Bleak Meditations

Is your life only worth something if you are not even a contributing member of society, such as an embryo with no brain waves?

Potential is nice but most potential is wasted. Every new generation is forced to listen to the speech about how children are our hope for the future. Why do we send children off to fight wars? An 18 year old on the front lines is still a child as far as I'm concerned. Some nations use child soldiers as young as six. If the young are the hope we claim they are, then why do we let cops beat them on the head when they read in the Constitution that they have the right to protest and when they do, look what happens to them! The generation of the Sixties believed all the lies they were told to make the world a better place and when they found out that the police weren't going to allow any changes, then the Biblical scales fell from their eyes.

Children are NOT the hope for our future. The older they get, the less we listen to them. Babies cry, we change their diapers stick a bottle in their mouth and go back to ignoring them. We park children in front of TV sets and video games. We ignore teenagers because if we paid attention to the outrageous things they did, they'd be grounded for life. We ignore college-age kids because they're off in college and moving out anyway. People in their twenties are always too busy. People in their thirties ignore us because they have their own families. Those in their forties are preoccupied with mid-career concerns. Those in their fifties are too busy with financial messes to even be aware of us other than to put us in old folk’s homes so that they can ignore us. Sixty-somethings are in the same boat as us and we'd like to tell them to go to hell but we are afraid of them pulling the plug on our life support. Seventy-somethings are worried about karma as they themselves are put on life support machines. Eighty-somethings are making out their living wills and cursing their grandchildren who visit only to see if they can pull the plug yet.

We ignore this unpleasant reality at our own peril. Of course, the pessimist says that even if we don't ignore reality, reality will still dispose of us anyway.

Children are NOT the hope for our future. Our future is death. Their future is death. If they are young soldiers, their present is death. If they have some disease, then make a similar prognosis. If one thinks the delusion that children are a legacy and a form of immortality, then tell me of even one person brought back to life by having children. In Asia, they have ancestor worship. In America, ancestors might be remembered briefly at best and only by those who knew them in life. And those who knew them will die soon themselves. Your memory will be erased from memory when the brains that contain those memories die.

Children are NOT the hope for our future. Sure, children are fun at Christmas time until thoughts of "greedy little expletives deleted, Christmas is about Christ not about you getting toys that you will leave out in the rain and be tired of before the sun sets on December 25th" intrude. Needless to say, I bite my lip a lot around my children. They don't need to know the sour thoughts of an adult. They'll get as disillusioned as I am soon enough. Let them enjoy their all-too-brief childhood. I'm luckier than most. My children are little angels most of the time but my neighbor's kid ought to be incarcerated now and save the taxpayers at lot of grief. What hope for the future does he offer? More likely he will rack up a long list of victims before the state finally puts him away for good.

Children are NOT our hope for the future. If the generation of the Sixties couldn't make any significant changes, no generation could.

Children are NOT the hope for our future. Tom Brokaw goes on endlessly about the Greatest Generation that fought World War Two. When was the last time you heard of any member of that generation sending Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a letter to protest him saying that the Holocaust never happened? If the Greatest Generation can't bring itself to educate the world about the Holocaust, then why are we surprised that genocides go off without a hitch in Sudan and Tibet? The generation that fought Hitler saw with their own eyes the death camps. If the generation that fought Hitler don't know that the whole point of World War Two was to stop death camps and genocide, then perhaps that is why Stalin got away with killing forty million and Mao got away with killing seventy million people. Hitler only killed twelve million (6 million Jews and 6 million non-Jews) but he inspired a host of imitators.

Children are NOT the hope for our future. Not when they don't remember the past and are not taught about the past. Would Bush and Congress have been able to get away with passing the Patriot Act if the generation of the Sixties had bothered to educate young people about Cointelpro and other violations of civil liberties by the government? Those programs have been dusted off and restarted under other names.

Children are NOT our future because we don't provide them with a future. Is leaving them a polluted world that will take centuries to clean up any kind of future? In a world with over six billion people, having more children is the problem that causes all problems and it is a problem that will not be solved short of God allowing an asteroid or comet *Wormwood* to drastically reduce the population. People will not stop having children, not even at gun point. The Chinese won't stop. The Muslims won't stop. The Latinos won't stop. The Catholics won't stop. The Mormons won't stop. The Europeans stopped and got overrun by Muslims.

Children are NOT our future. They are not even their own future.

God is simply wiping the canvas clean and going to start over with a different species. Other species living on this planet have to pay for our stupidity and die along with us.

I make this calculation: Russia invades Georgia, re-annexes it, and makes plans to invade Ukraine or Belarus or one of the Baltic States. Either Cheney gets his way and nuclear missiles strike Moscow or he doesn't. Either way, the public decides that it would be better to stick with a third term of Bush (declaring himself president for life and canceling elections) or a third term of Bush (in the person of John McCain) rather than change from the policies that made the world so unstable in the first place. Those policies are, of course, Bush policies. A change in policy would have saved the planet. Scientists are saying that it may already be too late to stop climate change. This chain of events will simply clinch the death warrant.

With the human race's run of bad luck, Krakatoa will erupt, dim the sun, and plunge the planet into an ice age at the worst possible time (not that there is a good time for an ice age). Perhaps the long predicted asteroid or comet impact with Earth too. Toss in a visit by hostile extraterrestrials to pick through the ashes and you have the extinction of the human race.

It just seems so perverse that right when we can hope to see Bush turned out of office, withdrawal from Iraq, and some peace with the Islamic world; along comes the Russians trying to resurrect the Soviet Union. Bush looked in Putin's eyes and did not see the KGB operative. His lack of historical perspective could not see in him another Hitler invading the Sudetenland.



I will not conclude with my usual prayer because the human race doesn't have a prayer. It just stumbles from one tragedy to the next.