oUT OF cHAOS COMES WhAt?

There is a part of me that really, really hopes that all the insanity of the current millennium is just the normal death throes of the old and birth spasms of the new, as I repeatedly heard when I was young.

It was definitely what a lot of New Age philosophers and astrologers predicted for the first 12 to 20 years  of what was not only a new millennium but also potentially a new age--the age of Aquarius.  The 5th Dimension even bought in with a song or two.

Birth can be pretty traumatic, as can the creation of a new mountain---or star.

Death can be either horrific or  post-climatic, and unfortunately I have seen both.  Death is hard to watch without being affected.

But what really scares me is that this might be more of the same: the pendulum swinging, the usual--revolutions, civil unrest, war, philosophical debate that has hard repercussions on those at the bottom of the  food chain.

Who are we?

What are we really?

The human species  is capable of greatness....at least that is what seems to be proposed by discussions of technology, medical breakthroughs, transportation, scientific understanding...even its art, poetry, music, dance and literature seem amazing when compared to--say--a beaver dam or a wasp nest.

But is that what defines us?  Is that who most of us are?

Or are most of us much less grand, much more self-centered.

Whatever we are--we have taken over the world.  We have taken every other species habitat with little concern for why we are taking it.  We take.

Sure, male lions will kill the cubs of other male lions before keeping the lioness in their pride--and interesting that we call that group a pride, since humans have great motivation from their own pride.  But lions didn't take over the whole earth.  Perhaps if they had been less focused on their own personal genetic promulgation and more on the survival of their whole species, it would be the males with all the hair running the world .

But humans no longer kill the children of their newly claimed partners, that was a long ago and/or not generally talked about part of our human history.

We do kill though.  And not just for survival.

We kill, using the children of our worker-bees (I truly hate when someone compares the people in a company or a nation that do the actual work that, such a sign that those in power consider themselves far above the hoi polloi.  More a sign of a decaying social structure than of those at the top being better than anyone else.) and call it war or police actions or military intervention, but really meaning we had our people kill their people until the real important people screamed uncle and talked about doing what we wanted.  When we are on our own soil fighting, its understandable, but when we ship our own somewhere else, hard to play the "good guy" card unless we are fighting for the people in their  homes and were invited by them to help us.

But on our own soil--why do we ever get to fighting?  Why are we killing?
Do we fight and kill for food and water and our right to stay in our home?
Or do we fight to take someone else's home or food or water.

Or do we just want more, so are willing to kill to get more with no thought of who we are taking it from.

We had ranchers willing to kill for the right to graze their huge herds on national land, everyone's land--land I can spend the night on without permission and paying.  Perhaps they just needed to pay the people that owned the land to graze the herd and make sure that the land was not injured.  Of course, these are the same people that want to kill all the other animals, deer, antelope, buffalo, wolves, mountain sheep, coyotes, whatever lives there, to protect their  "investment".  So it really is just greed, greed and selfishness that is urging them onward in their war to keep land that is not any more theirs than mine or yours.

We have weapons manufacturers that fight rules for gun ownership--like having a gun is not at least as fraught with danger and responsibility as owning and/or driving a car.  I have had to maintain a driver's license, car tag and liability insurance since age 16, the earliest I could legally and independently own and drive a car, but if Joe-blow gives his 10 year old a gun, that is okie-dokie.  No lessons on how to use and maintain a weapon, no liability insurance, no shooters license-basically no regulation at all.  Too bad our forefathers hadn't the insight to make an amendment guaranteeing the rights of us all to drive anything, anywhere, any way we like.  I would have saved a butt-load of money--though I'm sure the number of traffic  accidents would have taken a good number of us out of the population.

Sociologists have posited theories on connections between behaviors that thin the herd--wars, gangs, increase in non-breeding individuals, decrease in attempts to provide healthcare and basic sustenance when the population is becoming too large.  That makes a kind of sense, so many of us we lose our value, but then why do we turn around and try to make it impossible to prevent unwanted pregnancy and abortion.  What is the benefit of making people be born only to suffer and die young or live terrible lives.

Who are we humans?

I don't really think we have only had the craziness we see since the new millennium started.  I'm pretty sure all that really changed is my perspective.

I sort of woke up and started watching what was going on.  Always easier when you are not running on a hamster wheel trying to get ahead or struggling to raise children--with all the anxiety and pressure to not screw that up.  My kids grew up about then.

We humans, we have always had a lot of chaos.  We kill.  We take.  We judge.  We are full of pride about things that don't matter.  We worry about our place in the social order and finagle ways to put our offsprings out of the harms way that is just being just another kid of a "workerbee"  We want status.  We want nicer stuff than our neighbors.

We want physical proof that we are doing well.

We humans--so insecure.

Maybe we should all spend more time making something beautiful and useful;  or just hugging each other.