The Walking Dead 8

They are sending folks back into space and the world is mourning the death of a president who is likely being shown to his own private furnace in hell right now and we are teetering on the abyss of climate collapse and we still have two billion or so on this planet who don't get enough to eat. But what do such small concerns matter to the Walking Dead, citizens of Zombie Nation? Ah, but this is the way the world ends, not with a bang, and not even with a whimper, but maybe an indifferent shrug from the powerful and a comatose shrug from the weak. I find it salutary and sad that the lowest paid professions on the income scale all involve care-giving and support to the most vulnerable: nursing, social work, teaching, etc., and the highest paid are all in the top echelons of industry and technology. The so-called feminine professions getting short shrift and the toxic masculine getting all the big bucks and Euros. this has always been a problem, and not simply in terms of gender discrimination, but the sad disdain and contempt that the most important work is held in. To this day, I still do not get people's obsession with space travel and exploration. To me, it is just one more distraction that prevents humanity from focussing on the things that should really matter, but what do I know? I am just an eccentric old Christian with eccentric old Christian values, such as the importance of honouring and caring for everyone and especially the poorest and most vulnerable among us. The Walking Dead would rather stay distracted, adoring the strong, rich and powerful, while not having to focus on the unattractive and unsexy issues of poverty, hunger, homelessness and galloping global warming. They don't like to be bored, either, about the ravages of unrestricted global capitalism, nor the dangers of giving full reign to hyper-competitiveness. By keeping us all permanently distracted with nonsense and spectacle, they really do have us by the short-hairs. I do have hope. More and more people are cluing in to the urgency of our times, and the call and clamour to our governments and to our lifestyle habits is moving towards crescendo, even if this may be too little too late. I still don't think that much is going to change until we change. Our history is dominated by an adulation of wealth, power and spectacle, and there is something evil, I would even say, satanic about what we have turned into because of this. Humility simply is not considered attractive, but without humility, we are doomed. Our elected leaders will only continue to move forward on their usual hubris while dragging us with them over the precipice and the rest of us will go on distracting and diverting ourselves because we simply don't want to face the facts about our world, our nation, our community, or ourselves. I am sometimes afraid that the few small voices crying in the wilderness simply aren't going to be enough, but right now this is all we have. We can only do our very best with the little we have to work with, and continue to try to influence others towards the good. There is good in us, even in the worst of us, but we have been made comatose by the collective psychopathy of mass toxic masculinity and unbridled corporate capitalism. Having abandoned our spiritual and religious heritage hasn't helped either, and now spirituality has been degraded into another consumer appetite. Do your mindful meditation and yoga, not to make you a better person and not to empower you to better serve humanity, but to help you sleep better at night and make you a better and more efficient wage slave. We are all threads in the same fabric, the same tapestry, and it is only by valuing each thread as essential for holding together the whole that we are going to move forward and actually begin to become better people and a better humanity. But it's going to take a lot of work, because we have become so gravely corrupted by greed, selfishness and indifference.