[thoughts from ~burning woman~ ]
The other day, in an unguarded moment of, what, nostalgia? Remorsefulness? Painful introspection, well whatever, I wrote that thing I called ‘Throwing away the key’ and got some interesting replies. I gave myself some interesting replies also, churning up some pretty nasty internal monologue.
The long and short of it, it’s now churning me. Oh yes, there was something driving my thoughts that day and it has intensified. I don’t know where this is going but I’m sure I’ll find out.
Life on earth is interesting to say the least. It’s kind of black and white though we like to throw in a lot of colours to hide the plain truth and we like to pretend the colours are real. They’re not.
Duality: It’s all your fault, the other side, it’s all my fault. There is nothing in between, either or, that’s it. We don’t like that so we say, as if saying it really meant anything, well, it’s not all her fault, it’s not all your fault, not all yours, not all mine. It’s always a bit of both. Then we write up reams of laws and hire thousands of highly paid interpreters to determine the degree of fault to saddle both with. The system gains. Instead of one guilty party, you have two, and both get to pay, forever. A Crayola System, in a nutshell, that’s what living in society is.
Life on earth. For the average Joe or Josephine, it’s never black or white, it’s the coat of many shades of grey. Nothing’s really evil; nothing’s really good. We make sandwiches without the slices of bread and see nothing amiss with that when we open the plastic wrap to pick at bits and pieces of meat and cheese, lick the mayo and mustard from the wrap and finally grab the pickles off the tray and eat them. What a delightful sandwich, we say and of course everyone agrees, it was a delightful sandwich.
Then comes the innocent, the fool, the philosopher who sits beside you on that spinning plastic stool and says, that wasn’t a sandwich, that was a mess of edibles, perhaps, more like a dog’s breakfast. Oh, how dare you, or, Oh well she’s just a kid what does she know, or He’s the village idiot, don’t listen to him.
You ordered a sandwich, the system gave you a sandwich and that’s the end of the story: it was a sandwich. When the system gives it to you, it’s always what you meant to have. Always. If you said otherwise, you can’t begin to imagine what the system has in store for those who insist it wasn’t a sandwich.
Anyway, what difference does it make? It does, says the philosopher, the baker didn’t sell any sandwich bread and he went broke. His family is now on the streets, homeless and starving. And did you notice that the mess you call a sandwich did not cost you any less without the bread?
Well probably the other ingredients cost more so who can blame them for not lowering the price? If that baker had any gumption he’d have found another job to provide for his family. Those people are just lazy. What people, you ask? You know those immigrants, those, those, you know, those not like us.
Which brings in love, and hate. Well, we don’t want total love, that would throw a lot of things in complete turmoil. We don’t want total hate, that would make us look bad, so we bring in the Crayola box again and we start colouring between love and hate.
We have an official black people day, or week or we may stretch it to a month. See? We’re not racists. We don’t line up at some church to shoot the same-sex couple that just got married. See? We’re not all that homophobic. We just won’t serve them any sandwiches, but that’s understandable, we have rights.
We bring in famous entertainers to raise money for some flood victims because their plight was in the news, plus it’s a marvellous opportunity to promote our group and raise even more money.
There are gala dinners and lavish entertainment and when the bills and our financial expectations are covered, we gather to two percent remaining, and put the amount on a billboard size cheque for the photo shoot and the TV interview and we bring the happy, smiley CEO of the charity corporation that will distribute two percent of the cheque’s value to the village mayor who will pass on two percent of the receipts to his friend at the lumber yard and a pick-up truck half full of two by fours and six sheets of plywood will drive off to the construction site where a half dozen volunteers from the local church are building a Christian school. See? We are charitable.
So, let’s stay with the greys, they’re so much easier on the eyes. And for those of you naysayers who gripe about the way we do things, this is earth and if you don’t like it, you know the slogan, “Love it or leave it.” What’s to not understand?
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