Here lay the deeds of men,
Good and evil alike
Fighting for a “bigger cause”
Dying for a “belief”
Blinded by passion.
Their lives up for sale
Bought with misdirection
Ideals bent on their destruction
Cost of a human life measured
By those who have no remorse.
Lifes worth lies in the tears
Tears born from the love of ones lost
Love leaping all boundaries of condition
Love alight with possibilities of a tomorrow
Love longing the embrace
Love begging for that smile and all the moments lost forever.
Scavengers linger
Feasting on the spoils of chaos
Consuming death and destruction
Along with the greed and dreams of power
Cleansing and reinvigorating
Preparing us for a new inception. __________________________________________________________________________________________ Salutations weary souls of this mysterious world,
I welcome you to the shores of Super Ninja Crabking land.
I’m going to put a lot of effort into not going on a rant for this one; I plan to keep this short and to the point.
This post is about a topic that affects us all and often lingers around in our thoughts but we refuse to give fuel to this much needed fire and that includes me.
I am talking about death, I am talking about heinous acts that we commit every day, I am talking about suffering felt by millions around the globe in the name of various evils. I refer to the tears of a parent whose child was killed playing outside, the screams of a wife whose husband perished fighting a war that no one cared for, the anger of a husband whose wife was brutally raped and murdered, fear in the eyes of a father whose son picks up arms promising to fight till his death, helplessness in the soul of a mother who cannot get enough food to keep her child alive. I apologize for being a bit dark and shocking, but this is not a subject that I wish to approach with a light heart. I did try to focus more on the emotional aspect rather than the acts themselves because trust me we’ve done and continue to do unimaginably horrible things but you get enough of that everywhere else. Don’t you feel that we find it so much easier to neglect and look the other way? As long as it’s not affecting me or anyone I know it’s easy to file it under non-essential in your brain. My stand here and always, will be that I am against murder, I am against suffering, I am against genocide, I am against hunger, I am against corruption, I am against war, I am against the unequal spread of wealth and resources, I am against misguidance and lying to the population for personal gain. I am going to refrain from naming or shaming any particular faction or government, I’m not even going to address any particular event or situation to avoid being labeled as biased and try to put my point across as purely as possible. I don’t have a problem with anybody or what they stand for but my problem is against what they all have in common, violence. This need to enforce their viewpoint with a show of force, if you have to force your ideals on people through violence and fear then maybe you should take a good look at those ideals because they seem to be something that is not beneficial to anybody in the first place. Your ideas as much as you believe them to be right are not and it is something that you need to accept no matter how difficult it is.
I, like everybody else witness in some form or another all the tyrannies carried out by humans all over the world on a daily basis and what do I do as a result? Nothing. What reaction do I have to the almost infinite suffering incurred by my fellow human beings every day? Not an eyelid bashed. I carry on with my day, I do the same menial task at work afterwards, I go out and have fun with my friends and family, I watch movies and TV shows to divert my mind when alone. I continue to live my life without a second thought about the plight of so many around the world, something that should make me stand and vow to take actions to help people does not even phase me enough to think about it for even a few minutes. I know this is something a lot of people do, I am not making a broad judgment and I am quite aware that there are thousands of people around the world who choose to act towards the betterment of our society and the human race. What I am saying is that there are not enough of us doing that, and even the ones who are out there are doing so as a reaction to the ongoing crisis, we shouldn’t have to be reacting in the first place. I can go on and on forever but I’m going to save you the trouble, I’m sure you’ve heard it all before.
The above shown piece of art titled “The Battle of Unnumbered Tears” just strummed a few emotional chords in my heart and I decided to use this forum to share my thought. What caught my eye was not the mountain of human remains or the gore in the picture but the sadness, the whole piece is made to divert all that pain to the tears shed by the ones who cared, the ones who see how pointless it is to kill another or get yourself killed over an idea or a disagreement. We as the dominant species on this planet are the only available proof of intelligent life in the entire universe and we are doing a mighty sloppy job of making sure that remains intact. I read articles and hear people saying that we live in a time of relative peace; to those people I ask what their definition of peace is? Does peace mean we are not involved in a world war where thousands if not millions of people are killing each other over petty differences and propaganda created by politicians or corporations who hunger for either money or power? I fail to find any cause, idea or belief bigger in value in relation to even one human life, yet thousands of people around the world seem to easily find many. This is what saddens me, the fact that we fail to understand the value of life itself. Our own life, the life of other species with whom we share the planet and the life of our home which is this little rock in the middle of nowhere that we have so lovingly named Earth. I really wish for us all to stop at some point and realize that there is a bigger picture, that working collectively and coming together to solve each other’s problems might be a much better plan than looking to make a buck of someone’s predicament.
