Be Where....

[agent compassion]

We are all signals, and products of those signals. Why else would we fear chaos and disorder so much? We spend all that time carefully filtering and arranging the signals and ideas that make up our identities, that we cannot bear the thought of something disrupting it.

Fair enough, that's rather obvious...

In spite of all our posturing, though, we are constantly susceptible to being influenced by these signals, and we tend to cover for that influence by waving our egos around saying "It was my idea all along. I meant to do that."

But the effect of environment on attitude is palpable, regardless, why else would people feel the need to migrate? To "get away from it all" and "change the scenery" is an irrelevant statement, unless there actually is an "all" to get away from and scenery to change...

I hold within myself, at any given moment, an infinity of warring possibilities. There are dominant themes of course, and I can find myself flipping between one and the others instantaneously, a sort of "Who am I today?" routine. But ultimately a pattern emerges, and we call it a personality, and you interact with that personality on the screen and call it by my name.

The very fact that I have time to sit and think these thoughts is significant, it means that I am doing substantially better than a good deal of the world's population, some of whom will never get to learn to read in their lives, much less touch a computer.

To a great extent, the elite countries - the rich ones, the fat ones - are responsible for this. They have engineered it so that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer and well, angrier. You'd be angry too if you saw your town, your home, your kids get bombed for the sake of [Insert Vague Moralistic Cause Here.]

And we all know what happens next.

But then, we ought to know - we're the ones who made that environment for them. And we are all, when you get down to it, products of our environment. And so are they.

So it occurs to me that, if we want to stop creating these situations, creating these people who have nothing to live for and want to take us down with them, that we could start by not engineering their environments to be as miserable as possible.

Oh, sure we can change, I'm not suggesting a copout. Just because you can name your enemy doesn't mean you're capable of fighting him...the same factors that blind us from seeing how we're products of our environment have also blinded us from seeing our way out, to some extent. We reach for the same tools everyone else does. We fail just like everyone else does. What comes next? I don't know. I'd like to say enlightenment. I'm a bit too cynical for that, though...but can you really blame me?

[Horab Fibslager]

thsi remindeds me in particualr of my one owrded essay - surrencder.


the way has no bounds.