It’s Veteran’s Day in November of 2009. Pacquiao is about to fight Miguel Cotto, President Obama is in his dungeon, deliberating whether or not he should send more US troops into Afghanistan, we sit in our bubbles, watching the news tell us that we don’t have reason to yell in the streets because our economy isn’t in a depression- it’s only a recession, and I’m twenty one years old, getting drunk on the US Navy’s dime, feeling old, brainstorming how I can get the most bang with my life. There’s a saying, “Render to Ceasar that which is Caesar’s.” I’m contemplating the wisdom of that statement.
There are others who are contemplating suicide. In some countries, suicide ranks the fourth leading cause of deaths. Suicide takes the lives of nearly 30,000 Americans every year and many who attempt suicide never seek professional care. What with the doomsday prophecies surround 2012, even more people are contemplating suicide. They are so afraid of experiencing asteroids slam into their favorite pub or of a planet sneaking up from the dark side of the moon- they’re afraid of suffering the end of the fragile world they’ve come to accept. Afraid of suffering. Afraid of the end. They are Afraid of suffering. Afraid of the end.
Others are given hope by the 2012 myth. Perhaps something will change. We need change. We need a change surpassing anything a nation’s president could promise. Nationalism, politics, religion, it’s all going down. But not by our hands. We don’t see our hands being able to do much more than commiting to the cycle of events that we are taught to follow.
The majority of us really aren’t afraid. We’re too attached to this best of possible worlds. We think, “Surely something so abrupt and ridiculous is merely a ploy to launch an epic apocalyptic movie and accrue the maximum amount of profit in this depression that has been played down.” Every time I go to pay for anything with an american dollar, I look at the words “Legal Tender” that signify the underlying slavery we have all come to blindly accept. The largest, private banks are holding the other end. They are in control of every boom and bust. There is no depression, including the Great Depression, that wasn’t scientifically engineered by the Leaders of those banks. We are the dull -eyed, laughing livestock of the Universe. We have the coolest toys, the most developed brains, and we are consumed by mass distraction, by the noise of this fast paced “modern civilization,” and by our own attachment to our egos. We are a machine with all the bells and whistles of a half -oiled steampunk nightmare. If there is one thing I know, it’s that we are not in control. Caesar is.
I’m drinking hard apple cider in Italy, watching zombie, vampire, alien, superhero movies on my BlueRay 7.1 sound system Projector Theater System. Meanwhile, a high school girl is gang raped at a high school dance in California, “free people” are nursing disease infested wounds that prove their addiction to drugs and alcohol in the dark alleys of Moscow while Billionaires are leading ladies of the night into well guarded clubs. A soldier has lost his ability to cope and has started gunning down innocents in a base in Texas. Down the road from me, there is a man crying out in garbled Italian while someone is repeatedly slamming him against a car. Others have gathered and are laughing. They are laughing at the joke that has become our universe.
People just want to be left alone. They want to be able to have some semblance of bliss. I can imagine young people in America, looking down at their peers for dressing differently. The hip hop crowd is driving home tonight and the bass of their music is shaking the car. They’re laughing. They’re speaking in Ebonics. Someone is walking home, oblivious to the world past whatever song is blasting into their ears from their uniquely colored ipod. Others in another car are dressed in tighter clothing, wearing predominantly darker clothes, sporting wicked tattoos and I wouldn’t be able to make out the words to their music because they’re screaming. It’s some sort of an emotional thing they identify with I guess. They think they know something about life because they know something about suffering, and they just want to find someone to flirt with and help them forget the suffering that has scarred their lives. Suffering is a part of this life. Any effort to try to ignore it is an exersize in futility. I’m left with my violin and my guitar and my idea of folk messages, and making music and jamming as a means of communicating deeper meanings, and I’m alone. I’m left in a corner of the world. Everyone back home is assuming I’m having fun without tangible interaction with them and I’m left to my own thoughts. In the end, what difference does it make? Caesar wasn’t stupid. Divide and conquer.
I am rarely satisfied with who I am. Nothing can undo the actions people have done to cause suffering to others. I think of my sister’s dad, reacting to the little pain he suffered as a kid, somehow oblivious to the pain he’s cause the young girl he raped. I’m unable to act because my sister is paralyzed by the fear that to speak up would be to condemn her only dad, making it impossible for him to change and live a normal life, making it impossible to hope that someday her dad could love her as a father should. The cool thing about superheros is that they always seem able to rush in and keep the worst of the damage from ever happening at all. We live in a world where our heroes are figureheads, or they tend to be viewed as something more than what they are. I’ll go home someday and someone will hear that I’m in the Navy and might buy me a drink. I’m no hero. I reset people’s passwords. Even if I was a technological genius, how would what I do on a daily basis attribute to World Peace? That is what we’re after, is it not? We’re trying to make Peace? Behold! We demand this world to be peaceful and we will kill whoever tries to make it otherwise! We are the global force for good. Do you accept this lie after you’ve found out that the private banks in control are too attached to war for the profit it rakes in for them to ever let us give it up? This is the apex of purpose the average American can dream of. It is an illusion. We are satisfied with this world and even if we aren’t, we’re too insecure to make the necessary leap in our ways of reasoning.
