Things Change (snap fingers)

The world I live in is spinning. Thank goodness, or we would fall off.
But that is not the spinning I'm referring to.

When I was younger it seemed as though the world was a reasonable place. I could depend on my world being relatively unchanged from day-to-day. The sun would shine, the rain would come, night would fall, the house would be there, I would be alive, I'd have food, etc.

The world seems much more tenuous now. Life seems more fragile. It's amazing any of us survive for any amount of time. And in fact, many do not. But the human population of the earth is increasing, so people not only survive, but more survive than die.

Yesterday I went to see "The Constant Gardener." It was a good film. There's nothing I could add to the almost unanimous reviews. It was worth seeing. I went alone. Something I hadn't done in many years, and actually enjoy doing. No distractions.

The film made me angry, as, I believe, it was intended to do. It piled on to the feeling that I've been experiencing since 9/11/01. The world is out of control. Of course, the world being in control is an illusion. But it was an illusion I became comfortable with, and predictable days enabled me to perpetuate and trust that illusion.

Since 9/11, the illusion has been shattered. Nothing feels permanent. Nothing is permanent. Everything changes, grows, deteriorates eventually. It's a change in what our culture teaches, in what we base our whole society on.

Intellectually, I accept the truth of that. Emotionally, I have not caught up. I'm naked now. Living my life as a naked, baggy-skinned, 54 year old.

I'm American, and I'm angry at my government. My government has a one track mind. Money. Make money, so we can have more. So we can live in comfort. So we can have a different reality than anyone else on earth. It doesn't matter that our way is unhealthy, for us and others, it only matters that it makes money. It doesn't matter that lives are sacrificed for this comfort. As long as it is more non-American lives, than American lives. It's all disguised in that ominous term, American interests.

We as Americans are as guilty as our government because we elect these louts. We buy into the advertisement to speed up our lives with fast food and chemicals, and we buy into the political, campaign lies. We elect people who are not free to govern with their conscience. We elect people who have so much political debt when they come into office that they can never catch up enough to actually make a decision that would take them and us out of that spiral.

America is now governed by large corporations. Corporations that have become so large, due to merges, that nobody really knows who they are. We can't boycott a company because of its methods and policies. If we did, we'd have nothing to eat. In this framework, I can almost understand the thinking (not the method) of Mao's cultural revolution. Wipe it clean and start over. It's too big to fight. Too big to chip away at.

It all makes me angry.