The End

July 19th 2007

n a biography of Jim Morrison I'm reading, the conclusion of the introduction was "Friedrich Nietczhe killed Jim Morrison." After reading the entire book I could pretty much agree. It wasn't necessarily Friedrich Nietzczhe the man who killed Morisson but it was the same idealism that killed Nietzche himself. Existentialism.
I'm feeling run down. The newspapers are printed in blood. All I see when I watch the news is a world on fire. I'm starting to see a severe seperation in the the populous of humanity. Whether or not I believe in the testements of the bible and the apocolypse is irrelevant, but I know the story well. Ironically it seems that the world is dividing up into two sides, two extremes. Good and Evil.
There are people who are extremely indifferent to suffering, genocide, poverty, pain, injustice, and inequality. Then there are people who are extremely sensitive to it. Things are getting worse, everyone has a problem, but nobody has a solution.
The baby boomer generation was born with a vendetta. A vendetta against schizm and control, against injustice. Those who were my age in the '80s and '90's seem as though they just sleepwalked through their time. Mindless and passionless to care to utilize their youth to make a difference. My generation has been born into a coma. We're all alive but seemingly unconscious, unaware of our surroundings. For some who have all ready waken up its only a matter of running to rouse everyone else. I've written about my disappointment in my generation before, but I have to say it again, we can no longer afford to be apolitical.
A lot of my peers consider being apolitical a good thing. It's hard to blame them for it. Look at what our government has done to us. I can understand that noone wants to take part in something they see no good in. But what are we going to do when we give up and our children end up blindly following the leader, just as we almost have? Look at what runs America now. The once proclaimed greatest country in the world is being ran by lies, hypocrisy, schizm, war, malice, extremism, and a deadly sense of indifference.

Yesterday I was watching my younger brother and sister play. These children have little to no consistent guidance, they have no sense of structure or respect. They have no idea how to somewhat effectively communicate. Every 10 minutes I had to seperate them while my overly sensitive younger sister would scream and cry about something not being fair while our younger aggressive and violent little brother would destroy something, kick, or bite her. They did this consistently, just about every 10 minutes, for hours. Eventually I became so exhausted and impatient that I gave up and stopped interferring. Instead I just sat and watched their interraction. Never once, after countless fights, did they learn from their argument. Not once did they bother to think in their minds what caused the problem and utilize a strategy to prevent it the next time.
Three times yesterday I had to listen to my 7 year old sister scream about how something was so incredibly unfair. First it was not fair that her brother had won a beach towel in a church drawing and she did not. So chance and luck was unfair to her. She thought that everyone should have gotten something equally because the joy he took in his luck was not worth the disappointment in her misfortune. Basically my little sister is a communist. Not that that is a bad thing, but that is the idea I get. The one that finally pushed me to the edge is when she asked me if dinner was ready. I said it's been ready, we all ready ate like 20 minutes ago but you guys were playing so we left you alone. She started screaming hysterically. Saying she was hungry and "it wasn't fair" and that we should have came to get her. I said it all works out, because the food is still on the table waiting for her. But for some reason that still wasn't good enough, it was unfair that she wasn't alerted that it was ready the moment it was ready so that she could eat sooner and not have been hungry for 10 extra minutes. Whatever, there was no point in trying to explain to her that there was nothing unfair about it.
While I was watching this I realized that children are very existential. That was the best word I had to describe them. They operate in their own world. It's a world free of politics, ethics, and schizm. They know nothing about any of it. They haven't yet figured out how to relate any small scale problems or interactions with large scale perspective. That was their problem, they didn't yet have perspective. The things that they think are unjust or unfair are nothing compared to what I have experienced as unjust or unfair. And even yet the things I have experienced are nothing in comparison with what I know is unjust and unfair.
I had expressed to my grandma how the news depresses me. I can't watch it without feeling this overwhelming sense of negative emotion, a mixture disappointment, fear, anger, and anxiety. She told me that she agrees, and that yesterday they showed a picture of an Iraqi child being taken on a stretcher, and his body was riddled with bullet holes. Somehow he had gotten in the way of some of the fighting and didn't even stand a chance. When she told this I noticed the mood of my sister had changed, and she stopped what she was doing to listen. Asking questions like, how old was the boy, and did he die? Now that something real had captivated her attention I told her that this is why I don't like to hear her say things are unfair. Things are incredibly fair to her, she's been born into a world of good fortune. Things are not perfect, but she has health, love, and safety. She has the opprotunity to make her world whatever she wants it to be. I asked her which was less fair, not winning a beach towel, or not being able to walk down the street and play without being afraid of being shot?
My grandma didn't think that the news should have showed that clip of that boy. I told her its unfortunate, the things going on in the world but its necessary. Because censorship does not make anything any less real. I grew up in an enviroment where I could see just about anything I wanted to see. Whether through media or real life, I saw violence, sex, profanity, and suffering. My mom did a lot to put me into perspective when I was younger. She did a lot of things subliminally. Things that confused me a little then, but I appreciate now. When I was 12 suddenly a photo of a boy starving to death in the desert with a vulture waiting to eat him appeared on the living room wall next to the door to my room. Everyone thought it was kind of sick and sadistic. I always defended it even though I didn't know why. It capitivated me. I wasn't there, in Sudan, experiencing it first hand. But everyday I still saw it, and it served as a reminder that the things everyone else was worrying about in the 7th grade at school were nothing compared to the things others had to worry about. While I watched everyone else fight over boys who were idiots anyway, and bitch about someone buying the same shirt as them, I thought about everyone out there who was just trying to survive.
There is a good chance that all of this is the reason I had a nervous breakdown when I was 13. Things had never been the same since then. I didn't feel like a child anymore. Maybe my mom didn't go about it in the best way, but sometimes I wonder where I would be if I never was forced to look at things in a different light. I wonder how long its going to take for my sister, who is actually very intelligent, to quit whining and utilize her intelligence to take control of situations, first her small scale child hood problems, and hopefully later on things that will really make a difference.
At the same time it makes me think I'm only wasting my energy as well. And the whole idea of existentialism and children and the general downfall of the world....it all ties together because we can't afford to only look at things in a small radius around us. Nietzche died after going insane when he watched a guy beat his horse in Italy and tried to protect the horse. He had a complete mental breakdown right there in the street and never recovered. Existentialism killed Nietzche, it killed Morisson, and its really starting to bring me down.

You may say I'm overexagerrating. I say, fuck you.