One day a man or woman is sitting in an office, driving to a job, installing a cable or unloading groceries. The next, he or she is summoned to invade a nation half way around the world, and some will never see their homes or families again.
A few thousand ordinary folks, working people, some making barely a living wage and others making fifty times what they need, cluster into a high rise complex and an hour later the buildings and the people are ashes and rubble.
Some bedouins and some camels trudge along the perilous desert sand and the sky rains down death in an instant.
Those caught in the conflicts of leaders pay the ultimate price for someone else’s power, and have no power of their own to change things. Life has never been fair in recorded history.
Such unfairness was supposed to stop when the people of the United States formed a government of, by and for the people. The philosophy was the best of all possible governments in an impossible world. Carrying it out against the evils of the greedy and the possessed could not long endure.
Man is his own enemy. Death is the fate of all mortal beings.
So to what end is the purpose? The Pharaoh Illusion of a pyramid making one immortal? Five thousand years, and man has learned nothing?
Not a thing. Nothing of value. Nothing to better mankind other than robot assistants plugged into a wall, things that don’t work when the power grids fail. One severe storm and misery spreads like spilled coffee over a whole area, people run and hide for their lives.
Stand back, death, stand back just a few more minutes … no one is ready. No one is ready to die, they do stand ready to kill. And be killed. They need not doubt. Death will come to both.
Isn’t that the news, the sum of it? Perhaps the newspaper is at times little more than one huge obituary of those who came to the end of their earthly lives, prominent or beggar, of earthly power or without any. Those who exercise the power of life and death over others meet up with the same fate. Generation, after generation, one succeeding the other, none lasts.
Where there is joy it is in the little things, coming suddenly and disappearing quickly. The joy at the birth of a child is the beginning of half a lifetime of responsibility, perhaps grief and pain.
Someone else owns everything we need, so we must pay them to give it to us. Even if we have liberty nothing is free, life is never a free ride. But if it were, it would end at the grave.
Why is man so evil as to hate, to covet, to accumulate only to leave behind, to seek only to find that whatever he has found still must end, he is mortal. A funeral procession five miles long, with limousines slowly making their way, find their stopping place at the cemetery. It is over, the procession is for the living, not the one in the hearse. The flowers in the full bloom of beauty will soon be as dead as the one they honored.
Some things last a little while. Family names may go on for generations, but finally become meaningless. Is “Kennedy” the image it was forty to fifty years ago? Truman came from nowhere, and thence returned. Shakespeare opined that the good men do lives after them, history begs to differ, it is the evil that lives on. The good is seldom done or noticed if it is.
Youth, strength, beauty, intellect, courage, talent, perspective … age takes them all, then death takes what is left. Is that all there is to life on earth? On earth … yes. For our much thinking, we have driven ourselves mad with power, even to imagining creating for some future generation immortal bodies by genetic engineering. Duplicate a body? How about duplicating a soul? Madness, all of it is madness, all of it to no avail.
Every war has been to eliminate wars and wars prevail over peace, there has been no change. Empires build to be greater empires, time and corruption take them down, another rises and falls in the same pattern, having learned nothing from those who came before.
Oceans could well be made from the tears of the living, but mountains could never be built from anything but the rubble of civilizations past. The old way of archeological prospecting was to seek out the mounds, for that is all that was left of what once was. Now we know that the ocean has swallowed and hidden some of history also. To whom does it matter? Shall one rise from those heaps and say, it is good to be found? No, not one.
Faith, hope, love, these three are all we have and all we are in proportion to how much of each we possess, and the more we give of each, the more they multiply within.
That alone is the brilliant light of an otherwise senseless thing called life. Man can create his gods, they perish with him. If idols are all we have, if life became nothing at its end, then it would be better never to be among the living. Many have reasoned that out before.
The only reason we have faith, hope and love is that they come from outside of us, from One who created all, the One most denied and despised.
Each soul dies alone. It does not stay alone afterwards. Does that make you wonder? Does it make you afraid? Or does it give you joy? Wonder about it.
“Published originally at EtherZone.com : republication allowed with this notice and hyperlink intact.”