Sensation Nation

Sensation Nation

Americans just can not get enough cerebral titillation. If there isn’t anything going on, you can be sure it will be mere moments before something rushes in to fill the vacuum. The 24 hour news cycle’s most important job is to make sure we never get a rest from human tragedy and despair. We are trained to need stimulation, occupation, and sedation. Filling every second of our lives with ‘stuff’ there is no time for us to be at rest and reflect upon who we are inside. The effort to avoid fear on the outside exacerbates the fear we feel on the inside and fans the infernos of humanity’s long time nemesis, hatred of each other.

Our lexicon is augmented by the War Machine and terms like ‘Shock and Awe’ and ‘Surge’ are now threaded through every day conversations. Somehow we become disconnected from the original death and carnage sewed by these extreme uses of force and are amazed when we reap the results of these poor choices. America acts like a ‘cool’ kid from high school who refuses to relent on pressing this false self image. It would rather die than change course, it is so identified with the path that it is on. To grow or evolve is mistaken as defeat because wisdom is not used as the measure of success, but rather unfortunately the perpetuation of limited ideology is the standard.

One of the main reasons Americans can not see beyond the end of their noses is their obsession with the religion of Christianity. So many of them absolutely believe that Jesus is the only way to heaven and that if you don’t follow him, they are doing you a favor by trying to cram it down your throat. The veneer of sophistication leads them to think they are somehow different from the ‘enemy’ who is doing exactly the same thing under another disguise. Far be it for most Christians to crack a history book, they whistle ‘Dixie’ when you bring up such inconvenient points as the gospels being written well after the fact, Jesus being voted as God in a board meeting, and that nobody would even be a Christian if it wasn’t for the murderous emperor Constantine imposing Christianity upon a crumbling Roman Empire.

Constantly reinforcing each other’s illusions, they create an alternate reality. Boxing themselves into smaller and smaller often contradiction laden spaces, they can not rectify the discrepancy so they start eating pills by the handful. Money to the church, money to the government, money to the pharmacy, and the list goes on… It is a bureaucracy of confusion that each person has to try to sort out just to get through the day. Work, work, work for things that are not necessary and only end up harming mental and eventually physical health. I guess this helps when they shake you down once again at the hospitals (if they don’t just turn you away and leave you to die because you could not afford insurance).

Come back to peace my friends. As they say in Zen, sitting silently doing nothing, the grass grows by itself. The whole disaster is superfluous and unnecessary to the blessing of life. When we see wars rage, it is not something to be for or against. It is something to understand and heal. All sides are in a bad way and hurting. One must not gain at the cost of another. It does not need to work that way. Together we can create systems that benefit everybody and the synergy of Love will be the joy of the Earth.

~Christopher Moors

10/27/2007