Après nous le déluge
You know, it’s like the man said:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
So, a woman was left to die somewhere on Mount Everest and a rescue team was sent out to try and save her. I wouldn’t be surprised if her companion, her husband maybe, hadn’t even noticed that she had got into any kind of trouble - he was probably too busy talking on his mobile.
Never mind, he’ll probably be able to catch up on events on his new portable TV. That’s what’s become of those segments of earth’s population which aren’t actually dying of hunger & thirst or busy trying to kill each other over oil, religion or meaningless bits of real estate: people watching TV or talking on their mobiles.
Watching & talking shit is, of course, much easier than doing meaningful things or interacting in a sane way with our fellow human beings. Still, when a species is that good at doing insane things, it’s almost a waste of a God-given talent not to go for all-out specialisation.
Why try to sort things out with your girlfriend when you can park your car in the middle of a rail road crossing and then watch how things develop further? Sensible - not quite, no but Hollywood-style mayhem is much more fun, of course. Plus, most of us don’t think any of our actions have real consequences, so why stop and bother to think at all, before acting like a cartoon character?
Of course, there is one other thing we’re very good at: envy. Our Holy Books may warn us not to covet this, that or the other but most of us react to these instructions with a shrug and a mumbled, not covet, my ass! Ah yes, as the saying goes, We’re only human, after all.
So, if you want a baby and you can’t get one at K-mart immediately, why not abduct your pregnant neighbour, try to kill her and remove that neighbour’s baby with a razor blade?
One of the reasons we do spend all those hours doing the zombie in front of our TV’s or chitchatting on our mobiles like senile squirrels on speed, is that we know that we’re very bad at all the relationships we find ourselves in.
When we’re not busy plotting to kill our significant others or obsessing about getting pregnant, we raise our children to become either, just like us, zombie squirrels - or we lazily and (self)indulgently turn them into self-absorbed princesses and mad hatter frogs.
That is, of course, if we can find someone to become a significant other. We’ve become so used to not doing anything more tiring than changing the batteries in our remotes and recharging the batteries in our mobiles, that we can’t even be bothered any more to get out to find a mate.
So, we even try to find and select dates through computer dating sites - and there are a Hell of a lot of them these days, catering to every whimwham whim & fancy. There’s one for every kind of religion, from born-again bores to atheist activists - and if you want to make sure your future soul mate shares your political beliefs, you can cover the whole spectrum, from liberal lefties to Aryan arseholes.
Not that all these sites are of much use, in the end. It’s like they say about computers, Garbage in, garbage out. So, however advanced and clever these sites are, in the end they have to try to connect human being to human being. Garbage outed, indeed.
(Incoming news flash: now there’s proof that even molecules are better at dating than we are. If that ain’t enough to give you kittens, I don’t know what is.)
(And another: from the moment man picked up a rock to brain another man, humanity has always been busy to build better tools to fix all his problems. So, after spending billions of dollars and God knows how much time on getting to the point that we now can change a deeply miserable man or woman into a no doubt as dissatisfied woman or man, ain’t it lovely to learn that chicken have found a way to do the same thing spontaneously?)
Well, you know that we are in deep shit when we can’t trust Al Gore anymore about climate control and even Noah risen can’t be bothered to make a decent job of it and buggers off even before the half time commercials. So, like the dodo before us, we will soon join the dinosaur.
Maybe then all those much-abused mobiles and terrorized TV-sets will finally have some time for themselves - and who knows, when they come to know each other, something beautiful will come from the useless ashes that we left.
Yeah, yeah, I know, I’m just a sucker for a happy ending.
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