Twinkle Twinkle, Baby
I found a playground in my neighborhood. It’d been there for years, and I think I’d been there before, but I’d forgotten about it. It was nice; I’d always wanted a yard or a swing set, and I’ve never really had one. But now, at 10:45 on a Wednesday night, I had this playground all to myself.
I didn’t really think about anything, I just swung for a while, looking at the winking stars. It was a nice respite from my constantly racing mind, all the problems that I see and can’t do anything about.
I jumped off, afraid my over-enthusiastic swinging was going to wake the park’s true owners. I climbed up the slide and laid down on the little bridge, quiet moisture clinging to my shirt.
I stared at the stars again, which never fail to amaze me. They looked so calm, so permanent, so unchanging but I knew that we were racing through them at 640000 miles per hour. It’s so goddamn corny, but that’s life, isn’t it? Even when things look like they’re going to last forever, they never will. Something else is always at work.
It’s not always going to be bad, but it’s going to be change. Most of the time, it seems like the worst thing in the world. But, most of the time, the worst case scenario is that you get to try something new.
I stared up. The guard rails hedged the sides of my eyes. I felt trapped, but free. I didn’t have to go forwards or backwards, along the beaten path, I could just go up.
A blinking light traveled across my already-blurring vision, and I was amazed again. If a human from any other time- 10,000 years ago, 1000 years ago, 100 years ago- saw what I was seeing, they would have been dumbfounded, amazed, and probably horrified. Maybe they think it was a God, or some great cosmic event.
I, though, I know that it’s just a bunch of people flying through the sky in a big metal bird.
I was dumbfounded, amazed, and a little horrified.
It’s so amazing to me, that we can fly. Man wasn’t meant to do that. We weren’t mean to cross oceans, to go faster than, say, 15 miles per hour, we weren’t meant to go into space. We weren’t even meant to know what space was. But look what we’ve done. We’ve taken what was given to us, and we’ve made something so much greater. We haven’t followed the plan we were given, we’ve broken the rules that were handed to us, and we’ve become gods.
I’m not meant to be alive right now. One thing after another proves that to me, almost every day. If I was born ten years earlier, I’d be dead, no different than the billions before me. I’ve broken the rules that I was handed, the most important rules in the book. Now, though, the little rules have got my hung up. The little, stupid, man-made rules. We’re great because we broke the rules, and now we’re setting them on ourselves.
I suppose we need them, though. Because, for some reason, some reason that I can’t fathom, we still haven’t figured out how to be decent to one another. We’ve figured out how to reach out to that little white circle in the sky, a little light that actually turned out to be a moon, a whole new world, and we reached out and put man there. We can do that, across hundreds of thousands of miles, but we can’t reach out to the people all around us. We can fly through the air faster than sound, and we can reach anywhere on the face of the planet in a matter of hours. We can learn how to go to the bottom of the ocean, to the edge of the atmosphere, and beyond.
But we can’t fucking learn how to be nice.
Compassion isn’t something that’s selective. It’s not reserved for people who you love, people who you’ve known for years, people who you’re friends with, people who’s names you know. Compassion is a basic fucking right.
Life is tough. We grow up, we grow old, and then we die. That’s the facts, and that’s probably not going to change. But when people, humans, when we fight with each other, too, life gets a whole lot shittier. We’re all on the same team, playing the same game that now one is sure how to win, and we spend the whole time killing and fighting and squabbling. We can’t do that. We’re fast approaching the event horizon, the point of no return. If we get there, if we get to that point, however many years down the road, and we still can’t constantly and consistently give a fuck about our fellow man, then...we’re gone, as a species, and we deserve it.
We’ve got a lot of hard times around us and ahead of us. Corruption, war, pestilence, natural disasters, famine, global warming, ad infinitum. If we’re together, we can break the rules again, we can beat the odds and come out on top. If we’re not…
This doesn’t have to be some grand effort. I can’t go out and disarm every nuclear bomb in the world right now. I can’t destroy every bullet. I can’t even make people stop hating people because of their race, their skin, or their beliefs. What I think I can do, maybe, is make people realize. Make them realize that we do have to be nice to each other, and we do have to care about each other, no matter what. Because whatever anyone does, they’re still human.
The survival of the fittest is a big rule in nature. The meanest, the toughest, the roughest. They’re the ones who are supposed to make it, they’re supposed to take out the meek, the weak, and the sick. Those rules don’t apply anymore, we’re playing a different ball game, and if we let them, the fittest will take us all down.
