Grown Ups

I've started to wonder, do human beings ever "grow up?"

Maybe it's a small data sample - the rich, the famous, and the powerful - but it seems like we're all still as vain, insecure, duplicitous, cruel, desperate for attention, and jealous as our younger selves in middle school - and middle school may be giving us all too much credit. 

You've heard the phrase: I'm not angry, I'm just disappointed: Well, in this case, I'm not disappointed, I'm angry.

When I watch the bullying, the lying, the ignorance exhibited by politicians on the daily news I used to wonder, How is it that this person got to be in a position of influence, of leadership; granted the power to make decisions that can ruin lives? It's a rhetorical question, of course. Seeing a grown woman crouching down to shout through a mail slot that she should've been head cheerleader would be funny (not hilarious but humorous) if it happened in a sitcom rather than in real life. Perhaps that's the hook: We've come to see real life as a sitcom, which may also explain the popularity of "WandaVision." Also, mail slots are still a thing?

Maybe this isn't unexpected. It's a capitalist society we live in, after all. Everything is about cash. Straight cash, homey; plain and simple and devoid of the inconvenience of morals. (There's "rich" and then there's "Bezos Rich.") Human beings will tell lies, and act with unspeakable, indifferent cruelty if it will line their pockets with cryptocurrency. Jesus wants you to be digitally rich! Human beings will believe anything that plays to their vanity, insecurities, jealousies, and especially their grasping, insatiable greed.

Capitalism may be more result than cause, of course. That little (or not so little) lizard-brain voice in your head, telling you - shouting at you through the mail slot - to light up the torches and grab the pitchforks and head on over to the village down the road to kill and steal everyone and everything is what got us here. Well, some of us. Not those "not us" people in that village down the road. Life. It's a bottom-line business.

They had it coming. They were socialist, trans, urban, weak on crime, anti-business, globalist, elitist, open-borders, science-believing losers who brought their principled arguments about equity, empiricism, and representative democracy to a gun party. 

I'm not disappointed.

I'm dead.