The title of this post is not implying anything as drastic as self-deletion. It is mere to state the indifference I feel for the near and medium distant future.
For context, I will provide a timeline of events that have led me to my current state of mind. It's not long, but it begins in death. At the age of nineteen I lost my father. While an adult, such a loss was traumatic, but I had been living on my own for about a year. This meant that while I did experience the pain of losing one's parent, I was not faced with the uncertainty of someone financially reliant from a survival standpoint.
I only had to deal with the emotional and mental void in my life which included losing a mentor, friend and sounding board. The last being a far more profound loss than I would have realized before his passing. I remember feeling sorrow whenever I thinking about all of the promise the future held. It saddened me that there was one less person in my life to share thoughts about philosophy, politics and most importantly to me, technology. The wonders that mankind would bring forth seemed constrained only by its imagination. Computers would improve life in yet to be realized ways. The mysteries of Space were be solved as Humanity reached out in search of any neighbors yet to be known. Life for a growing percentage of Earth's inhabitants was improving and my country was setting the example for the world. The American dream was alive and well and required nothing more than the will and drive to achieve it. Sure, there was materialism, but you could choose to embrace or ignore it. The greed of others did not diminish your own life in any apparent way. Whether you sought to climb the corporate ladder or sit it out on any particular ring, life was still enjoyable and the future looked brighter everyday. What I believed to be a trend towards Utopia made me wish my father were still alive. All of the wonders he would miss in the twenty or more years I believed he deserved.
This would also hold true for when my cousin was murdered a few years later. At 27 years of age, his life was taken and the same thoughts about the technological advances he would never witness came to mind. There was also some thought of the ways in which disparate cultures, races, economic classes were co-mingling, converging and coexisting seemed to also be eventualities I wished both my father and cousin could have seen. Still, it was the technology that they would never know that bothered me the most. In my mind, it would be the technology that would make all of the other advances referenced above possible. Improvements in transportation, housing, energy, computers and more would all work to make life resemble the future as envisioned by Gene Roddenberry.
This was the belief I held for many years. It was the believe I held until the year 2003 when Americans allowed George W. Bush to attack Iraq. A man who the Public knew to be a bumbling, "C" student who could barely string together a coherent sentence before and after the 9/11 attacks was deemed the right guy to lead America into war. While I'm no warhawk, I'm also not opposed to one defending one's self... When one is actually under threat. And, while even attacking Afghanistan seems questionable today, planning to attack Iraq seemed questionable while it was happening. The evidence presented by the GW Bush administration was in no way compelling enough to warrant any kind of military response. Most Americans disagreed, so GW avenged his father's perceived defeat at the hands of Saddam and anyone opposed was shunned as unpatriotic... Even the Dixie Chicks.
In my opinion, the good life in America peaked in the 1980s but since the early 2000s, it has done nothing but decline. Since that time, the standard of living has fallen precipitously as masses of its citizenry have moved closer to poverty, homelessness, ignorance and stupidity. People don't even seem to have a sense of survival. They appear to be as oblivious as the animals that are slaughtered for consumption. Instead of their leaders fearing reprisal, the Public cower in the face of undeserved, illegitimate (in my opinion), incompetent and reckless actors. Considering that there is one (1) president, 100 Senators, 535 Representatives and 9 Justices in Washington D.C., it is odd that the remaining approximately 335 million Americans allow this country to start so far from the ideal and example that I believe it should represent.
The only example that America can claim to be setting for the rest of the World these days is how to hasten the decline of an empire. There will be history books written about how the United States was once the nation envied by all other nations. Economic historians will record how the U.S. Dollar was once the World's currency of reserve and like the Portuguese Real, no one other than said historians will remember this fact, let alone care.
America will either be beholden to Chinese manufacturing or the cell phones that have replaced so many people's brains or it will have to abandon its climate change hoax to allow for the dirty practices required to mine and refine the rare earth minerals needed to fabricate those phones. The leadership in the United States will have to either die off from natural causes (they are pretty old) or the Public will have to wake up and wrest control from it decrepit, arthritic hand. America's military and police will have to decide who is the greatest threat domestically, the citizens they've sworn to protect or the oligarchs and billion-dollar corporations that continue to push for the greatest inequality the world has ever known. They did after all promise to defend against all threats both foreign and domestic.
While the optimist in me knows we can right the wrongs that have plagued far too many of my fellow Americans, the pessimist in me says we lack the will, at least in the immediate future. It is for this reason that I no longer feel sad about my father's and cousin's passings. The near term future looks especially bleak. The medium-distant future looks just as bleak. My only hope is that the distant future holds greater promise than I can currently envision. The problem for me is that I won't be around to see which path Humanity takes... Thanks goodness for that!
In 2018, I wrote a book highlighting the problems Humanity would face if more power, wealth, and control was funneled to a small group of elite individuals, groups, or organizations. In my book, I provided solutions (from myself and others) to the inevitable problems and also a means for the Public to analyze, compare, and contrast the words and deeds of those we choose to follow against reality. In my book Solutions: Enough complaining. Let's fix America.
In "Solutions...", I provide the means for readers to disseminate information as provided by their news sources of choice, their elected officials, and any other authority they choose to follow. The book also offers a means to hold their leaders up, not just to a higher standard than is currently accepted but to one that would improve their lives and the lives of those for whom they care.
