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I am having a moment where i am beginning to doubt either the sanity of most of the world, or my own.
Yer right, I'm sane and most of the world is crazy! How likely is that?
This is number 42 in my on-going but ad hoc column - Rumination's from My Verandah!
I sip on a cold glass of McGuigan's Black label Chardonnay and fight the temptation to close my macbook up, and just enjoy the sun, the sounds of the running water at our ponds, and the birds. Hey! even Bodi & Lenni out the back warning all and sundry not to look into the property, all somehow melds nicely.
But, no!
Personally, I am brain tired over trying to work out why it is that humans cannot accept - 1. We are all the same genetic stock (even the right wing bigots and the left wing loonies).
2. That if you resort to violence to make a point, then your point is not worth making.
3. That everyone's life is finite, and if we would turn our energies toward making this life and this planet the best life and healthiest planet, it would indeed be paradise.
4. That extremism, right' left, political, social, emotional (put in tour own descriptor) will never properly serve the human race.
5. That there is NO God and NO afterlife - this is it kiddies, so don't expect "divine intervention", don't expect your god to save you or to reward you after your death and make the bloody most of this life because there isn't a second one - and my rider is, that "IF" there were a second chance, then why in all that is logical, would it be given to those that so wasted their first life.
What is so sad, is that these basic questions are not asked and sure as "hell" aren't considered by all those on a march to "glory" or death! Personally I don't give a fig any longer if you die! But I make it clear, you have no right to take me with you! You chose your shoes - you bloody well wear them.
I have often finished a "rumination" with a quote, and on some occasions it has been John Lennon's famous:
"You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will live as one", from Imagine.
I have decided to throw all rationality out the window on this afternoon on the verandah. Sometimes I think we need to be absolute and total dreamers in order to continue this march through a world full of insane and nightmarish political diplomacy, political correctness and the relentless push for power by extremists of all sorts.
I have a gig where I interview older people (those over 65 years of age), and that now includes the Baby Boomers, who are rapidly "running" into this age group, my observations that i am about to expound upon are really based on those born during the Great Depression years of the 1930's and prior.
These folk express a belief to me over and over again that they have lived through the best years - even dealing with WW I and II. The belief is, that the world really is no longer controllable, that they are scared because not only can the enemy be in their street, if indeed they know who the enemy is anymore, but the pace of change and the relentless march to destruction leaves them to conclude that as the end of their lives races toward them, and they will not be sorry to go!
So whose bloody fault is all this? I mean to say, we fight for peace, we fight for power, we fight for justice, we fight for human rights, we fight for resources, we fight for dignity, we fight for control - we fight because we have the belief that "we" have god on our side and sometimes we fight for the sake of having no focus and too much energy and, sometimes we fight because we are so insular and selfish we want it all "our" way.
So what is the common factor ? OK, I'm a simpleton, but it seems to be "fight" and all that entails.
Sociologist and certainly geneticists will tell us that we fight constantly, Darwin's whole theory of evolution of the species is based upon the fight for the strongest of the "species" to survive.
Am I the only one who is tired of the "fight"? have we been evolving for 6 million years, or 200,000 if you only believe the race of Homo Sapiens is the only one that deserves to be considered, just to be where we are now?
Hang on, just where are we. According to Monty Python we are "thirty thousand light years from galactic central point". I checked that fact up and it's pretty damn close, but does that help us? I don't think so except to point out this galaxy is pretty bloody big!
In fact it's so big that the argument that intelligent life must exist elsewhere becomes more likely all the time.
I have often jokingly said, that if there is intelligent life "out there", i'm sure they have marked this planet as to be avoided at all costs, or putting it simply, have just labelled it "Dangerous - Avoid at all costs"!!
So don't bother looking to the stars for help over this! Either the place is soooo big there is almost no chance of us being 'discovered", and if we have been, it's pretty damn evident that no intelligent sentient life would have anything to do with such a "lunatic" species as we have evolved into.
