This World

I'm sitting here in a peaceful, safe place that took me a lifetime to find. And yet, underneath the calm is the depressing realization that the world around this place, and also at times within it and of it, has become riots in the street at one end and virtual warfare at the other.

This is the time we live in, a time where there is no middle. In spite of the vastness of information available to us through every medium imaginable, we have isolated ourselves into a small cocoon of sameness, of things that don't vary from the rigid realities we have set for ourselves.

Our tolerance for differences is purely intellectual because in real life we don't tolerate differences very well. Rather than look at the people around us, look at those that are not around us. Those are the ones we need to examine, especially the reasons why they are not around us.That is where the true sickness of our society lives, in those people we threw away because they just did not fit into our extreme constricts of acceptable and unacceptable.

In the last couple years the polarization of the external world of politics and wealth accumulation has infected the day to day relationships of ourselves as human beings. We are so easy now to cut someone out of our lives because they are not like us. We are uncomfortable without our own personal choir of yes we agree, and we dissect the different ones who don't agree as if they were tumors infecting our perfect world.

We demand everyone be completely socialized, never say the wrong thing, never step outside the rigid lines we have drawn. If they mess up once, if they displease us in the least, if they say one thing we don't completely agree with, then we cut them out of our lives. That person annoyed me. Off with their head! We have let our ego needs turn us all into the Queen of Hearts.

The harsh thing, the dehumanizing part of this is we do it now without even bothering to talk about it anymore. No one feels the need to explain, to apologize, or even defend their right to demand only those like them live and interact with them. No one thinks much of gated communities anymore. They are normal now. They are who we have become, the walled cities of sameness.

We are no longer families with each other where the weird uncle was tolerated because that's just who he was, even if he wasn't like us. Now we cut the weird uncle out of our lives. We no longer tolerate the flaming activists who take to the streets for justice, for information, for equality, for the truth. Instead we condemn them and judge them for bringing "negative" energy into their lives, for choosing to focus on what's wrong with the world instead of what is right. We have grown so fond of living with our heads in the sand that we no longer feel the kick in our ass from those stepping over our indifference.

We no longer understand that not everyone was raised the same, not everyone speaks the same language even if it is linguistically similar. We no longer accept that intellectual and emotional growth happens at different levels and times for different people. We want everyone to be perfect, especially if we are not. The more imperfect we are, the more we demand perfection in others. It's a vicious cycle we just can't seem to break.

We no longer end marriages, relationships, friendships. We burn down the house, trash everyone associated with the destruction, even if we lit the match. We walk away bitter and vengeful and since we live in a world where bitterness and vengefulness are the norm now, it's easy to raise armies to support us in the war on each other.

We are all so special now, all so believing that only we have the right to dictate how others should be and live. We have become intolerant sheep who are led around by flatterers, by yes men and women, by artificial praise and ego boosts. Our needs mean more than the needs of others. Our aches and pains hurt more than those of others. Our childhoods were more awful/perfect than others. Our marriages were more awful/loving than others. Our relationships are more awful/perfect than anyone else. We all just know we are the only ones who get it and everyone else is deficient.

How did we get here? Maybe if we started asking ourselves that instead of finding new ways to judge each other, to make each other THE OTHER, we might just find out how to heal the mess we find ourselves living in. Until then we will continue to live with violence and despair and hatred.

And we MUST get involved. The racism that has taken over this country once more grew because too many people fell asleep. Too many people felt it wasn't their job to deal with it. Too many people didn't want the negative energy of doing something or even being aware it was happening. Too many people just didn't give a damn because their own needs, their own specialness was more important.

At some point America became a selfish, bitter, country intolerant of everyone and anyone who is and was different. This didn't happen overnight. This happened one person at a time. It happened the first time we cut someone out of our lives because they weren't perfect. It happened the first time we criticized someone for not being just like us. It happened the first time we put ourselves in the position of being the judge instead of the citizen.

