I often feel as though I’m one of the few adults in a nation full of children. I watch Americans playing their ridiculous red hat/blue hat games, pretending that their arbitrarily-chosen schoolyard teams are really different from each other in some important way that justifies defending creepy molesters on their team while viciously attacking the same kind of creepy molesters on the other team. I see jackasses braying about how different things would be if only their team were in charge, despite the fact that both have had long periods in which they held strong majorities in individual states and in all branches of the federal government, yet failed miserably to create the Utopias they keep insisting they can create if only given one more chance; in fact, both have cooperated to build the fascist police state in which we are now trapped. I see politicians contradicting themselves egregiously while their fawning worshipers are too busy licking their boots to even look up and see both sides of their masters’ mouths projectile-vomiting different kinds of filth. I see adults so horrified at the basic awfulness of human nature that they try to pretend it’s some evil system imposed from outside (presumably by gods or aliens) like “capitalism” or “patriarchy” that creates the awfulness, when actually it’s just humanity. The next time someone prefaces a criticism of human behavior with “under capitalism” or “under patriarchy”, keep that in mind while reading it; you’ll see that they’re just whistling past the graveyard. Very few people can handle the realization that they’re nothing but highfalutin’ monkeys running million-year-old neurological programs that have never been debugged, and that Man’s garbage will have a much more lasting effect on this planet than he will. They yammer and bleat that this pathetic animal is “killing the Earth”, when in actuality he is at most making the surface environment more hostile for himself and a few closely-related species. But even beyond that, the Earth is going to die in a few billion years anyway; when the sun goes she’s going to take her children with her. Nor is this a unique situation; all stars die, some more quickly and spectacularly than most, but all of them go in the end, as will the galaxies they inhabit. Indeed, the entire universe, and every iota of it, is mortal; it is nothing more than a complex symphony echoing in the abyss. And when it’s over it will fade away, leaving nothing behind except the fact that it existed, and that it was savagely beautiful.