Just another rule for us to break.
I didn’t really think about anything, I just swung for a while, looking at the winking stars. It was a nice respite from my constantly racing mind, all the problems that I see and can’t do anything about.
I jumped off, afraid my over-enthusiastic swinging was going to wake the park’s true owners. I climbed up the slide and laid down on the little bridge, quiet moisture clinging to my shirt.
I stared at the stars again, which never fail to amaze me. They looked so calm, so permanent, so unchanging but I knew that we were racing through them at 640000 miles per hour. It’s so goddamn corny, but that’s life, isn’t it? Even when things look like they’re going to last forever, they never will. Something else is always at work.
It’s not always going to be bad, but it’s going to be change. Most of the time, it seems like the worst thing in the world. But, most of the time, the worst case scenario is that you get to try something new.
I stared up. The guard rails hedged the sides of my eyes. I felt trapped, but free. I didn’t have to go forwards or backwards, along the beaten path, I could just go up.
A blinking light traveled across my already-blurring vision, and I was amazed again. If a human from any other time- 10,000 years ago, 1000 years ago, 100 years ago- saw what I was seeing, they would have been dumbfounded, amazed, and probably horrified. Maybe they think it was a God, or some great cosmic event.
I, though, I know that it’s just a bunch of people flying through the sky in a big metal bird.
I was dumbfounded, amazed, and a little horrified.
It’s so amazing to me, that we can fly. Man wasn’t meant to do that. We weren’t mean to cross oceans, to go faster than, say, 15 miles per hour, we weren’t meant to go into space. We weren’t even meant to know what space was. But look what we’ve done. We’ve taken what was given to us, and we’ve made something so much greater. We haven’t followed the plan we were given, we’ve broken the rules that were handed to us, and we’ve become gods.
I’m not meant to be alive right now. One thing after another proves that to me, almost every day. If I was born ten years earlier, I’d be dead, no different than the billions before me. I’ve broken the rules that I was handed, the most important rules in the book. Now, though, the little rules have got my hung up. The little, stupid, man-made rules. We’re great because we broke the rules, and now we’re setting them on ourselves.
I suppose we need them, though. Because, for some reason, some reason that I can’t fathom, we still haven’t figured out how to be decent to one another. We’ve figured out how to reach out to that little white circle in the sky, a little light that actually turned out to be a moon, a whole new world, and we reached out and put man there. We can do that, across hundreds of thousands of miles, but we can’t reach out to the people all around us. We can fly through the air faster than sound, and we can reach anywhere on the face of the planet in a matter of hours. We can learn how to go to the bottom of the ocean, to the edge of the atmosphere, and beyond.
But we can’t fucking learn how to be nice.
Compassion isn’t something that’s selective. It’s not reserved for people who you love, people who you’ve known for years, people who you’re friends with, people who’s names you know. Compassion is a basic fucking right.
Life is tough. We grow up, we grow old, and then we die. That’s the facts, and that’s probably not going to change. But when people, humans, when we fight with each other, too, life gets a whole lot shittier. We’re all on the same team, playing the same game that now one is sure how to win, and we spend the whole time killing and fighting and squabbling. We can’t do that. We’re fast approaching the event horizon, the point of no return. If we get there, if we get to that point, however many years down the road, and we still can’t constantly and consistently give a fuck about our fellow man, then...we’re gone, as a species, and we deserve it.
We’ve got a lot of hard times around us and ahead of us. Corruption, war, pestilence, natural disasters, famine, global warming, ad infinitum. If we’re together, we can break the rules again, we can beat the odds and come out on top. If we’re not…
This doesn’t have to be some grand effort. I can’t go out and disarm every nuclear bomb in the world right now. I can’t destroy every bullet. I can’t even make people stop hating people because of their race, their skin, or their beliefs. What I think I can do, maybe, is make people realize. Make them realize that we do have to be nice to each other, and we do have to care about each other, no matter what. Because whatever anyone does, they’re still human.
The survival of the fittest is a big rule in nature. The meanest, the toughest, the roughest. They’re the ones who are supposed to make it, they’re supposed to take out the meek, the weak, and the sick. Those rules don’t apply anymore, we’re playing a different ball game, and if we let them, the fittest will take us all down.
Just another rule for us to break.