I read the news today, oh boy
“A Day In The Life”, The Beatles (John Lennon/Paul McCartney), 1967
Oh, the news.
There was a time when I thought mankind as a species had lost it’s way, but longer observation has allowed me to realize that we never had a clear way from the start.
We go in circles, in cycles.
That’s how we infested this planet. We don’t like each other and we go our separate ways.
We hate being alone and love those like us, hiding behind the groups that give us anonymity as individuals, maybe because alone we feel dehumanized, maybe because in groups we feel the need to dehumanize others.
Like an amoebic pseudo-pod, we oozed across the planet and lived where we could find purchase, until now, there is no further place to find purchase.
Wars are fought. Sides are picked like the noses of children who do so out of reflex, rolling their hard earned prizes between thumb and forefinger before being chewed on. We admonish children not to pick their noses, but we pick the world they live in with as much thought it that they put behind it, it seems.
This is where some might say if we just all sat around a campfire naked and sang songs that the world would be a better place, or if we got rid of all the corporations, or if we took money out of politics, or if… if we just did that one thing… the world would somehow magically be better and wouldn’t make people consider lawsuits against Disney1 for false advertising about the realities of the world.
I have bad news. It ain’t that easy.
Change is hard. Change starts with the self, and changing the self means leaving groups because groups hate independent thinking unless it’s to their own end. It means ignoring the red dots of life and being human by one’s self. It means finding value in one’s self, not finding value in what others want you to value.
It means identifying one’s own biases and pulling out a bright light and rubber hose to interrogate them mercilessly, even if you feel you’re a victim, particularly if you do feel the victim. No, I didn’t say it would be easy, but when you dig down deep into why you do as you do, why you think as you do, you become aware of things at a different level. Don’t worry, the world won’t make more sense – it will, in fact, make less sense, and the trick then is to make it make sense for you.
Too often we fear calling bullshit on things, or too often we feel we have the right to call bullshit on things without that interior interrogation, that introspection, and maybe that’s because we feel we do not have enough time in a world that keeps promising to make more time for us to do the very same thing but has demonstrably done the inverse.
Until we as individuals embark on that change, I don’t see things getting better.
- Disney built it’s business on the public domain, where they copyrighted their renditions of stories that already existed (check Gutenberg.org for originals), but in doing so have made their popular versions there epitome of the values that they themselves are not so good at practicing. ↩︎