Ever the Same? I don't think so...
Why do we think, insist, that life as we know it is the only way? The one way? The one, TRUE way?
Take the current situation in the UK for instance. The Independent is quoting John Major as saying that Theresa May’s coalition government with the DUP puts the peace in in Northern Ireland in jeopardy, to paraphrase. Why do we think ISIS is the only terrorist organization still operating in the world? Why do we think car bombs are a thing of the past? Why do we forget that not long ago children were dying horrible deaths in the UK because of difference of opinion on ideologies?
I’d slightly touch on climate change, as well. Climate is eternal. It must ever be so, right? I’m not denying or confirming climate change in this section, I’m merely stating a fact. Why do we think this way? We’ve had ice ages on this planet, we’ve even had miniature ice ages. We’ve had times where the atmosphere was so toxic that life as we know it simply could not exist. Look at the air composition during the Jurassic period, humans would not be able to survive in that so all of those Jurassic Park movies are total fiction. I doubt a dinosaur could breathe our air and survive. The Earth had at least 5 times more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than the figure currently considered normal. Go on, have a look and tell me how you’d survive breathing in that stuff.
Whether it was ratified by America, or not, The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights sets a standard of what each human being should expect as they traverse their way through life. There’s a reason the UN felt a need to create such a document and ask that it be ratified by all member-nations...seasons change, human nature changes, our minds change. Except for now. Now, we must be static, we must not change, everything has to stay the same, because it’s always been that way! Well, at least for the last ten years or so. Anything before that didn’t matter anyway.
We expect our lives to be exactly the same, we don’t look for civil rights violations because, well, we have the Constitution and that will always protect us. Until it doesn’t. We aren’t looking at that, though, because we need a bigger television. Because, we have a right to a bigger one. It says so in the Constitution, right? The right to pursue happiness, and there is no bigger happiness than a TV you can bend like a plastic sheet!
That seems to be the one thing that changes now, not our perspective, not our thoughts, but our stuff. It’s been this way for ten years now, why would the world change? Why should our worldview change? The climate changing is one thing we notice, because it impacts our ability to get stuff. If we can’t visit California to gawp at the porn capital of the world, because it’s under water, well, that’s just a bad thing. We have to fix that! We don’t see that climate change happens often, in the grand timeline of earth. We have to stop it. But, not that whole ‘we could change the peace process in Northern Ireland’ part, because there’s peace now, why would it change?
We can’t go back to the days when soldiers had to search under their cars for car bombs, or watch as soldiers are attacked hundreds of miles from because of the uniform that they wear. It’s impossible. We’ve changed! In reality, we haven’t, we just want to think we have. We have so much hubris now, and we think we are so enlightened, but in reality, we’re that ostrich with our ass up in the air. This is no time to relax, this is no time to quit. It’s time to work even harder, so that we don’t undo all the good we have done. For every season and all that.
"We're that ostrich with our ass up in the air." I will steal that line. Just so you know. LOL
Great article.
I get sweary sometimes lol. Steal away! :)