A Sort of Rapture
Sometimes I think about the world, the whole world, me and all of that shit outside myself. I am not disregarding other people, those with different lives, different worldviews, and experiences I cannot ever comprehend. This world is a complicated place and the ideas of good and evil are imprecise and they change from culture to culture. Religion provides small answers to meaningless questions, and one’s dedication to such limited, singular ideas creates the brutality that has always plagued the earth.
Yes, it is late at night (or early morning), and I look at the clock and literally see 3:33. This is the moment these thoughts spill out of my head and we move past this to 34, 35, 36 and on and on and on. I am down, depressed, obsessed with the end of the world in a similar way that faithful and serious people are (although the ‘end of the world’ is not a true thing, or at least one that humans will ever experience. Perhaps all I think about is extinction, is evolution, is the whatever species that will replace us once we have killed ourselves and every trace of our lives is gone.)
There are times when I sit here and rant and rave and laugh and cry thinking about all the harm we have done to the world, to one another, to the sky and the dawn and the purpose of civilization. We have these paranoid ideas and we think we understand reality through the veil of whatever fancy or mystical ideology proves to us the way things ought to be. Our whole society is punctured through with believes in violent conflict with one another–race, faith, politics, doom. We live in a state of fear and find no one to blame outside of ourselves. And this makes us angry, it consumes us with rage, and there are reasons we point our fingers and blame people smaller, with less of a chance to make it in the brutal world. We target the weak, the desperate, those who are running and hiding and hoping to find a better way to make their children stronger, to find a world that perhaps they have failed in, and yet there is still a chance and hope for someone outside of themselves. They experience a true patriotism for the lives they wish to lead.
I cannot stand the self-righteous bugaboo that so many people on every side of the spectrum impose upon human existence, presuming themselves better only by the chance of fate, by the simple luck that they were born this way, in some land of plenty, and that those without the chance of being just like you are somehow invading your space and seeking a chance to replace you. People with moderate success are fucking horrible, and we all know it, and we recognize this characteristic within ourselves as we blame and blame and blame and proclaim ourselves victims when all we want to do is victimize others.
Yes, this has been a horrible shout into the night, and yet I believe all of this to be true. I write this in a state of personal crisis, in a dark moment that hopefully will break come morning when I stand back up and look at the sky and see potential hope in a new day, in yet another chance I suspect most of us will waste, seeing in one another the darkness we suppress then splatter out into the world onto everything we see, trying to make ourselves feel better, believing that those outside of our range are looking at us with such envy that there is no reason for them to be at all. This, here, is the key to our violent, helpless age. We are all terminal children and such a fate is the worst thing that can ever happen in society. It has happened before, in Rome, in Spain, in the United States at the time of revolution. It happened in France, in Russia, in Germany, in the UK, and over and over again in America (and by this I mean all the Americas, from Guam all the way back through the South and Central and North. It is troubling how hard we believe in our truths, no matter what facts undermine it. We are a dying breed, seeking some new, desperate way to escape death for just another thousand or ten thousand years. We all plead please please please please please to an amorphous ‘God,’ or to a singular ideology, and we dance our days away hoping that something which will never come can offer some sort of rapture.