I have always pondered big popular questions of existence such what is the meaning of life? and What is my purpose? I am going to risk answering these questions even if I sound foolish and probably am way out of my depth because great thinkers and higher minds have failed to answer these questions since we gained enough intelligence to ask them. Let me assure you I am not the one that finally figures this out and solves this mystery, the fact that we don’t have answers to these questions is because there is no answer, so instead I will share with you what I think is the meaning of my life. We each have our own meaning our own purpose, this meaning differs in accordance to the roles we play in our lives, whether it is being ourselves, towards family, towards friends, towards society, towards our environment, towards ourselves as a species and so on.
The meaning of my life is love and knowledge. I think love is something that is unique to our species, we have this uncanny ability to somehow entangle our brain and thoughts with another person or an idea at a level that is so personal and exhilarating that it can bring about feelings of euphoria and connections that are nearly impossible to put in words, I picture it to be something like the nutrient filled waters of a river mixing into the ocean which provides the currents to spread them all around the world creating and sustaining life. Where the river is another person or an idea and our mind is the ocean filling itself with the nutrients and using the currents of language and feelings to spread that love all around the world. This ties in perfectly with the other meaning of life which is knowledge because it is something that we gather throughout our lives, it mixes and evolves with our experiences and the development of our brain, to produce something much more profound than itself alone. Knowledge provides us with a means to control & organize our thoughts to move in directions that are fruitful to us and on rare occasions to plains not visited by others. Think of it as a means to understand the flow of currents and successful understanding can lead to more optimal spread of nutrients which in turn would create an explosion of life. I think it is kind of important that knowledge and love go together because having the means to manipulate information and create influence without the love and greater good in mind can have disastrous effects, all of which we have and continue to witness to this day.
Having all that together brings me to the purpose of life which I think is making sure we all individually and collectively work towards not only ensuring our survival as a species but working towards exploring unseen possibilities and reaching heights that we cannot even conceive at the moment. This purpose of survival I feel is older than us and most life as we know it, it stems back to the primordial life. The sole purpose of life was to make sure it was sustained and be able to replicate itself to ensure survival. This is a common trait we share with all other life on the planet and is engraved in our DNA, which I might say is the basic purpose of DNA itself, to ensure the survival of our species. I feel although we are at a crossroads where our rapid growth in intelligence combined with the ability to create means to manipulate our environment to our needs has put us on a direct collision course with our most basic purpose. I will not lose hope because I know we have it within ourselves to realize that this trend of short term thinking will lead to our demise as a species. We need to slowly and surely come together as a species and push ourselves to creating a balance between our growth and exploitation of the environment and ourselves. If we direct all the energy and resources put into creating war, spreading propaganda, exploitation of dwindling non-renewable resources, lobbying and misguidance to actually helping each other, creating dialogue and promoting conflict resolution, education, motivation, focusing on renewable resources and thinking as a species rather than a religion or a nation or a region, we can stick around for a couple of thousand years longer and hopefully live up to the title of being the only current intelligent life in the Universe.
I feel I have gone on longer than I should’ve but hopefully my message has been successfully transferred. So I feel it is time for us to find means to not kill ourselves, devise plans to save our dying planet, and promote a culture of equality and life preservation. I believe we are getting there slowly but surely if you study history on a larger scale, all we have to do is ensure we don’t kill each other before we reach that stage.
I left the poem/thought unfinished because we always have a chance at a new beginning; it only depends on how we choose to begin. Let us and our actions fill in the end.
Super Ninja Crabking out.
In case you liked the art in this post, it and other amazing pieces can be found here
Super Ninja Crabking 