All sorts of people are dying now who never died before

April 11, 2008 at 12:15 am (Uncategorized)

I think about death from time to time because as Criswell one spoke about the future, it’s where I’m going to spend the rest of my life, sort of. Well, it’s where I’ll be spending everything that happens after.

Thinking about all the shit I’m likely to miss… functioning nanotechnology, human/animal hybrids (they’re coming), the discovery that elephants have an advanced orally transmitted culture, the extinction of the human race… always brings about a strange combination of whimsy and wistfulness. I understand that humans suck, and the planet will be well rid of us, but I still harbor a kind of fondness for the scrappy primates that could, despite a total lack of claws or teeth or decent fur. No brachiating limbs, no prehensile tails, no brute physical strength… our ancestors made it by being able to figure out what to do with a pointy rock better than anyone else could. And soon we’ll be dead, brought down by our own inability to be more than primates that were really good at figuring out what to do with pointy rocks.

We’re just smart enough to be really fucking stupid, but it’s sad. So far to come and yet not so far at all.

I’m pretty sure I’ll be long dead before the last human rattles, groans and dies. I could be wrong about that, of course. I read stories in the newspapers and laugh from time to time… about how much money has been spent and how many people have died in Iraq, for instance, and that more money will be flushed and more people will die before it finally ends. I don’t laugh because I find the horrible waste, the endless graft and corruption, and the deaths of people terribly amusing. I laugh because no matter how bad it gets, no matter how awful it is, there will still be people who will believe it was the right and moral thing to do, and those people are allowed to vote. Allowed to work their jobs. Allowed to live the lives they denied others in their blind, overweening pride and hubris.

You have to find it a little funny or you’ll swallow strychnine, I suppose.

But these same people also make decisions about what textbooks our children should read, what regulations our corporations should be held liable to, what kinds of emissions are acceptable in our air and water… you see the people who honestly believe Iraq was a good idea and the horror comes when you realize they have children who they will teach their diseased, moronic, warped mindset to. That gay people are sinners who want to destroy marriage and have special rights, that there’s no such thing as global warming, that the USA is blessed by God, chosen by God and morally right no matter what it does, that it’s okay to let rich people lie, steal and cheat us all blind because we hope to be rich someday ourselves and do the same shit to other people. That out of the billions of men and women and children in the world, less than 1% of one nation of roughly 300 million should be in charge.

I see this shit and I have to laugh at it.

So proud, we jumped up gibbons, we mandrills with guns. Ever better and better at getting sharp rocks to do things.

I’m not trying to imply that any other nation is any better. Trust me, if Canada ever becomes the richest or most powerful nation on Earth you could expect a lot of the same shit, only with less demagoguery and fervor and more intense smugness. Put China, or Nambia, or Australia in charge and you’d see the same shit, better in some ways, worse in others. I mean, ask a long distance marathon runner what he or she thinks about trying to run in Beijing sometime. Humans everywhere are self-centered, cruel and rapacious, your humble correspondent not excluded.

It’s sad that we won’t rise above it. I once seriously believed we would.