We carry the dead on our shoulders
as we pass through the forest.

Flowers of flame and smoke grow from our footsteps,

consuming all in our wake.
From the ashes come fresh life,

old stories retold by young souls.
We are fated to destroy what we create,

but only so that we can create anew.

In the end, I am but a child of thought traveling through life in a broken vessel.

If we want to have any chance of surviving, we are going to have to change quite a few things.

We need to stop being so wasteful.

We need to stop polluting.

We need to deal with all the pollution we've already caused.

We need to stop making food that has no nutritional value, or even worse, is full of poison.

We need to start accepting that everyone is different, and have their own beliefs.

We need to stop actively and needlessly committing harm, both to each other and to the other life forms we share this planet with.

We need to start accepting that we share this planet with others. The world does not exist for us alone.

We need to stop allowing ourselves to be led by the corrupt, and to start playing a more active role in our own governance.

We need to start accepting responsibility for our own actions, and recognizing the effects our actions have on others.

And the list continues. There are many things we need to change. There is a lot to be done, and a lot to be made up for. But it can be done. It must be done.

We can start by being nicer to each other. Start today. Avoid making a hurtful remark. Hold a door open for someone. Give a friendly hello to the cashier at the store or bank, the gas station attendant, or whoever else it is that is providing a service for you. Smile at a customer, or a random person on the sidewalk.

Every person, every living thing, deserves your courtesy and respect until such time that they do something that warrants otherwise. If you can't be bothered to show it to others, then you're not worthy of it yourself.

And we flew on clockwork wings to a land made of glass and steel, with fire in our hearts and voices in our heads.

A man in New York executed a former coworker on the sidewalk yesterday morning, and the resulting crossfire with the police injured nine bystanders, and the shooter was killed.

Aug 15th a man in Washington D.C. shot a security guard at a conservative lobbying organization in the arm because of the Chic-fil-A controversy.

Aug 13th a half an hour exchange of gunfire near Texas A&M left 3 dead (the gunman, a police officer and a bystander), and 4 injured (3 officers and a bystander).

Aug 5th a white supremacist opened fire in a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, killing 6 and injuring 4. He shot the first responding officer nine times, was injured by another officer, and shot himself in the head.

July 20th, a lone gunman killed 12 people and injured 58 at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado.

19 people were shot in Chicago last night. 17 were shot tonight.

Things are starting to get really out of hand. I know times are tough, but it's time to take some deep breathes, cool your heels, and try to get along with your fellow humans. Let's try start being a little nicer to each other.

LET'S ALSO REEVALUATE THE FUCKING HANDGUN AND ASSAULT RIFLE LAWS ALREADY. I'm fine with gun ownership, provided it goes along with gun safety and responsibility. Owning a rifle for hunting, cool. Owning a gun for home defense, sure, whatever, consider reading some statistics as to why that might not be a good idea, and make sure to take some gun safety courses and spend some time on the range.

I mean, seriously, this is all good and fine. But this kind of shit keeps happening. Responsible gun management is such a lovely theory, it really is. And I really, really wish things could be that way. But reality shows otherwise.

I'm not saying make guns illegal, what I'm saying is this. It shouldn't be this easy.

And here's an idea, instead of just focusing on restricting access to guns, it's time to start putting some effort into restricting the manufacture of guns. With the exception of military contracts (for the US or for other members of the UN), I see no reason why an American firearms company should be able to manufacture guns or ammo that American citizens cannot legally buy.

To tell the truth. I'm getting really sick and tired of the debates. And not just over the guns. The ones over politics, and religion, and social issues as well. Debate is supposed to be a good thing, BUT NO ONE IS FUCKING LISTENING TO EACH OTHER. You've already made up your mind about your opinion, you really don't care what the other person has to say, and you refuse to budge.

I'm not going to try and pretend I'm not guilty of it myself. We all are at some point or another. But you know what, if someone has a different opinion than me on a subject I try and listen to what they have to say before I dismiss it. A lot of the time I find that my own opinion ends up being affected by it. And those times I realize I'm just spouting rhetoric, I do my best to remove myself from the conversation.

Instead of having all these debates (read: arguments) all the time, on facebook or elsewhere, try having some actual discussions. You know, reasonable and rationale open discourse. What a novel concept. Try doing the whole being nice to each other as well.

