance in some macabre masquerade, in which they do not represent us at all. The cancer grows as they wear their tattered robes of public office, through which we can see the corporate branding, and they make deals with the devil behind closed doors, selling our children’s blood for plastic baubles.
What good is it to find new lands and usurp them? To force them by political and economic means to adopt our ways? To force them to give up their soil due our mismanagement, to give up their water since we have used ours as a public toilet? We go not to other lands with the open arms and laurel as friends and equals, but as conquerors and parasites. We stick our steel spikes in and suck the earth’s blood beneath their feet, force upon them our shoddy goods and beads, rape their children as we have our own, push our icons… and recoil in horror when they push back.
We brutalize the earth, our neighbors and friends, our families and ourselves because we covet. The deeper we look within, the wider the abyss, yet we stack broken furniture and old clothing against its walls in a feeble hope to fill the mocking emptiness, instead of lighting the fire of paradise and filling the void with the warmth and light of human understanding, love and compassion.
We cannot love paradise because we do not love ourselves.
now, back to happiness!
posted by Blog Monkey at 1:21 p.m.
16 Comments:
Wow. That is amazingly powerful. You are very asute in your observations, Monkey. I hope that you find your hope again soon.
Warmest hugs,
~Ange
Yeah, and when you pretended to wack off on that cheese doodle! That was really great!
You've inspired me - to write a blog about all that is noble and beautiful in this world. Hope is the thing with wings. Except if you're a sink chicken. Then it's "Soap is the thing with wings"
That was very good. Our world keeps crying because we keep doing things to cause the shedding of tears rather than do anything between stints in hopes of drying them.
oh, sinkula. you wack off on all that is beutiful. ;)
yeah, that is about right and why I am going off grid in the next sevral years to be the crazy woman growing her own food.
Here you go again, proving you're more than hilarious... seriously, this is wonderful. Maybe it was something in the stars, but I had a dark weekend, too. (Had a nightmare about an uncle I hadn't seen in years. He couldn't find his wife in the dark and I woke up super shaky and had sweats, chills. Then I found out she, his wife, had OD'd (while I was having dream) and that she's hospitalized now.)
It seems your weekend (maybe it's time to try to be monogamous or at least honest with women) helped get you in touch with Truth, both yours and extended world truths, eh?
Hope you feel better, but sometimes, even though it sucks at when we bottom out, we need to get back to basics to rebuild. Hope that makes sense. (Have to get my son from kinder, so I'm rushing...) Peace.
Kat
In this 'information age', we have access to vast amounts of information, but the quality of what we have access to is increasingly questionable. Real news reporting is buried under a landslide of prepackaged news planted by corporate PR, ideological groups, government and other entities interested in manipulating how we act and consume. Real news is buried from one side by a river of PR and from the other side by pressure from the dominant media conglomerates to select news for its entertainment value.
Our sources of belief have become less trustworthy. Once they were mainly our parents, elders, teachers, neighbors, and other people we grew up with and spent time with personally. Those sources were sometimes right and sometimes sadly wrong, but at least they didn't systematically exploit or deceive us by the millions, for purposes unrelated to our own well-being.
We're stressed out by unprecedented levels of environmental and social destabilization: 500-year floods, devastating hurricanes, increasingly severe water shortages, unexpected crop failures, resurgent diseases and war. Often the reaction to such stress is to flee - not just physically, but emotionally and cognitively. People who have money often flee from the pain of their lives by consuming.
Our world has been turned inside-out by entertainment. Once it was built around work, now it's made up of thrills. In industrial countries, entertainment has become the kind of dominant business that manufacturing once was. The loci of our entertainments are artificial environments - stadiums and auditoriums and the interiors of cars, instead of canyons and vales and dells; earphones instead of the sounds of birds or wind; and the false fictions of TV ads and sitcoms instead of reality. If we're not astonished by the gradual extinction of our world, maybe it's in part because, being constantly cut off from it, we no longer have any strong expectations to begin with.
The disconnection is worsened by systemic misuses of technology. Consider, for example, the soaring dissemination of automated toys and games that provide the propulsion, conflict or imagery once provided by children's arms, legs and imaginations. In a Toys-R-Us world, we spend more and more to bring up kids who are less and less connected to what keeps them alive.
What to do? Good policy is not enough. It does for human behavior what end-of-pipe control does for pollution. So, just as pollution is more effectively attacked at the source, attitudes need attacking at their sources - in the education of kids by parents and schools, in the learning environment we grow up in, in the curricula of universities, in the accountability of media. We need to revisit how people learn (or don't learn) from the first gasp of life to the last, because today's average upper-middle class college grad, when you strip away what he knows about entertainment and technology, has a medieval understanding of the world. That understanding won't get us through the next century.
sorry - the above was written by Ed Ayres - WorldWatch
http://www.worldwatch.org/
Yes, when you dig even a little bit at any given socio-cultural problem you begin very quickly to perceive that the answer lies at a fundamental level and no amount of policy change or quick fix is going to be worth a damn. The very basis of our culture is flawed and the forces that continue to shape it go unexamined, denied or undetected.
c the hwg, marvellous post, i'm glad you shared that. i agree wholeheartedly to this symposium of the inane blasted day in, day out. i want to hear the birds, as corny as the pop media have made that seem; not because it is relaxing... but because it is REAL.
i do not have cable at home, nor internet, nor a phone.
check my most recent post.
Sometime you just have to take a break from all the negativity and fear-mongering the media shoves down our throats. Let's try a No Media Day. More about it on my blog.
http://web.mac.com/meinert_hansen/iWeb/Site/Blog/Blog.html
Shameless self-promotion, I know.
OMG Monkey, did you just post something at exactly the same time as me?
seems i did.
you! advertising on MY blog! shameless! shamel- hey, good post.
Haunting tekst you have written. Wonderful!
If it only weren't so darn true.
There's work to be done I guess!
unfortunately, yes. where's the 'hand of god' these days?
Post a Comment
<< Home