How fucking foolish can we be? We are the product of billions of years of happenstance, of infinitesimal chance. Of evolution, of primordial soup and nebulous clouds of space dust and nothingness. We hold in our hands the only life of which we are aware. We are a species united. And yet we continually look only at our differences. We think only of getting the leg up on others and of divisiveness, and for what? For profit above happiness? Above life itself? Capitalism has spoon fed us poison in more than one form and called it freedom, and we were so desperate for the serotonin and dopamine that we sacrificed the majority of our lives for the backhanded promise of security and freedom. All of my life, my nation has waged endless war against people I have never met. It is not me. It is not my family or friends. It is not human, it is not loving or familiar. It is the product of human greed and greed alone. Think of the billions of extant lives in this moment. My life. Your life. The life of every person you’ve ever met is JUST as precious as yours. Each and every human has a life as complex and intricate as what you have. The human condition is, fundamentally, non-communicable. How can my brain possibly explain the intricacies of its own existence when it itself cannot even properly see the color yellow? When it cannot even see itself without something else telling it what it looks like. We exist in perpetuity as a fuck you to the universe. We are defiant. We are persistent. And yet, for these past several hundred years, for these centuries since the nacience of capitalism and, more promptly, neo-feudalism, we’ve sacrificed the complexities of our lives, the true humanity, to the embodiment of other humans’ greed. We give our best years to tasks that others have determined for us. How many men, women, and other individuals have wasted away their youth, thrown away their vigor and life and passion and love in the pursuit of that which they generated, but would never know? We stand now on the verge of yet another global catastrophe, the thousandth, it seems, in the mere 20 odd years of my own existence. Imagine the surprise then, to learn that we’ve seen times like this before? The plagues of centuries past, the global wars that rocked the previous siglo. In each case, these things only worsen with time. As life itself develops, it complicates itself. We mimic god in our existence. We are complex, and given time, our existence itself only serves to increase in its severity. Each world war has increased the toll, in dead, in suffering, in repercussions for the survivors. Are we going to prove true the Fermi paradox? Are we on the precipice of the great barrier itself? Are we on the verge of our own extinction? If the universe is billions of years old, then where are the aliens? Are they there, ignoring us? Ignorant of us? Ahead of us? Behind? Above, below, or inside of us? Are they our past, or our future? Or did they too, think that their border dispute was important enough for the suffering they caused? Did they mean to kill, to eradicate life on scales hitherto unseen? Were their lives superior to their neighbors? When they hunted them down for the gods they worshiped? We exist in defiance, and yet, we turn on ourselves, defying ourselves. Where are the extraterrestrials? How could they see the worlds’ end on the horizon and not move out of the way? How could they decide that their need to pay the rent was reason enough to go to work the day that those nuclear terrors screamed down from the sky, vaporizing and eradicating their hopes and dreams in the first billionth of a second after their neighbors’ son’s cousin’s friend’s roommate’s cousin pulled the trigger? We are connected. Ewige Kreis. Seid Bereit. “I am Become Oppenheimer”- Death, the Destroyer of Worlds, of the Bhagavad Gita.
