Set Adrift

My good friend, my dear old friend
and I say so despite the frailty of
our friendship, I know your pain
and the desperation of loneliness. And
I know also that your desolate condition
is the result of your very own lack
in failing to fully appreciate how so
fortunate you once were, as a good and
decent man, spurred on by irrational
desires to cause hurt and pain to those
most responsible for your comfort
and your happiness. Spurning the
integrity of your responsibility to them
to achieve a fleeting goal of passion
they became lost to you, and now you
flounder finding no one else to fill
the yawning vacuum in your life. In
the process discovering the reality that
possessions complement but do not
enrich one's life, and the absence of
love and companionship is destructive
of the value of life.  There are simply
those truisms and realities that cannot
be conveyed but must be lived to fully
comprehend ourselves as agents of our
own dislocation from life's promise.

Discerningly Discriminating

Truly, it stands alone, for there is no other
place quite like it, the land of opportunity
of self-confidence, of great-heartedness
opening its shores to those inhabiting a
world of dire misery to become as one
among the citizens of a land wide open
and free. Free enterprise. Wide latitude
offering riches to the bold and the far-seeing
entrepreneurs whose imaginations are held
by no boundaries. And where anyone can
aspire to hold the highest office in the
land. Having done so acknowledged as the
most influential, powerful single individual
on this hapless planet. To serve with proud
distinction as custodian of uncountable
wealth, international influence and respect
selecting from among senators and congressmen
of the Republic, even peanut farmers
and second-rate actors, governors, military
personnel, lawyers and community organizers
even flirted, twice, with the unthinkable concept
of a woman as president, but chose instead
in collective wisdom an envious, uncouth
and unlettered cretin of a circus barker.
And now, in the persona of a president of
the formerly great United States of America
one who has alienated far and wide, globally
and internally, in a wise display of equality
it does stand alone in its utter inane insanity.

History Lesson

From time immemorial it has been
the history of humankind to drift
as the first energetic pockets of those
bipedal creatures with emerging 
thinking prowess sought to migrate
great distances to establish themselves
other than where nature had deposited
them in her busy, harried schedule of
creation. Humankind is still on the move
searching out opportunity to advance
their interests, leaving behind a trail of
monumental disturbance both to the
landscapes they abandon and to the
relationships they flee or secure in
tribal, clan, and religious dysfunction as 
a reflection of nature's premise that she
could only do the best she could and
the rest was up to her creations. Discrete
geographic settlements homogeneously
reflecting adaptation and settlement
did not solve the endowment of survival's
impetus toward territorial aggression.
But nature meant her creatures to widen
their genetic pool allowing improved
specimens to survive. And now, in this
modern world built upon the genius of
the time-honoured succession of human
creative brilliance manipulating what
nature has produced, the living laboratory
that is the world we know exhibits areas
of human advancement and their direct
opposites. In those continents of strife
deprivation of the masses in a malevolent
social structure recreates restlessness
and search for haven. The new mass
migration of the disadvantaged has 
descended upon the continents of the
advantaged, bringing with them their
transformative cultures of distrust, envy
victimhood, violence, hatred and conflict.

Programmed

The design is inherently flawed. But
then perhaps deliberately so engineered
and inherited through countless generations
of human existence, flaws that no one is
immune to representing as they do within 
the overall grand design merely another
element in an elegant network of mechanics
translated through a skeletal armature
of precise method incorporating muscle
tissue, blood, sinew and bone atop which 
sits a brain, the control panel for the 
appendages and all that comprise the human 
and its mind, echoing the being of a soul 
entrapped in a living shroud whose entirety 
is clearly hugely unsatisfactory, for do not 
we all criticize and find fault with our fleshly 
trappings? We are to a one and in the aggregate
self-absorbed yet assailed with doubt, curious 
and envious of all that we are not and do not 
possess. The mirror we are most apt to gaze 
upon reflects back to us our imagined fount 
of perfection as actors we worship as celebrities 
appear as we do not, live as we cannot, love
as we would like to, yet our yearnings are
never satisfied nor satiated. That those we 
elevate in high esteem on the pedestal of 
celebrity fail in every index of human potential 
to grasp the apex of existence humours us 
not at all, for they too are inexorably infected 
with the very same flaws that disturb our lives
while their performances fail to persuade them
otherwise leading them to envy their audience.

 

Fragile Endurance

Long before dawn, when the world
was dark with lingering night
the heavens themselves screened
by layers of cloud heavy with their
burden and long after dusk when
the world, wearied by unending
rain that lashed the earth and all
its creatures when the dimmest
light revealed the world awash in
oceans of rain spilling nonstop
from the brimming clouds, thoughts
turned to Biblical-era fables of 
surviving the punishment of floods
and our very own experiences with
monsoon drenching, drowning
whatever cannot find shelter
from pummeling winds sweeping
the rain before it to penetrate every
conceivable vulnerability, dissolving
and destroying, humbling the shelters
that humanity in its conceit regards
as impermeable, a human-conceived
match contesting the destructive
power of nature's rumbling moods
in a disorder of the elements, brooding
and dangerous to existence. Yet in a
world of impermanence, no storm
system has yet proven its capacity
to linger interminably, and so it departed
and in the morning after, surviving
elements of the natural world made
their resistance known in a triumph
of fragility's capacity to endure.



 

The Chosen

Did you know this? There's an entirely
new paradigm in provocation and its
acceptable response. If and when
violently attacked, preferably do nothing.
If and when attacked the invariable
response is of course, defence, by
whatever means. And throughout the
history of humankind defence was not
only considered to represent the only
response justifiable by the visceral
nature of sudden attacks, but that most
urgently recommended. Through the
peculiar alchemy of twisted logic a new
perception has surfaced, however, and
those who act swiftly and with the precision
required to save their lives while disarming
their attackers are viewed and named as
aggressors. Has the normalcy of human
survival requiring instant action to
defend oneself been relegated to a trash
bin usually overflowing with the
edible corpses of a slaughterhouse?
Sadly, yes, if the attacker is an Arab
'youth' out to kill, and his victim is an
Israeli citizen, child, adult, elderly,
police or military, makes little difference.
All others may continue to function as
nature had intended for one's self-defence.

The Futility of Naivete

Migration has made the world a more
tangled place of tribal, ethnic, religious
and ideological dimensions altering
the homogeneity treasured by long 
established societies calling themselves 
nations distinct from their neighbours 
rife with their own celebrated heritage
and cultural compacts, dismayed with
the inexorable diminishing of all their
traditions held dear, yet struggling to
warm to the customs, cuisines and the
melding of languages and religions.
On the international stage accepting her
crown of world beauty the young woman
distinguished by "Australia" emblazoned
across her chest, gives thanks to the
country that has hosted generations of
her family and her many and varied
supporters. In her speech extolling the
beauty and serenity of her religion, Islam.
Oblivious by choice that in those nations 
where Islam rules supreme the ulema: 
Imams, Mullahs, Ayatollahs and their
elite, outraged at her lack of Muslim 
modesty issue fatwas so that she is 
well advised to give wide berth to the 
birthplace of her esteemed and so
hugely valued religion to avoid the
penalty awaiting her for attempting to
fuse Islam with freedom and equality.