‘You can tear down Nazism because it looks and sounds evil. But a smiley face that advocates happiness and progress is a totally different beast, one that the 21st century is very familiar with.’ ~ EON
Humans believe that stress is synonymous to life. Everything comes with a heavy dose of the jitters, plus backbreaking effort, plus uncertainty and ambivalence, pain, discomfort, friction, anxiety, stress. Stress. Lots and lots of stress.
Life is like that, people say. The way the world works, the manner in which the universe is set up. A stressful, testing arrangement, living through which is a constant challenge.
While there may be some truth to this outlook — stress is down and out prevalent in the cosmos at large — not all stresses are hardwired in the system. Some are direct products of human choices, arising from conscious and deliberate action. From collective agency and society’s norms. From collective ignorance and toxic inertia, or toxic momentum, or both. Choices that lead to outcomes that poison and destroy their surroundings.
The huge patch of garbage floating in the seas, for example. It’s real, getting larger, filthier, nastier, and it’s all human-made. Getting stickier and deadlier by the year.
And the toxins people swallow every time they go for a dip, a nasty cocktail of disease care of a battery of industries that dump their refuse in the water supply.
And the 1%-driven economy, which everyone keeps griping about, and the economic woes they keep getting into, time and time again. The recurring economic problems that keep getting recycled into the system, manifesting themselves as socioeconomic crises; the populist politics that stem from these crises, leading to fear, suspicion, paranoia, persecution and hatred. The wrong kind of politics and economics. The wrong kind of culture, out of which rises conflict and death, all in the name of peace and love and benevolent deities.
Like the wars that rock people’s lives and the shady deals they incite and the grief that accompanies them no matter what. The things that drive humanity crazy, they are by and large products of everyone’s consciousness, or unconsciousness, depending how you see things. Turn a blind eye to the self-inflicted plagues of humanity, bury your head in the sand of routine — wish the problems away, believe extra hard in the sanctity of human life and all that it entails — and they might just disappear, humanity’s problems, pouf, like magic, or so the silver-tongued and beguiling promise to the gullible masses.
They solve nothing. If anything, they perpetuate the problem.
They consolidate it.
Humanity’s number one threat, my friends: its own civilization — mea culpa ad infinitum, ad nauseam, especially when it’s on the ‘right’ track, thinking it’s fighting the good fight.
A tragicomic irony of cosmic proportions, civilization is.
A comedy of errors in a whirlwind of terrors in the stagnant pool of atavism.
My name is EON, son of Time, and I’m here on a mission, and what a delightfully amusing mission it’s turning out to be. I wouldn’t miss it for anything. I gripe about it sometimes, it’s filthy and parochial here, but it’s all worth it in the end. The self-defeating hysterias of a toxic paradigm playing role model is a rarity, in fact, it’s priceless.
Intrigued? Watch this space for more — and happy Valentine’s Day! Love conquers all, as you can see.
From the collection of writings EON: THE ANGRY COMING OF AGE