A deep sense of loss

Every day, as I reach my office and sit sown at my desk, I can't help but think how monotonous our lives have become. We have lost the sense of the extraordinary, and have substituted it with a desire for more commodities, gadgets and toys. This seems to be the result of an over-technification of our world; we no longer have a need to exert ourselves to achieve every day tasks, there is nothing hidden out there, nothing remarkable happening in the streets of our cities. If you want to keep the thrill you have to go to some really nasty places, such as Baghdad or Beirut or some other war torn country, and even then life becomes "predictable" the fear becomes a constant, the threats are familiar and you get used to them and build your mundane life around them.

We have lost the capacity to marvel at the world, to think there are fairies in the woods, or goblins in the cupboard. Monsters have been expelled from closets and from under our beds, the age of discovery has brought us nothing but a lack of discovery for the average John and Mary, and the worst of it is that we are content to let it happen, to have our orderly lives remain so, to see that our own internal status quo (not to mention the social one) remain unaltered, and that we can look forward to next year's new car model to change the one we now have, or the latest electronic gadget from one of the few big manufacturers, and all of this while we drift into nothingness, and like Willy Loman feel we are better because we are liked, that we have struck it big with all of those gadgets, when in reality all we have done is loose a vital part of human spirit, the drive to change, to explore, to face insurmountable odds and conquer the world.

I sure hope I can live long enough to have a life, and not a collection of commodities and debts to relate my life to the world...

Racism and Bigotry

Global Warming

Fisherman's Village
Originally uploaded by Polluxg.

I know this is an issue that everyone has an opinion about, even if it is to consider it all a load of crap. However, the latest news seem to have finally gotten people to listen, and think about global warming.

But still, I don't think anything is going to be done in the near future, since most people still have that selfish way of looking at things that says: "Hey, I won't live long enough to see it." After all the predictions are for 2090, which is still a long time away, and by the time most people realize the real threat posed by this shift in the planet's weather, it's going to be, not only too late, but of catastrophic proportions.

After all, thinking of a few inches more of sea level seems insignificant, but when that means that most coastal cities might be closer to flooding, and tsunamis much more frequent, as well as less beach space, then people will care, for it will be their lives, and more importantly, their properties, which will be at stake, then people will care, and therefore corporations and governments as well.

I just hope that by the time the planet is too hot to live in, or the northern and southern halves too frozen to be habitable, mankind will have found a way to colonize new planets, and maybe, just maybe, have learned to care more about the environment, and less about their own pockets, wallets, and bank accounts.

Dead Cities

Wild Bird
Originally uploaded by Polluxg.

I've just spent a couple of days away from Bogotá, in a quaint little place called La Cuncia (a degenerated form from La Concepción "The Conception"), and now that I'm back in the city I've found myself thinking that it's dead. Whereas in La Cuncia I could see tens of birds bathing on the automatic sprinklers used in the garden, or hear the concert of frogs, toads and many other night animals, and even got to see an Armadillo; I've realized that cities lack life, aside from humans that is.

Even the cities that have big extensions of land devoted to parks, such as Bogotá, have lost a lot of the life that once thrived in its place; the wildlife left to the cities is the kind that tried to hide as far from human eyes as possible.

I fear living in a city is turning us into these homo-centric beings, who have forgotten the beauty and joy that comes from the symphony of hundreds of birds singing, to the rhythm of a river's gentle flowing, or even the raging sound of a waterfall. We have lost those accents to life, and replaced them to the blaring of horns and emergency sirens, or car alarms. And the worst part of it all is that we can no longer go back to nature; we've become trapped in the cities, enthralled by their destructive appeal, by that single mindedness of purpose: To gather human beings in a single entity.

"Sacrifice Life And Limb" but for what?

Recently I've had some very troubling thoughts. If these guys are willing to sacrifice life and limb for the ideals of their society, for a common belief that we call a nation, then why are they mistrusted, and in some cases even despised?

I know the fact that they carry weapons is a factor, and another part is that some of them believe that because of that sacrifice they're willing to make they are above the rest of us; but despite these rotten apples, have you said thank you to a soldier on the street lately, and if you don't see soldiers close to you, have you at least thought about them lately? or are they just something you'd rather forget?

The only problem is when you think about enemy soldiers. Then you feel the right to hate, despise, loathe and many other things. But aren't they fighting for the same reason as ours? to defend their ideals? their notion of right and wrong? (and bear in mind that this applies to soldiers, not to criminals who use car bombs and murder tens or hundreds of civilians just for the media spectacle of it) they are just like our soldiers, and I say ours without distinction, because in the end it doesn't matter to which country they belong to, they are out there fighting and dying so someone, probably you and me, can live the way we do, and if not us, then someone on the other side.

Maybe what we should do is simply abolish every single army in the world, or better yet, combine all of them into a giant security core, dedicated to maintaining the peace between mankind. The only problem is that before something as Utopian as that to happen, we all have to learn a basic truth that most religions and governments on this side of the world have forgotten: "No One Man Has The Universal Truth". Not about God, nor about how to rule a country; we are all as right or as wrong as the next persons point of view.

Oh, What to write

It's been a year since my last post. But as I started to notice that my Blog wasn't getting enough visits, I asked myself, is all the effort worth it? and the answer was NO. If I wanted to write for myself I would do it on an old notebook I keep on my bedside table, which is what I've been doing for the past year, but now I've been reviewing some of my old posts and realized that even though visitors were few and infrequent I had some, so I decided to try it again, and maybe this time try and have the patience necessary to build a reader base; but this hits me with a new dilemma: What should I be writing about? What do I have to say that will catch the attention and interest of a disenfranchised humankind that seems to care naught about what someone else thinks? Should I be writing about the same things everyone does? sports, politics and entertainment? Have we really reached a point where some out of the box questions don't attract enough attention, or am I just paranoid?

When Harry meets Frodo

As the sun sets down over the hills of Hobbitton in the Shire, and a bespectacled boy looks out the window of the Griffyndor common room, the greatest and most fearsome creatures of darkness, in two different worlds but no less evil for this fact, are doing everything in their power to find and destroy them. How would a meeting between these two relatively unimportant (well not really so unimportant in the case of Harry), small, relatively defenseless characters be?

What would they say to one another? Would the conversation be of ordinary things like the weather, or flowers or owls, or some less common but to them just as ordinary such as Quidditch or elves? or would they sit down to discuss the burden of having the task of saving the world? Would they compare notes on how to be a hero?

All of this is assuming they have already gotten over their acquaintances, and explanations of their own peculiar worlds. One of the most likely outcomes of such a meeting would be a deep sense of relief on the part of both of them, for finally they would have someone to understand them in a way that no one else will ever be able to; after all, only those burdened with the fate of the world on their shoulders can really understand what it feels like, not just the delusion that you are going to save the world, but the brutal knowledge of it being a given fact, and that should you fail the result would not be just a disappointment for those who believed in you, but most likely their deaths would be in order. Talk of a way to screw up one's mind!