World End

I've got a little more to say about the purported 'end of the world.' The Mayan empire was slowly decimated by Spanish conquistadors, and the new habits, preferences and diseases they brought with them. The Mayan people began to lose their faith in their deities and their communities and as a result were subsumed into the culture of the Spanish colonists. It was a case of the imperial efforts of one civilization out-gunning the empire of another. Over the last 13 years, since 1999 and Columbine, we've grown used to the periodic news of madmen (usually men) committing mass shootings at schools, shopping malls, movie theaters and universities. It's horrific every time, but it grows less shocking with each occurrence. It's awful but no longer surprising that mentally ill people have access to guns and violent images to inspire them. After Newtown, only 16 days ago, I thought 'well maybe there is something to this end of the world stuff,' because who shoots at small children and teachers (apart from the shooters in primary schools in Dunblane, Scotland and also in Lancaster county, PA, both in the last 15 years, of course). Then we had news of someone setting a fire and then shooting at firefighters who came to put it out. Followed swiftly by a second incident of this kind. And now I am convinced that we are officially a empire and society in rapid decline. We are arming our own killers, and in the end we will all be gone. I fear it is too late to make meaningful change - this is a country built on the freedom to own guns and carry then around and shoot them at will. It's only a matter of conscience that keeps gun-carriers from shooting at people, and that's a very thin line, one easily crossed as mental health declines. For military veterans, that conscience has had to to be worn away and in some cases erased, especially over the last 70 years, in which it stopped being clear who our enemies were in war zones. So now we have people who have seen incredibly traumatic things, which can directly result in mental illness, even in people who have not suffered previously, who have had the stigma against shooting people rubbed away at until it's nearly gone, who are trained gunmen and usually weapon owners. Somehow, so far, the people these men (mostly men) seem to kill the most are themselves. In 2012, more service members died from suicide than in combat. The silver lining here is that combat deaths are clearly down, but there are far too many suicides amongst the combat survivors. How do we stop such senseless violence and death? We will all die anyway - why would we want that end hastened? All of the people killed, by others or by their own hands, had the power and in many cases the desire to help others get through their time here with less pain. But we continue to fight for the 'freedoms' offered centuries ago, in a different time and society, and we will apparently fight for them to the death.

New Year

2012 ends tomorrow, and lacking anything better to do I've been taking stock of the year and thinking about things I want to keep or change for 2013. My friends and I do a little ritual around this time where we write down the things we want to be rid of for the new year and put them in a blue fire (epsom salts and rubbing alcohol). While it is cathartic to watch things like 'anxiety' burn to ashes, and it does help to remember the vision several hours later when sleep still hasn't come, I have to remind myself that this 'year-end' business is just as irrelevant as the 'world-end' nonsense was on December 21. We all laughed at the people who took it seriously, because it's not like the Western world has observed anything else in the Mayan calendar ever; but our calendar is equally arbitrary. December 31 and January 1 are just Monday and Tuesday this week, and in real time, unrelated to calendars, they are one and two planet-spins from now. We've assigned importance to these days based on the number of planet-spins that occur as the planet completes its revolution around the sun, and the months and days of the week were named by the Romans, which is pretty recently in the large scheme of the universe. So while it's great that people make resolutions about changes and think about things that didn't work in the past in order to do things differently in the future, in actuality you let go of things when you let go of them; things end when the end. I think I find this comforting because it's nicer to think of life as an unbroken line that ends when it ends, rather than a set of goals to reach in a certain amount of time. If we're all here in order to do the work we're doing, whatever it is, for however long we have, I'd hate to think of it being chopped up like that and marks being given for effort and achievement. With all of that said, at this time of year it's nice to remember that no one can make you happy but yourself, and the more you do things because they are expected of you the less they mean. If you do have to do things in order to get by, own them, so that they feel like choices and not obligations. That's the only way we take the helm in our own journeys.