And you know what, if you're going hunting with an assault rifle, you should be limited BY LAW to a clip of 5. Fuck you. You want to shoot faster, fine, but if you can't hit that deer with 5 bullets, you don't deserve to kill it.

On the nature of society and government, from a heavily biased perspective.

For society to truly work it must encourage individuality while still promoting action towards the common good.

This is an idealistic concept. But it is by no means an impossible one.

Unfortunately, human greed seems to cause all forms of governing to inevitably devolve into caste systems. Because some individuals desire to have power over, or more material wealth than, those around them.

A carefully balanced caste system can maintain itself for quite a long time. Centuries even. To be successful, a caste system must provide two things to (a majority of) the more numerous lower (working) class: some degree of ability to sustain themselves and their household, and some sort of rationale for why things must be the way they are. This rationale can be as simple as: fear.

If the balance is not maintained, if these things are not provided in a sufficient capacity to enough of the lower populace, it will collapse. It can be plague, a stronger force can invade and conquer, or it can be the old crowd favorite: revolution.

Generally the decline is gradual. Some rulers (governors) are better at maintaining the balance than others. A succession of overly incompetent, overly greedy, and/or overly cruel rulers of varying small degrees will encourage eventual collapse, but if a single ruling party (whether individual or group) is too much of one or more of those things, it can cause an immediate and rapid dissolution.

We don't really like to think of our species in terms of being a finite thing. We would like to believe that we will literally continue on until the end of the world. But while it is certainly true that if the planet is destroyed we will perish along with it, it is far more probable that Earth will long outlive the human race. The vast majority of all species that have existed in the history of the planet no longer do. Extinction is inevitable. But the more capable a species is of adapting to changes to its environment over time, the longer it is likely to survive.

It is the same with species as it is with governments, which is a handy coincidence, because if the human race wants to remain an evolutionary-viable species, we need to change our governing style. Well, actually, we need to change our societal structure in general.

This is not as much of a stretch as it seems. There are over 7 billion homo sapiens on the planet, and life-expectancy continues to improve, that number increases at a growing rate. There is a generally-held belief that population growth will max out at a certain point. That past a certain point, population growth cannot sustain itself, and (stabilized or decreased by way of disease, famine, war, or just good old conscientious awareness) will plateau. We won't actually know if that's true or not until we get there.

In the meantime we are doing an incredible (or alarming, depending on your perspective) job of mucking up the place. We're rapidly burning through a lot of finite natural resources, and polluting to levels that will take a long time for Earth's natural processing cycles to deal with.

We are generally being very short-sighted. None of this behavior will necessarily destroy the planet (or even necessarily make it merely uninhabitable), nor will it necessarily cause the human race to go extinct. What it will do though, is make life generally suck. Or if you think it sucks already, well, it can get worse. And hell, even if the planet becomes nearly inhospitable, society could continue on.

For awhile. Could be a long while, could be a short while. Not forever. But if we want it to be longer, sooner or later we will have to adapt. And typically speaking, later is not better.

We need to become an enlightened, global society. It's the 21st century, and yet throughout the globe there is war, genocide, famine, wide-spread disease, political upheaval and societal unrest. Inequality abounds...

...and there's absolutely no reason for it. There is enough food and clean water for the entire planet. Most diseases are curable, and cost little to do so. Advancements in micro- and nanotechnology abound. Communication is faster, easier, and more expansive than ever before. All the information in the world is literally at your fingertips.

And most importantly, we are all of one species. One human race. Where we are born, what color we our skin is, the social status of the family we're born into, it's all chance. The distinctions of who is better than who are completely arbitrary.

And whether or not we choose to admit it, we know this.

So let's stop being stupid, and all get along, yeah?


I feel like I never fully tied in my opening point, but it's almost 6am and I'm bloody tired, so I wrapped it up shoddily so I can go to bed. I apologize for this, and will hopefully return to the subject in the near future.

Mortality is that chest pain you get every once in awhile, the one where you're never really sure if it's your heart or your lung (but you're pretty sure it's your heart) and it only sticks around long enough to remind you that one day you are going to die. But not today.

And even after a over a decade, you're still only 27, and not quite even that.

That's mortality.