I didn't have time to create a new visual masterwork to accompany today's text, so I stole two random stock pics out of the archives and then merged them to form one composite photo. Here, I'll show you the source material and then the finished product:
This 1st file was labeled "Morris_Powdered_wallpaper_1874_b":
& this 2nd stock image was labeled "Great_Barrier_Reef_7":
Now here's the combination of the above two images:
Sorry; bad joke. I'll start now:
Dear diary,
The hardest part about living in this age is that you can perceive all the suffering in the world, but you can’t do anything to stop it. We all know, for instance, that a schoolbus of children was just bombed to smithereens, and that the evidence—the casing of munitions found in the aftermath—proves that our own home country manufactured the bombs that did this. Now we all can view the pictures of the demolished vehicle and the little bloody corpses, but we can neither stop the atrocity nor prevent the next one from occurring, because…
Why can’t we stop warfare? I was going to say that there’s nothing we can do, because we’re just one individual with an electric screen that presents the news to us, yet we have no power: we cannot make the news—by which I mean: we cannot augment or influence in any way the events that get reported—we can only watch & listen... never ACT. We are input not output devices.
Is that correct? Are we all so helpless? Again (I think I mentioned this yesterday), we could go outside and stand in front of government buildings, and chant carols before the establishments of multinational corporations and war profiteers, big banks and other culprits; and if there are enough of us standing there, it qualifies as a scene, which is not unlike a feature presentation; presumably reporters will arrive & aim microphones at our face and ask “What’s up, doc?” which, by interpretation, means: “Go ahead, make my day.” Then we’ll have become one of the events reported to other people’s electronic news screens. Maybe these presently absent viewers will see us & join us... Pretty soon the whole world will be standing outside, chanting “Stop!” which, being interpreted, means: “While enjoying the muzak, please hold; your call is important to us. An operator will be with you shortly. In the meantime, kindly extinguish your violent mayhem.”
Then what happens? Then the Bad Guys (are there Bad Guys indeed? I suspect they’re all merely thickheaded power-addicts) send in the troops. The troops are then commanded to fire their guns at us nonviolent carolers. Then the armed troops either kill us, or they all turn and look at each other and say, “Hey, why are we gonna kill these peaceful folks here, who live in our neighborhood, friends and family that we know and love, or people from our fellow troopers’ neighborhoods that we might someday meet, know & love? Let’s let these people be, and explain to our bosses that they (the bosses) simply gave us a lousy order: it’s not smart to try to kill the whole world’s population; it’s better to treat one another with respect and dignity.”
Does that sound too cheesy? Would an armed trooper really say such a thing? I wonder if, in reality, the troopers would gladly obey their order & just massacre the innocents. I wish there were researchable events in history showing similar situations, so we could find out how they ended. Maybe if a certain percentage went well, while a certain percentage went foul, we could at least broadcast the odds that such events, if they transpire in futurity, will turn out like so.
But why do we want to know the odds? Are we gonna place bets on our survival as a people? What would be the point of such betting?—that it’s fun, and that if you find yourself trapped in slavery, you might as well sing while you toil? OK you convinced me. I’ll bet fifty bucks that if we all stand & chant carols, the troops will join our side rather than slaughter us. I wager that the troops will NOT kill us this time. My hunch is based on the knowledge that the individual troopers of the militia have more in common with us (the standers-and-chanters; the nonviolent carolers) than with the bosses of the corporations that own and command the militia. Everyone hates bosses. Plus bosses, over the eons, have gotten way uglier. I mean morally, not physically; although if you look at the bosses on display in the glass case labeled Flash Sale! Neoliberals 99% Off…
Morals and ethics. I don’t cringe at those words. I like to think about how humankind should proceed: What’s the best way to act. My only reservation is that I’d prefer that we never allow ourselves to invest too much confidence in any given conclusion. Or maybe a better way to put it is: Let’s stop short of concluding, always, on principle: never conclude, just treat all persuasive views as weighable suggestions. Like, if we say “Close-cropped carpet is preferable to shaggy carpet that’s grown to seed,” we should always consider whether the next area to be carpeted would really and truly benefit from the dense, firmer style, or if, in THIS instance…
I’m just saying: eschew prejudgments. Always think. Don’t be afraid to break your own rules.
But now some heckler says: Fuck thinking. The world’s suffered too much thinking already. Thinking is what got us into this mess. What we need is more feeling. Intuition. So change the mantra from “Always think” to “Always feel”. We trust thinking and reason way too much. Why must we always know “exactly the value of one and exactly the value of two, and which is ahead”? This type of nitpicking dulls the spontaneous love that otherwise would spring up. Love is our default: Why labor to curtail it? Our basic attitude is attraction for each other; empathy, compassion; we have to work and think and reason our way into organized violence. All this thinking clogs one’s conscience. Thus, “conscience does make cowards of us all”, as Hamlet says:
. . . the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.
You’ve convinced me again, dear heckler. The readiness is all. But your outburst here took the air out of my sails, and the steam out of my locomotive engine. So I’m just gonna let my sailboat rest for a while, here on dry land, and allow my train to sit still on the tracks, in the middle of the ocean.
The main point is the same, however: You see and hear the bad things that are happening in the world, but you can’t save the world. And if you’re like me, so that you can’t be truly happy until all other living creatures are happy as well, then you’re cursed to be sad. And if you lose track of the bad news for a moment, and catch yourself smiling or maybe even laughing a little, you quickly snap out of your insanity and recall THE AWFUL TRUTH: that civilians everywhere are being enslaved and slain, and that lovely souls are being crushed by debilitating diseases, and that somewhere out there, a squirrel is trapped in an air vent.
And I don’t understand why there’s so many of those polka-dotted round-shell beetles that look like orange ladybugs. There’s billions and billions of those ugly little things. It seems their purpose is just to breed & get in the way of all progress & then unceremoniously die. Then all their corpses congest the stairway to heaven.
And the song of crickets is distasteful: I hate it. I always cheer when I see a deceased cricket.
Plus wasps are SO sinister...
I trust that insects, or at least their faroff progeny, will be to humans as humans were to the dinosaurs. I’m saying insects will succeed us, once we’re extinct. Whatever kills us off will not slay them. They’ll have this planet to themselves. And they’ll maintain, in their genes or DNA or transferrable generative instructions or whatever you call it, I say, they’ll maintain a distant memory of mankind, and they’ll make this recollection into a warped little insect-version of God. And they’ll buzz to each other the old-new common mythological rumor or warning that the race of big soft fleshy colossuses will someday return to stomp them all out and spray them with poison. Cuz they’ll probably recall how meanly we treated them, back when we were Earth’s husbandmen.
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