Margarine vs. Butter

It's the end of the day now and I'm laying in bed looking back and forth from my laptop screen and a luminescent scattering of stars peering in from the window above me. The window is slightly cracked, shut enough to keep in the warmth but open enough to hear the sounds of nature just out of reach.  A distant hum of a passing airliner rips apart the sight and sound of a peaceful night.  My immediate reaction is to be annoyed at the interruption of this peacefulness so far out from anywhere.  How could somebody be so separate from reality as to build a machine that cuts through the tranquility I was experiencing?  All this technology must go - we must go back to the beginning!  But I am just as quickly reminded of my own ignorance.  Without such imagination and technology I would have little hope of being here and of going anywhere.

These are the pieces of confusion I have been trying to fit together since as long as I can remember.  What is the utopia everybody imagines in daydreams and love-lusts? So long I worried about the actions taken in life.  Is my life in line with god's enough to make it to paradise, to heaven?  Will my parents discipline me today even when I try so hard to be perfect for them?  Will my friends today be my friends tomorrow and should I change my life so that all I want comes true?  What is right?  What is truth?  But as it turns out a lot of people have the same existential crises and my own uttering of questions about life become just as annoying as the next persons.  When a visitor to our community pulled out several sheets paper towel for his lunch I gasped inwardly in horror at the outrage of using bleached tree pulp for a minute sum of dribbled soup.  At least, to my comfort, I immediately laughed at myself for being so sensitive to a folly so small.  Where is the line drawn then?  Is it between using paper towels and not buying shoes made from cheap, foreign, child labour?  In a thousand years will it really matter?  Does the current of human nature change for the better when the mass percentage of humanity craves what ultimately destroys itself?  That is a frightening thought.  Some of us are outraged that America is still taking innocent lives in Iraq and Afghanistan.  We are infuriated that the last Republican in office entered these wars and disquieted that the Democrats before and after him made exactly the same decisions.  But if going to war was not left up to congress but to the decision of each individual American would it have been the same?  The masses are not as reasonable as we would like to think.  Stable women and men may have the ability to see goodness in any kind of human but in the end the world is getting larger, more populous and fast-paced, and the opportunity to create hell for others is growing.    My community thinks in non-violent ways about every facet of life and they do a pretty good job of it too.  No murder of any kind, not in war, not in judgement, not even for the non-human.  Live small, simply and local.  Don't raise a fist not even your voice.  This is wonderful and a pleasure to live amongst.  Despite this I do not think that the endeavor to spread this message will ever be taken seriously.  I do not even think that it will be heard at all by most.  Jesus Christ, the man, taught a message of pacifism and peace, sparking a radical following.  Though, within just a few hundred years this small group of people (just as groups are springing up now) became large and the message was lost entirely.  Even today the majority of Christianity, Catholic, Protestant, Schismatic and otherwise is dismally opposed to the voice of their originator.  This is just an example of many revolutions throughout time.  In the United States the view is just as foggy as it is anywhere. The airplane breaking my nightly silence is barely a breath of the problems surrounding us.  We think about how technology will solve our problems.  How can we get a car to run off of the sun?  How can we reestablish the housing market?  How will we pay off our student loans?  But the questions are just as foolish as the makeshift answer that leak from them.  Truthfully, there is no solid answer.  The problems were overlooked before even asking the questions.  Why must we have cars in the first place?  Why do we buy homes too large and too expensive, bought with money nobody has?  Why do we have to work in jobs we hate till we die to pay off an education we never use?  Many see that there is something wrong.  Some of them even understand why.  Fewer still can feel the futility of that truth.  Do we bail or hold on to childish hope?  We don't know.  Of course we don't know if by crossing a street we will be hit and killed by a car either.  I'm not taking the chance.  Hope is for children, but I still wish upon falling stars.  There is no longer adults, only adolescents making the best of a time soon to be over.  I will not bother arguing over pointless questions of religion or politics or economy or happiness.  Not unless I see you as a friend anyway.  After all I am a human nature, one that gets lonely.  One that also rambles.  There is a time for coffee and a time for philosophy.  On occasion they are at a time the same.