We

An occasional good thought or gesture is pleasant. And we are, most of us, pleasant quite often. It's not enough. And even in those pleasant moments, many would have to concede it was simply the easy path -- a conciliation for easy passage through the moment in order to avoid complications of our actual feelings. Nice is easy. False nice even easier.

But even when well-intentioned, our daily pleasantries cost us little. This is good, for we are all of meager purse. The notion of personal nobility is clearly but a fable, true altruism a myth. For we are in the final stages of a Grand Cycle, a culmination of resolution of many issues affecting Earth and Man. Paradigms long embraced will evaporate in the winds of change, including those of science, politics, religion, ego, greed, and disrespect for Earth and each other.

It's been a vacation. A very long vacation away from proper concerns. We've been children left at summer camp without supervision. And in that milieu of disorder we've learned to assert self above others, as though each of us was of primary importance. Our vision was inward, protective, and exclusive. And in this focus on the "Me" instead of "We," our current superiority over past ages and cultures is once again apparent: we are the current best at denying all but our little selves.

Survival is, of course, the primary urge. Many more of us, now, seek only that initial requisite ... the basic necessity just to exist. When that is assured, our focus is of acquisition -- getting the goods for comfort in existence. And it is because of our long inculcation via mass-media insistence that we feel compelled to justify that compulsion ... to get the goods ... at any cost.

We are the world's biggest nation of consumers. The world's nation of biggest consumers. No difference in the difference. We're better than any previous generation of the 1940s, or Fifties, Sixties, Seventies, Eighties, or Nineties -- better at making the media message to convince ourselves to buy, and vowing that we must, and sacrificing other concerns to do so. We feel compelled to climb on the treadmill and join in the mindless race of such acquisition, taking vacant comfort in the fact that we don't "waste" our money on the wildly extravagant purchases available to those of greater privilege.

But such is Pyrrhic pride, and we know it; for we are still caught in the same game of acquisition; only the scale is smaller. Our common denominator is the same -- to be dominated by the compulsion of consumerism and gratifying perceived needs of self instead of the duty to consider what lies beyond it.

And in this inexorable rush to satiate ourselves, with all the time it takes from dawn to dusk, the minutes tick by in little lives of shallow purpose, at last bequeathing the same stillborn momentum to yet another era of stasis and confirming the constant status quo:

Most people will accomplish nothing in their lives -- no mark for humanity, no advances in science or technical arts, no progress or elevation even of the smallest degree. These are the endless legions of "mindless eaters," vapid consumers, or otherwise well-minded folk who nonetheless contribute little to the graduation of the collective soul ... and these are the unmistakably dominant influence from one lazy generation unto the next. Let's do lunch.