Andrew Carlan, Esq.
Ignore What We Say And Watch What We Do
I was getting out of my car at home when a little girl ran past me. I had just finished an overworked workout at gym. My mind felt like a balloon floating on hot air. In a state like that it is susceptible to any idea hanging around. The idea has no parent and if I was carrying this child I was unaware of it.
As if someone else was speaking to me, I heard myself think "why do people have children in a world in which there is so much suffering and in which we all do complicated dances to suppress how Keats bluntly defined death, "When I have fears that I may cease to be." They must separate suffering and the fear of death from procreating. Why?
How do I know if the universe is meaningless? I ask the questions. I’m not paid to answer them. Well, I believe my own eyes more than I do authoritative opinion. For example, all human beings bitch about what a hell life is when we are in pain. When we feel good we learned long ago how to forgot. Like God, we look at the world and damn if it doesn’t look good enough to eat. But the truth keeps seeping up like the contents of a septic tank. That’s why we make elaborate plans to avoid being alone and why the curse of work is a blessing in disguise.
We can’t make children alone. But since the pill, it isn’t necessary to the heavenly oblivion sex sometimes creates that we reproduce. So, if life is pointless, why are we so heartless as to create more food for the cosmos to devour alive? Even the rhythm method would at least create slow dancing rather than the boogie woogie of umpteen million new births every year and relieve Population Watch of the need to find that woman who left her faucet on and is causing this flood of little people.
I didn’t conduct a scientific poll. But a hunch tells me most of these births are planned. Mothers are ecstatic. Fathers, too, especially if it looks like him which reassures him it is his and will grow up to be the world’s greatest ballplayer or sitter on nails if the baby bounces out in India. A lot of babies bounce out in India. Only China has a bigger basketball court.
Down deep all human beings run on seriously defective machinery. Why should be it be that in places like the barrios of Mexico City or in the filthiest parts of Manila or the cities of Africa or among Islamic fanatics that families grow like cancer cells? Mercedes technicians may wear white jackets so they look like doctors. But they are not doctors of the souls. Mercedes ownership doesn’t suddenly free us from our really deep down defective machinery. In fact, in the opinion of one whose may turn out to have the veto, the rich can’t even get a bad seat in the Kingdom of Heaven. The poor of the world aren’t stupid. If they were the rich would sleep better. So why even by human standards do we continue to reproduce like this was paradise even under the worst conditions?
My eyes tell me there are some things only intellectuals are crazy enough to believe and some things only ordinary people are crazy enough to believe. Either ordinary people in every age and in every culture are pitiless or they "know" something the intellectuals don’t, which is why the intellectuals don’t win elections except ones they control.
The trouble is the media has installed itself in the brains of ordinary people. Ask ordinary people why they have children, why they believe and they will regurgitate the comical phrases created for them to recite by the media intellectuals who believe largely in themselves, which is a large order. "Born-again," love until it comes out your ears, "He answers our prayers." I don’t know which phone company they have, but they must be hearing recorded messages. "Jesus is my friend." Jesus is not their friend. If Jesus were their friend, they have a strange standard for choosing friends. Here today and gone just when you need him.
No, my eyes and ears tell me they have a more complex story to tell and they can’t tell it in words maybe because it is so concrete it goes beyond language as music does. Watch what they do instead of what they say and what our ancestors have done since consciousness first arose and at least be smart enough to shut up for one moment and just stand in awe before a phenomenon that eludes explanation. Whether tomorrow some scientist will reduce this to an equation that shows it was just a mirage, a general defect in our lousy machinery, only time will tell. But each of us is running out of just that commodity one minute at a time.
