Existential Formulae

We exist, therefore we consume. The air
around us, water to sustain our lives and
food to fuel the engine of energy-hungry
bodies, and culture to assure us that we belong.
Among our primitive existential needs is
fodder for our cerebral functioning and to
assuage our curiosity about the lives of others
to enable us to assess our lives as compared
to theirs. This transfer of information was
once derided as unworthy gossip more latterly
given an official imprimatur as all the news
fit to print leaving that designated as unfit
to be broadcast via social media. Whatever
the source, word-of-mouth, sanctioned media
or proletarian alternatively to the cool set
we adjust our perceptions and harden our
prejudices setting fire to the controversies
that flare from embers of suspicion and
ethnic and cultural divides. We the people
and they the others as venerable as ancient
Greece which inherited the emotional device
of antagonism to the unknown from the
ancients that preceded them designed by
nature to respond to the survival code in 
adapting to scarce resources with territorial
ambitions. The mysterious science of nature
transformed to the greater mystery of God
incarnate an invention that invented life
endowing creatures with all the functions
of adaptation lacking only the capacity to
accept the presence of others like themselves
anxious to obey the instinct to survive while
simultaneously striving to deny survival
wholesale to that fateful 'other' whose own
imprinted need threatens the deserving.