I hate to break it to you, but this is not the best of possible worlds. Voltaire was right, but after writing his classic literature that we’re forced to read in school, nothing is changed. I believe people are so used to shifting the blame of the bigger picture that it’s become no one’s fault. It is all of our faults. We’ve shifted the blame until we are no longer in control of the world we want to provide for our children. The best of us try to provide a better bubble for our children. That is the most we can hope for in a world such as this. We’ve hit a wall. In order for it to become any better, we need to make drastic changes. Otherwise, we’re doomed. It’s as simple as that and yet seems so complicated that it’s beyond our comprehension.
I am talking about a revolution of the mind. According to the World Health Organization, by 2010, depression will be the number one disability in the world. We are losing ourselves. This world is no longer enough and if we don’t do something about it, we are going to end up laying down in our beds and never getting up. We will subjugate control over our lives to the people who already want to control our lives, they’ll spin an elaborate answer and sell it to us on the nightly news, we’ll buy it, and we’ll be virtually dead. We are dying. I enjoy a funny zombie movie like the next guy- Sean of the Dead was a classic- but this won’t be funny. Our son’s sons will be born into zombie-ism, and every noble cause any great person fought for will be rendered futile. The blood Albert Camus sweat as he wrote his underground articles of resistance against the terrors of facism will be all for nothing.The evolution of mankind will be over. It will be the dawn of the second Dark Age, except this time, there will be no hope of us ever coming back.
So many of us assume that the world that has worked “so well” so far would continue to work for us, and it may work. After you’ve worked your whole life and made some memories, come back and tell me if assuming everything your parents told you was right was worth it. Go watch the movie “Zeitgeist” and tell me how well this world has worked over the past hundred years. Watch the movie “Zeitgeist” and you would be lying to yourself if you disagreed with what I’m saying. As a child, I used to look out at the world and think that everyone who didn’t go to Church every Sunday and thank Jesus for every meal was condemned, lost for eternity and beyond. I now realize it’s the other way around. Who is less blind, the person who submits their existence to something made tangible by a Roman Emperor as a means of control, or the person who decides to make sense of the world as best as he can and decide to do what he can to make it better? We can’t afford to ignore Caesar. He’s too cunning.
I don’t have the answers right now. I can’t tell you what is truth and that everything else is some elaborate lie. I can tell you that we’re in alot of trouble. I can tell you that we can’t wait for anyone to come down from the clouds to clean up our messes. I can tell you that the future of the world is in your hands. It’s in our hands. We need to stop reacting. We need to make sense of the world we experience in our own ways. We need to mold our actions and intentions around the good of the community- not just our impulses. We need to decide exactly who we are. Then we need to take the next step in exploration. We need to embark on a journey that forages into the frontier of our minds. Louis and Clark are needed again to map the terrain of the fourth dimension, the dimension of our minds. We need to look inwards, into our souls and hearts and then take the stagnant power within and make it tangible in the world of the living. This is our only hope.
We need the first revolution of this new millennium. Do not accept anything that has come before. Caesar time is over- war is over, if you want it. Down with that sort of thing.
Behold! All Things Must Become New! Not because I say so but because you choose it!

Suddenly your life pauses. You were walking, talking, dancing, crying, and twirling that knife in your fingers until time itself loses it’s freedom and sits there bound and gagged at the feet you can’t look down to see. No insects chirp from the distant night. No warning siren of the last bird to fall asleep wakes you from this dream. “I’m coming,” pulses through your blood, tingles up your nose, shivers up your spine, sparks in every synapse, and you know you have no time to prepare for the moments that await you. You plunge into your mind for the simple sanctity of solitude but your uncertainty is penetrating and numbs you to the core. You look into the mirror to imagine what expression would best suite the occassion and giving up, you hope for the best. You feel the distant breaking of damns that reach you in a flash, but that is not him. Black holes tore at your dark clothes, at your milky skin, at your tell tale heart, until your mind had nothing to grasp, but neither the void, or the crumbling damns are you. It was the moment that you used that knive to cut those puppet strings, that first breath after a coma, time stood still.