How come we women still want to wear make-up, to have plunging necklines, short-skirts, tight clothes, high-heels. Why? For whom? For ourselves? For our own comfort and ease and mobility? Really? To make us count perhaps? To give us the confidence we otherwise lack? So we will be noticed? So we will be seen and heard? To keep making our appearence the primary importance, our primary value? To attract/to distract men, to one-up our own gender? All in an attempt to secure the future of our species? The one we’re already practiced at adept at making increasingly insecure?
Yup, its all connected, complex for sure, but inter-connected. Can we be blamed, we women and men for repeating our eons of variations of primal patterns, which have now brought us to the point of threatening our own existence? Meantime, we fail to question why. Why? Something about the current undercurrent attack on mothering -- our rapacious violation of Mother Earth and/or the unintended consequences of an ill-considered night of unprotected sex? Maybe, maybe not, against our will? So, like it or not women, you/we are the ones stuck with pregnancies and gestating and birthing and nursing then decades of mothering, too often alone. Yeah, why not bring more unwanted children into the world, why do they matter -- let them suffer, right? Oh, yes lets. But breast feed, nah, that's messy? Why no — oh no, leave that baby formula to profit the corporate giants, wont you?
How does our playing the game as the perfectly coiffed anchors on TV, or on titillating magazine covers, or being part of the everyday porn that’s everywhere for everyone undermining our intelligence and the best of the big frontal brains we’re bestowed with. The big brains still sending men — mostly — to war, to kill or be killed and to kill others, innocents, often. The big brains blitzing and blasting both land and sea. The brains too haughty and self-important to identify with ‘we the little people’ while colonizing and taking from our common-wealth, devouring what should be communal natural resources. And thence the toll we’re taking on kids and their future and the shameful legacy we are leaving them. Who cares? Who....cares?
Wow, have we screwed ourselves. We women and men. Learned about evolution once, did we? Don't think so. Learned about the need to adapt for the sake of survival? Yeah, but, that’s not for us, eh? Thats just about the birds and bees and other lesser mammals. Nope, we can just go mindlessly on, same old, same old, ducking and denying as is our wont the existential issue of our own dying and death and the abject fear we are fleeing from unconsciously in every moment.
Fear?.... I own it for sure, daily dialogue with mortality and my own end-of-days and my own inadequacies and how they leave me paralyzed and scared. For all my talk of it, at 71, I still haven’t dealt with end of life decisions and all the paper work and DNR's and Advance Directives and Wills and Molsts and proxys and wherefor the ashes? This in spite of the piles of thick files accumulated for years on the topic of non-existence that keep haunting. Oh to be sure, projections and flailings have their uses don't they.
So, yes, angry and sad — angry with myself for feeling useless these days. Angry with the state of the world — the one that reflects how I -- and we -- are all complicit. The one that used to be the big-wide-world out there, the one those dominant patriarchs were supposed to get right rather than stick us with the rigid skewed, self-serving systems we are tangled in today. Anger may not be enlightened but why not be angry at what we -- men and women too -- have so readily bought into. What we have collectively brought upon ourselves through unconsciousness, thoughtlessness and heartlessness and for all our religiosity -- our ignoring the golden rules of those Gods we have sought to conjur and elevate and worship. What will the consequences be of what we have made our priorities: from profit at all cost; to those plungeing necklines; to our plundering the oceans. This last day of July, 2018, as the world burns, methinks it is ours to humbly grieve, and lamentably, to accept the price that is ours to pay.
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