I haven’t posted in a while. The world is wobbly. My younger brother Carlos passed away a few weeks ago, and our dog Lucky died a few days after that. We are getting older and struggling with our health a bit and trying to figure out how we can make the math work, pay off our debt and retire. It isn’t likely to happen for me but I still hang on to the hope that I can somehow help my wife to retire.
I apologize if this sounds like whining. It isn’t. It’s just a recognition that it’s the twelfth round, and my opponent (life) has been pummeling me for 65 years. I’ve won a round here and there but my head is spinning and I’ll probably be laying on the canvas in the not too distant future. I hope when that time comes that the people who rooted for me, who cheered and encouraged me, who pushed me to give my all will see me on the mat and not see a loss. There is victory in fighting the impossible.
I guess I’m feeling a bit melancholy. I hope I haven’t bummed you out. Or bummed you out any more than you might already be if you look at the world with eyes that see.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the fact that as humans we just can’t seem to beat the monkey. We are all primates, and we all have that scared, angry and selfish monkey at our core. It’s like the old versions of Windows that were built on DOS. Layer upon layer of shiny new stuff, but limited in some ways because of the old stuff.
We are a bit like that and, the more I see, the more I wonder if we can overcome our programming. As soon as we are angry, scared, envious, lustful or in any other way driven by that base programming, the big shiny brain we are so proud of doesn’t work so well.
I can see it happening on a big scale now. Authoritarian rulers, politicians, talking heads, religious leaders, social media celebrities and others have harnessed the tone of outrage and righteous indignation. Appealing to the scared and angry monkeys at the root of our brains and driving us to war. To social disorder. To vilifying and hating our neighbors and fellow humans. And we seem powerless to stop it. Educated and uneducated, rich, poor, fat, thin, men, women, every culture, religion and political persuasion. We are gearing up for destruction or hiding from it, buried in the frantic pursuit of things to avoid dealing with the crisis before us.
I’m not sure that we can survive the next big conflagration. We are not fighting with sticks anymore. Even those manipulative bastards who prod us as a way to gain power for their fringe agendas, or to enrich themselves, or to bask in the light of their self-aggrandizing and meaningless ‘I am the greatest’ fame will be destroyed.
If there is an answer out there it is not going to come from today’s leaders.