Perhaps the last dawn...

An old friend of mine once told me that the entire purpose of life came down to a simple maxim, “The pursuit of happiness and the avoidance of pain”. At the time, and even now, I find that very trite and basic; almost too simple to even be worthy of debate or consideration. Sadly though, for most that is what life is all about. It’s the rhetoric we use, the platitudes we share, and ideology we espouse. “Live in the now”, “Forget the past”, “Always move forward”, “Never lament lost friends”, and the idioms go on and on ad infinitum. All of these things are great as bumper sticker slogans and eye catching or comment inducing Facebook posts, but for genuine wisdom or even powerful imagery it’s just empty words. We’re introspective beings by nature, we’re designed to reflect, to learn and adapt, to cull worthwhile information every action and reaction and tailor future behavior and interactions to produce or influence beneficial results.

Now while one might argue that this would seem to support or lend credence to the idea of pursuing happiness above all else, it’s worth noting a desired result does not always mean aiming for happiness. Self-sacrifice is something of a myth in today’s world, with selfishness and single mindedness being promoted by pretty much every major informer of personal opinion. We’re conditioned to consume, to seek out newer, better, more luxurious comforts and accoutrement; brainwashed into believing that the only true measure of success is a big house, a flashy expensive car, and a sizable number of offspring to offer up in order to perpetuate ensure the survival of the hereditary genome. But this is how society would have us measure success today. In ages long gone, when intelligence was something to be aspired to, when the betterment of all mankind was the highest calling and most fulfilling reward one could hope to achieve, when public discourse allowed for worthwhile dissent and a meaningful and worthwhile exchange of ideas, success was measured by how big of a footprint one managed to leave on the world during their brief time here.

Humanity is on an uncertain course, a unspecified route into the future, and in my lifetime, brief as it’s been up to now, I have seen a dangerous a fundamentally flawed change in focus from the useful to the banal and mediocre. Television serves to keep people docile and easily influenced, with few people bothering to question the information disseminated to them and most identifying more with Reality TV stars instead of visionaries, of which we have hardly any left. There are no heroes left, at least in the United States.

When I was a kid, we were told that we could be anything we wanted to be when we grew up; anything at all. An astronaut, a news anchor, a doctor, a lawyer, even president, it was all within reach if we wanted it. The truth though, is that for most of us we grow up expecting a reality that doesn’t exist. There are no more astronauts; our space program has been reduced to little more than a few billion dollar projects to do further research on things that vast majority of people find to be esoterically interesting. We’re not going to the moon, the first manned mission to Mars won’t be with NASA but from some private corporation that offers the lowest bid to get a willing crash test dummy meat sack to the rust colored orb. This is the legacy of those pioneers of yesteryear. News anchors serve as puppets for the major networks, delivering only the approved missives of their corporate masters and serving more as a mouthpiece of distraction to instill fear and compliance into a naïve populace. There’s no journalistic integrity anymore with sensationalism having been the most profitable standard for delivery of any information, everyone seeks to deliver gossip as fact and plays up the myriad of scenarios that might have resulted in a more catastrophic result. Doctors and lawyers are worthwhile professions but with a healthcare system that seeks to impose more bureaucracy and further complicate things like who pays for a bandage, the insurance company or the patient, there’s no nobility left in the profession. It’s a person in neon scrubs, giving lip service to a scared person on a gurney, offering token reassurances and the whole while everyone from the X-ray technician to the OR surgeon is really just hoping to avoid a malpractice suit and to allow the patient to live long enough to actually pay the bill. Lawyers have been vilified in popular culture by how many of them go on to serve as politicians and further debilitate an already bankrupted country. In popular media they’re more often seen as champions of justice and morality or portrayed as faceless cogs in a system that ignores them as individuals and just churns along like a torrential river. And no one reading this will ever be president. In order to serve in what was once the most hallowed office in the Western World, one has to be willing to be unscrupulous, allow their purchase by multiple corporations and special interest groups, have a thin allegiance to anything and everyone except the biggest check, and if the first four years of Obama’s term is any indication, a set of personal beliefs that can be easily influenced or changed to suit whatever the other side demands of you in order to get anything done.