We can't go on like this. If the country is to change, we must change ourselves first. It's always been that way. What hasn't been that way is our understanding of that simple truth. We let it die because we became more important as individuals to ourselves than to the greater good of a larger world.

This World

All Hail The Poo-Flinging Masses

When Historians look back on this time, they will divide the causes and effects into neat little groups easily studied and defined. We can't see as well right now as they will because the flung poo is getting thick enough to affect our vision. And most of the time, we're too busy being useful idiots for our respective sides of the poo wars to take time to brush away some of the bigger chunks.

So we walk around half-blind and inflamed with some transitory passion that will one day die like a rotten fish beached on the shore. Think about it for a minute. All those personal obsessions in your life, those passions that brought you such painful bliss, are now stories you tell once too many times after a few drinks, as if to deny what once mattered so much is now drunken party mundaneness.

That will be us, our whole existence churned down to a bite of a tale too often told but never with the necessary insight to learn a damn thing from it. And future generations will consider themselves fortunate they didn't have to suffer through the Age Of Ignorance, as our time will be called, the time when entire populations allowed themselves to become a bunch of poo-flinging savages.

When I look at some of the people sharing my world, when I make the mistake of listening to them go on about what any sane person would consider voices in the head gone wild, I wonder if maybe there really isn't such a thing as evolution. After all, those who choose to believe in Creationism instead of Science have only to look in the mirror to see evolution does not exist in everyone. In their case, it definitely does not exist.

I really think sometimes we are going backwards instead of forward. Many of the craziest of the rightwingnuts want to take the country back to the 1950's or earlier because they think something was better then. They don't realize the only thing that was better then was their knees. And their teeth. They had real teeth then. Maybe that's what they really miss and think if they just move the country backwards a few decades, they could eat steak again without chopping it up into hamburger first.

But because they miss their teeth and because they see no proof of evolution when they look in the mirror, then they are useful tools for the greedy asshats of the world. The same people always show up in Congress after an election. They're like the uninvited wedding guests who sneak into the reception and eat all the shrimp before anyone else gets some on their plates, and then they grab the bride's butt on the way out the door clutching one of the good bottles of champagne.

This is who the American people elected this election, the shrimp-scarfing, champagne-chugging greedy asshats they threw out in the previous election. But they didn't recongize them for the same reason most people still see someone twenty years younger when they look in the mirror. They see what they want to see. They hear what they want to hear. Monkey see. Monkey do. Monkey fling poo at his/her own image in the mirror.

The same old asshats will kick the new ones to the curb soon. All that passion, all that enthusiasm, all that fervor, will become just plain old ordinary racist hate again when they go back to Dumbfuckistan with nothing but bitter drunken stories about the ultimate reality show called "Politics." They will avoid admitting they got fucked like a whole bunch of cheap, gullible whores who believed they really would get paid afterwards.

They'll get paid alright, just like the Fundie Christians got paid when they realized eight years later abortion was still legal, Gays and Liberals could still move in next door, and they couldn't burn people at the stake who refused to become Christians--no matter what they were promised for their vote.

They'll get paid just like the Teabaggers will get paid by being told to sit down and shut up as the corporately-owned Congress and their Lobbyist handlers explain to them that Wall Street and the Banksters are their new masters and they'd better bow deep if they want to come and play again next time.

And when they have to return home to their districts, they'll learn to duck when the poo comes flying at them from the angry mob stirred up by hate radio. But at the same time, they'll look at the rage, the anger, the outright hatred, the bigotry, the racism, the mean-spirited poo-flingers direct at them and wonder how they can channel it into something useful to get them elected once again.

And you know what? They'll find it because we're still earning our time in History as the Age of Ignorance, and each day we fill our lives with the finest poo we allow ourselves to swallow. They will have mountains of the crap to pick through.

Atheist Quote by godless_heathen
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All Hail The Poo-Flinging Masses

Flies On The Wall #47

Flies On The Wall #47