So it sounds like a case of, "we" got ourselves into this mess - but the real point is, are we capable of getting out of it? You want to play pessimist, then you have to say an emphatic "NO"! But I did say earlier this is the rumination of a man who has decided that in the face of overwhelming evidence that things are indeed going "belly-up", despite the fact that a small group of people try to "fix' things, to simply be a "dreamer".
History suggests that nothing has changed, that the relentless march by one human, or one group of humans, to dominate another has been around for all of those 6 million years, and is now the means and ways are just so much more sophisticated
Not only has our technology given us the direct means to wipe life from this planet by weapons of mass destruction but it has, by subtle means, given us this ability as exemplified by the ever growing, ever evolving monster of climate change, to wipe us out slowly, but surely.
Technology has also meant we can reach out and find like minded people, and in so it is with this ability, the "lunatics of the left, right and even the "silly-party" now have the means and ways of spreading their message, and if you say something long enough and with enough conviction, it grows into a "truth".
Then we fight over whose "truth" is the real "truth"!
The growing problem is that more and more people are not trying to get out of the ever growing negative situations because the past has taught them that they are in fact pretty darn helpless. This is a condition known as "Learned Helplessness", was first proposed by Psychologist Robert Seligman, back in the 60's. It has some elements that can be challenged as psychological theories go, but I don't know about you - but I look around and see more and more evidence of people exhibiting signs of, learned helplessness.
Mind you when it comes to events outside our immediate sphere of influence, it is really quite understandable as to why we would feel helpless and our world has gradually become less local, and more global, and this certainly has not helped.
When we lived as solo hunter gatherers, we just became responsible for ourselves and our family, and that was controllable.
When we lived in a tribe, we could deal with the issues as it was an "intimate" world.
When we organised into villages we could deal with issues because we could share resources.
When we organised into nations then . . . . . then the troubles started to really manifest! Of course we aren't going to ever devolve out of nations, are we? But we could make that a #1 proposition in regard to the world of the "dreamer"!
The issue of "you have" and "I want" is an interesting phenomena! Simpletons will tell you that the "spoils" of life goto those who work hardest and thus gain the rewards. The lazy and those with little drive and ability simply are unable to "gain the good things" in life - they will tell you it's the natural order.
Firstly it totally disregards the issue of resourcing and who controls the resources. Money makes money, and with money you produce goods to make money! Hey, that's basically the premise behind capitalism.
Or, you could make goods, to sell for money, in order to access more goods, and that is a basic premise of socialism!
Yet both forms of social domination are so faulty and so loaded that neither works. We tend to gravitate towards capitalism because of the illusion of freedom that it promises to bring, and even if it doesn't, it sure as hell is a better life than systems of communism, socialism and totalitarianism (read fanatical right wing governments - like Nazis or ISIS).
OK, so wipe those off the blackboard and what are you left with - anarchism? I don't think so, on the surface it sounds like a great life. A lifestyle without laws and non-hierarchical organisations. Sounds fantastic but by all that is holy it might work in a collective of very few people, but in a world of billions?
So proposition 2 needs to be that we have a system where we are not any of these forms of government, because we know they will not work - with maybe some "humanist" form of anarchy being the most likely.
The third proposition becomes highly unlikely, but hey! It's my dream. The world will awake to suddenly realise there will never be any true winners if we keep to the path we are following, there will be incidental and often accidental moments where at any moment any given person with a gross amount of resources might think that they have "won", but really look what the mess we are in, these people have not helped at all and, the writing is on the wall.
Time is indeed running out, and I am reminded of those men who are portrayed as some what crazy, standing on street corners with signs declaring, "The end is nigh!". Maybe there aren't so crazy, and, maybe any given person reading my somewhat meandering rumination will think, "Oh, he's become a fatalist, or, he's gone crazy".
Maybe going crazy isn't a bad thing, i mean to say, I don't believe I am, and as I sit here on the veranda with glass of wine in hand, and the sun streams down through the greenery of the hills, it is easy to imagine that what is happening is in fact just a nightmare and not reality - or is it as Gil Scott Heron claimed in his epic song, B-Movie" :
"This ain't really your life,
Ain't really your life,
Ain't really, ain't nothing but a movie."
I wonder if it IS a movie, just how it will end?