The Lone Ranger is long dead, Superman was killed in the early ‘90’s and even though DC brought him back, that hallowed mythology has been forever shattered, and even the heroes we’re allowed to see on screen, television or theatre, serve only to make money instead of to inspire. Greed is humanity’s sin of choice and they make no apologies for it. Politicians that decry any form of socialism or equality as being against the basic principles of this country, either from a religious standpoint or from the “true intentions” of the Founding Fathers (if you actually buy into the Teabagger rhetoric), and an overly wealthy percentage of owners of this country and are unapologetic for their unabashed buying of public policy and still insist that they don’t have enough because someone else out there still has something they don’t. In kindergarten one of the most important things they impress upon us, outside of being able to color in the lines and count to ten, is to share. But the adult world tells us that if you’re decent and honorable, even just once putting someone else before yourself no matter the reason, you have committed career suicide and are doomed to remain in the same station in life with no hope or possibility of ever advancing. Greed is good it seems. The Christian right demands a return to more wholesome biblical values, well if that’s the case and that’s really what they mean, why don’t they start with demanding that the politicians they beseech to limit the public’s access to pornography and violence focus instead of having everyone do their best to avoid the seven deadly sins. I think that would be a better place to start.

For those that don’t have them memorized or are not so inclined to look them up, the Seven Deadly Sins are Pride, Greed, Wrath, Lust, Gluttony, Sloth, and Envy. From where I sit, the United States, in its current incarnation, it guilty of all of seven sins and not the least bit concerned with rectifying or changing that in anyway. We espouse our superiority and force others to adopt our way of life, convinced beyond the shadow any doubt that there is no better lifestyle to be had. We constantly consume, never satisfied or content with what we have and never pausing to really appreciate any of it. We kill for resources and to preserve our way of life but it’s all just smoke and mirrors to mask how truly petty and vindictive we are in our foreign policy. We have selfish ignorant leaders that want nothing more than to maintain their power and so they seek to depose, destroy, limit, censor, obfuscate, or otherwise cloud anything they perceive to be a threat to their station. We are a civilization that peaked in 1969. We put a man on the moon, put a calculator in a wristwatch, and managed to manufacture a device that allows college students to make ramen noodles in just less than three minutes; this device is called a microwave. The iPod, the Internet, the PC, even the cell phone, all of them are great devices built on technology that was intended to move humanity forward, to usher in a new industrial age and allow for mankind to break new frontiers and leap ahead and take the realm of science fiction and make it science fact. Instead we have record companies’ squabbling over who gets the thirteen cents Apple pays them every time someone downloads a song. We have cell phone carriers battling each other over who can get the flashiest startup sequence and produce a camera that allows someone to count the number of lips hairs the girl at the end of the bar has. We’ve got an internet that subsidizes television with video clips of stupidity and insanity consistently at the top, while famous people are tracked ad nauseam in 140 character snippets of their lives. We live in an age where communication between two people is the easiest it has ever been in the history of mankind, and yet we use more words to say nothing of value than ever before.

Substance is lacking from the world. Integrity, dignity, compassion, kindness, selflessness…these words meant something once upon a time and they were qualities to aspire to. We live in a three dimensional world with two dimensional people living two dimensional lives. Each of us indoctrinated by years of fear mongering and conditioned to believe that we are all special and therefore uniquely suited to have a positive impact on the world. I don’t dispute the last part, but I’m wondering when the seven billion on this planet who are not in the spotlight are going to get working on leaving their mark. If each of us is destined to do something extraordinary, why do so few of us enter the mass consciousness? Mankind was made for something great, either by design or by chance, we were made to do something remarkable and inspiring and in the last century we went further and did more than at any point in history before. We made ungodly technological advances, we reached for the stars and we conquered our fears. We refused to believe that something couldn’t be done just because it was hard, we refused to settle for anything less than excellence and gave nothing less than that from ourselves. We were inspired, informed, and willing to push the limits of what we thought possible to achieve something that would last. Our civilization is in decline, but the human race doesn’t have to follow it into the ether. We can save our way of life and we can save ourselves, we just have to be willing to not be afraid and to strive for something more than just the hedonistic “pursuit of happiness and the avoidance of pain”.