My eyes twinkle in the dim light of a fake fall tree, the only illumination besides my iPad screen. It’s early morning, and I can’t sleep anymore, the result of three dreams interwoven throughout my night. All were what I call “stress dreams”, meaning they weren’t the sweet dreams wished for at end of day. These were dreams that brought distress and un-quiet sleep.
It’s the real world that distresses me more upon waking: genocide in the Middle-East, fascism rising in the midst of my home country, war in Ukraine that won’t end, and a hate-filled talk show host being glorified as a martyr for a holy man he didn’t know that well. And it goes on and on.
I grew up into this modern world as a child communicating with other children in Australia, New Zealand, Europe, and around the States through the early internet. It was a fun time of global connection over shared interests. That innocence quickly grew into something else, and I believe all of us were unprepared for the overwhelming burden of knowing exactly where and how the world is on fire at any given moment of any given day.
I am reminded of the Tom Hanks’ film News of the World in which Hanks plays a character in the late 1800’s America traveling from town to town reading exotic news from Paris, London, Berlin, and other cities around the world. People once paid for the novel news of far away places. Now? It is beneath our fingers for the endless scrolling. I don’t think I was prepared for that to happen so fast in the almost-40 years I’ve been alive. In my teens it was a trickle. Now it’s the proverbial fire hose of information.
It is incredible to remember that humanity existed in many tiny enclaves, practically isolated from one another across this wide world, which has been shrinking for hundreds of years. Still, the Information Age so greatly accelerated that shrinkage that I believe nobody was prepared for the results we are seeing now. In many ways our new small world is a good thing; in many ways our new small world is a nightmare.
I am not here to decry modern connective technology. Like a flint arrowhead or the wheel, it is simply a tool to be used. It is our human proclivity to turn anything into a weapon, even information, that is our undoing. A very different film reminds me that “human ingenuity goes hand in hand with human cruelty”. (Actually, that slight misquote comes from two different Planet of the Apes films.) There is nothing we can’t imagine for good yet twist into an evil. The challenge is found in the pages of a holy book that urges “beating swords into plowshares”; that is, taking our weapons of war and returning them to tools that work towards the common good.
I can do very little against the onslaught of evil that has seemingly gripped our little world in the now times. Too often I remain silent, keeping my head down and merely attempting to survive from one day to the next. I have trouble enough here in my house, trying to keep the structure from falling down around me, or my car running, or me reliably going to work five times a week to earn the pittance I crave to fund this day-to-day survival. Occasionally, like today, I can poke my head out and call to the world to please amplify kindness, empathy, and respect for the preciousness that is human life that is so casually thrown aside.
The talk show host who was murdered should be alive today, as vile as he was. The children and fathers and mothers of Gaza should be alive today. The young black men who were lynched in Mississippi and found hanging from trees should be alive today. The little girls’ innocence that Epstein and Trump and his cronies are trying to erase should have true justice and restoration. We should be making this world better: preserving our forests and oceans, not strip mining and reducing to rubble for others to gain more power and more obscene wealth. That these things are controversial at all shows how deep in the shit we all are.
Perhaps this is the greatest human failing: sin, human nature, evil: call it whatever you will, that is the constant cancer we must all seek to conquer. Maybe that is what our fighting spirit is for, not to wage war against each other, but to battle ourselves for the dominance of good and the subjugation of evil. All too frequently, we fail to master our own hearts before we wake. Then we take the trauma of the darkness within and visit it on our family, neighbors, and “the least of these” in an effort to avoid the inner conflict altogether.
I turn again to Dr. Martin Luther King who begged us, before he was murdered, to not use hate to drive out hate, but to use love instead. Or the holy writ that urges us all to “do justly and love mercy” and Jesus who said to “love one another as we love ourselves”, though more often than not, that kind of sentiment will get you crucified and make people angry because most of us cannot bear to look within and master our own failings.
I grew up, and remain, a fan of science fiction, in particular Star Trek. Trek, at its best, is this great utopic look at the future. I still dream of visiting the stars, and encountering “strange new worlds” teeming with “new life and new civilizations” but humanity isn’t ready for that. In our current mood, we would wipe out any such new life in seconds. Maybe that’s why none of that new-to-us life has visited here yet, either. As the philosopher Calvin once said, “the surest sign [of] intelligent life…is that none of it has tried to contact us”.
At any rate, I renew my commitment to everyone to be the best person I can be. I vow to, as much as I am able, master my own shadows so that I can emerge into a shared light to love and care for as many as I can. That’s the best any of us can and should strive to do. Please join me? The world is dying and needs the collective us to save it.
a simple man 