Winds of Change

Note: I originally started this entry last year but decided to finish it today.

In less than a week, I will get married, for the first time. At 40-something, I wasn't sure that this would or could even happen. Change is good, if somethings a little scary.

Change...in our little world where (at least in the US), "people who know more than I what's good for me" (also know as "The Government") can enter my home, tap my phones, sniff my wireless and hack everything else without following the "Guidelines of the Land" ( formerly know as the American Constitution,) I have to wonder: haven't we, as a social species, gone too far? I don't mean a single step "oops! I'm a little over the line" but closer to "over the line, down the block and around the corner to just plain wrong"?

Change... not something that JUST happens to you, not something that just happens TO you, but also something that happens BECAUSE OF, BY and FOR you. "God helps those that help themselves", a wise and pragmatic man once said (reportedly). Seems we are all forgetting about this concept of self-determination, self-leadership, not to mention true compassion for our fellow man.

I know the bag of chips, a comfy chair and the TV remote are familiar comforts to most of us but what about the very often uncomfortable pursuit of higher, more noble ideals? Anyone remember any of those? Higher, more noble ideals like working together to create something new, strong, powerful and positive for our species (and that doesn't involve personal financial arrangements negotiations as the primary goal.)

Instead we have patent lawsuits, executions both legal and illegal, government invasions of foreign sovereignty and domestic domiciles and government buildings in complete violation of trust and law; posturing saber rattling and "peaceful" missile test firing, "mine not yours!" childishness and arrogant "first strike", "preemptive strike", "night time strike" and "unclaimed responsibility strikes"; family meal time television distractions about how best to betray your love, your enemy and a complete stranger, interlaced with overly sexualized commercials every 5.25 minutes to keep us just off balance enough to not ask questions and to influence us about how you'll have more luck with whomever you prefer to have sex with if you only use our product; IPods to block the sound of the living, dark "sun" shades to block the light of day and limit the site of your face just in case a feeling of anything should show up on your face; "don't look at me" glances and defiant "don't touch me glares"; my personal square meter of personal space excludes you; my personal economic forecasts; my big, useless car manufactured with 50 year old technology to be the bottom end of mediocrity to maintain an archaic industry power structure more than a century out of date at the simple cost of belching a little more black and gray smoke and a few more degrees of atmospheric heat before the next ice age to justify the need to fly around the world to blow up something that doesn't belong to you in the first place; human breeding programs to see which religion can out breed the others while abandoning the children after shortly after birth to wind-swept fields of sand and stone because the head count of the faithful has moved on, Mohamed, Jesus and Moses be praised; Eat this, it tastes good because it, as it's very base, in the same as everything else: sweet, salty and high in fat and only resembles "real food" which is confused as "fresh food", picked well before it's nutritional prime, colored for your acceptance and you can't understand why the "fresh food" from the mega-grocery just doesn't seem like food at all. Kick the dog, beat the kids, kill the family, bomb the church, shoot the airplanes down, sink the war ship, bomb the village from beyond the horizon and count the unknown dead as "probably terrorists", insult the masquerading dictators; be more important than the safety of others, complicate things to feel important and to prolong the opportunities to feel so. Above all other else, get all you can while you can at the expense of everyone, both now and tomorrow; "what about the children?!" idiotic homophobes, heterophobes, genophobes and sexophobes, metathesiophobes and phronemophobes, and then end up killing their families "as a mercy to them or a service to society" because they never actually had to deal with reality and decided now wasn't the time to start. And then finally, at the end, blame it on some one else: he touched me, they stole this, their watching me, she left me, they hate me, she loves me, he's afraid of me, they are jealous, I don't feel important.

How boringly, disappointingly, predictably continuous of us, all of us. Can we be done with this selfish, self interest dribble and get on to the reason for living? I assure you it isn't just to eat, sleep and "procreate".

The more I think about it, the more I realize that, contrary to popular beliefs that "God is protecting me and my group specifically", we are very lucky to be alive as a species on Earth and it's only a matter of time until we truly will have a challenge to that status. Climate change and our considerable contributions to that aside, we can be eradicated from our Earthly home at almost any moment for the Cosmos doesn't know anything about religion, political boundaries or care much about atmospheric densities. The Cosmos does as It wills and we, as a species haven't learned to dodge (comets) yet.

If we keep up the "small games on planet Earth", we won't make the next evolutionary leaps in thought, sociology and philology needed to have grandchildren of our grandchildren. Carrying gun outside a church, an assault rifle while wearing a yamaka on patrol, or high tech, sand resistant combat gear in the trenches will not stop a meteor from hitting the Earth, a truly awesome blast of Comic gamma radiation radiating the entire solar system, or an old star sending a little bit extra sunshine to boil away all life from the surface of our world.

Change... quick, pick something, anything, change it for the good for someone else. Tell someone and then do it again. Repeat until you are dead. That's the very minimum level of trying to improve things, the very minimum.

Change... I will get married next week and try to start a family. If I have the opportunity, I will teach my children the apparently outdated, archaic concepts of what it means to be a "good human being."