Do you understand what is going on in the world?

I can barely track my own plans two days down the road.

You dig?

And what I don’t need is my brain trying to figure out an answer to why humans apparently like to kill each other above and beyond the fact that we are vengeful, rageful creatures. The thing that becomes harder to accept is that maybe this is “good”. And when I say “good” what I mean is that we’re all alive today, and if you consider that to be “good” then it’s hard to look at everything that’s gotten us here in any other way.

Now, if you consider being alive today, and reading this, to be not “good”…well, you’re not my customer. Otherwise maybe it’s time to look at the reality of our human existence…We will kill indiscriminately if we have the right motivation.

We will kill indiscriminantely if we have the right motivation.

This is the impluse, the implusle to kill, that if you want to address or help in anyway evolve humanity to a less violent existence, that would be the one to look at. Find the situation in which you would be motivated to kill and dive in. There’s a lot of fodder with the Isreal/Palestine thing going on right now.

This situation exposes the massive hypocrissy of so many, which is fine (for them) and very good to know in general for us. It’s not like anyone should feel bad about wanting to kill the person who kills your child, that’s not the ticket. If someone kills your child, you’re a strange one if you don’t want to kill them. So I think we should put that aside…it’s a given. Not worth discussing.

What is worth discussing is…

Is there any value in considering a non-violent solution to violence? Is Ghandi full of shit? Is Dr. King a poser? Is Jesus a fraud? This is the only question we should be asking ourselves. And just like every other issue that has come up before, it’s all bullshit…any question other than:

“Is a non-violent or less violent world a good, deserving goal”. That’s the only question.

And if the answer is yes, well it’s clear that many fewer than first thought have much more work to do than we thought.

Because most of us, we’re good with killing or at least good with having others do our killing for us.

But they killed innocents!
But they killed women!
They killed
they killed
they raped
they violated
They did, they did, they did…

Reasons like wildflowers are everywhere and they’re accepted like a bouquet.

What will it take to admit our own savagery? For everyone to stop claiming the moral high ground. Isn’t the reality that blowing up a baby is blowing up a baby, no matter how you market it?

Maybe if we admited our own savage parts we could actually make some humble progress.

The problem with all this, as I see it, is that it’s overwhelming, incredibly overwhelming. What am I supposed to do, sitting here in my little coffee shop, with my little morning bun? What am I supposed to do, what are you supposed to do in the face of this behemoth of violence, this holiday, this celebration of killing? It’s like The Purge except there’s no one filming it with the intent to make money from a movie…er…

Most folks are screwed.

Screwed because it’s going to be difficult to make changes if there’s chaos in the form of open war but more subtley and much more likely in the form of infrastructure breakdowns. If the lights go out, if the trucks stop running, if the water doesn’t come from the tap anymore…that’s going to be hard. So it’s important to do what you can so that doesn’t happen. Then at least we’d have a chance to talk seriously about human nature, our collective awakening to the both dystopian and utopian reality that we actually inhabit.

So how do we do this, this keeping of the lights on?

We get involved in local governance. We begin to reverse the trends of authoratative control of local resources, including dialogue, debate, disagreement – not just money and power but actual conversation and decision making. Right now that is still possible in small, rural areas. Food production, small government, citizen involvement …it’s all still possible and even happening. This will be the savior, if there is any savior, against the encroaching violence. We can’t let people who don’t live with us, dictate to us how things should be. We have to figure out a way to pick up the slack, which is why things have gone so downhill, because we’ve given up our own responsibility for this over a long period of time. And into that void came voices from afar, voices that don’t sit at our table, don’t play with our kids, don’t struggle and laugh with us on the field and coffee shop.

There is an answer to the chaos, savagery and hypocrissy of the world…it’s us. It’s you and me, it’s neighbors and neighborhoods, it’s families, communities and people living together in proximity taking and reversing the trend from top down, outside in, large to small – that’s what we need to do.