Dying in the Winner's Circle

I doubt very many people, if any, are going to like me very much after they read this post. There is always a great big downside to complete honesty, which is why I suppose we tend not to practice it very often. Admit it, the way your husband snores at night makes you want to choke the life out of him, but he makes up for it in the waking hours which makes you grin and bear it. And you don't share your homicidal fantasies with him, now do you? The feeling could be mutual and you really don't have time for a petty war, not with the kid's soccer and the holidays coming up.......

Apparently, the human race could never function under a cloud of brutal honesty; never has and never will. Governments all over the world throughout history have done things to their own citizens, as well as those of others, and then have attempted to cover up the fact these things ever happened, hoping that no one will have to deal with the painful, ugly truth until such time everybody would just as soon let sleeping dogs lie, much like the Turkish Massacre of Armenians that has strangely shared very little of the the spotlight the jews enjoyed for THEIR genocide. How many people know that the United States conducted over 300 atmospheric nuclear weapons tests before we quit doing it? Have any idea how much radioactive contamination that poured into our biosphere? Do you really care these days, since your children aren't glowing at night? I didn't think so.

Previous administrations here in the good old U.S. of A. have kept their dirty secrets close to the vest lest those uncomfortable truths resulted in some serious head bowling. Usually our heads of state are dead before the records are unsealed and we find out how close we came to Armageddon or why half our families came down with strange cancers. So, can anybody tell me why state secrets ARE state secrets? You, in the back, shut up. No one cares.

And that's the crux of the matter, really. Nobody cares. Not really. This administration has lied through it's teeth to us for two terms now and we KNOW they've been lying to us. Sure, we like to think that so much of this bullshit has been overlooked because we WANT to believe the fantasies the Bush administration has been weaving for us, or because we've been afraid, or because most of us HAS ours and we could care less about those who don't. We eat our young, and we spoil our own nests like there's no tomorrow, and guess what.....there really might NOT be, thanks to our rampant consumption of everything we can get our mitts on to sell to someone else so that we can drive our expeditions and live in McMansions and wear lots of bling because frankly we seem to have so little else to do with our empty lives.

I would give us all the benefit of the doubt if the nature of intelligence was such that it's really not all it's cracked up to be, but for Bob's sake, I have seen the paintings and sculptures, I have heard the music, I have read the poetry and that crap Shakespeare wrote and I have had the pleasure of owning an Apple computer, and to me all that adds up to so much wonderment..........

So why do we do what we do? Why has it turned out that evolving into sentience has become our very own frankenstein moment? How is it possible that we can commit the atrocities we do and witness what we do and not be driven instantly insane? Or ARE we insane, only we are too smart to realize it?

I have been watching that show Heroes on NBC about a motley group of misfit genetically advanced human beings who are attempting to not draw unwanted attention while at the same time either trying to do evil things or save the world, who wants to do which not always being clear. As the season finale draws to a close, we find out who wants to release a killer virus which promises to wipe out the human race, and why. He's been alive for over 400 years and has become fed up with watching the human race continue year after year avoiding it's potential while dragging the rest of the world down with it. Now, you're usual response to such a person is that he's the bad guy and we have to rid ourselves of him, this evil judas creature out to destroy mankind.

Why?

Tell me exactly what makes him wrong, about what he's trying to do, and why?

Why DO we deserve some special consideration?

The dinosaurs were pretty damn successful for their time and certainly weren't doing anything in particular to deserve the world getting whacked with a big rock and ending THEIR reign.

So what makes US so special, especially considering the fact that we can build and detonate nuclear weapons, change the very climate of the world, and poison the rest of it with all manners of chemicals and waste products? We can create the Sidney Opera House, the Statue of Liberty, Michaelangelo's David, A River Runs Through it, etc.........Big deal. We can allow one tribe in Africa to wipe out another tribe and not raise a finger to stop it because, DUH, they don't have oil. Feeling sick yet? Not in the slightest? Well, there you have it.

Fifty two years; that's how long I've had to grow and learn and experience and fail and succeed and fail again and observe and laugh and cry and somehow get to where I am now which is somewhere between the Buckingham Palace and the Shanty towns of South Africa. I am well fed yet maybe a couple of paychecks above abject poverty. How I got here has as much to do with my own efforts as much as the conditions I grew up in. It is what it is.

And I am so angry, so disillusioned, so fed up with what this species has done with it's potential that I have lost that basic species specific loyalty everybody takes for granted. The aliens invade, we stand together and fight back.........right?

Maybe not. Maybe some of us think we are on the losing side no matter who wins.

Because, after all, winning is everything, right?

Yea..........right.