When the eagle is known from the owl

By Johnny D. Symon

I began to suspect very early on this week that I was contracting that age-old condition named world-weariness. Maybe I was stuffing my gray matter with too much political goings on. But whatever caused what seemed like world-weariness was really beside the point. On those rare occasions I tend to slip off to conceal myself in some big city where the "madding crowd" are so busy "madding" they're unaware that yours truly is walking amongst them. I love being around people, though my life experience has proven that that feeling is rarely, if ever, reciprocal, mainly I guess because I'm a critical and calculating cold-hearted individual. Everything I experience inevitably receives the sharp end of my scalpel.

I began to enact the autopsy process early on in life, starting with myself, then working out.

"It goes against the grain of modern education
to teach children to program. What fun is there
in making plans, acquiring discipline in organizing
thoughts, devoting attention to detail, and
learning to be self-critical?"

A J Perlis

My own autopsy has proven to be a long and arduous process. I recall it's beginning and presently I'm experiencing it's middle, but this autopsy's completion, it's end, is trickier to establish, though I know for sure that when it's complete, hopefully in the dim and distant future, that report will establish that death was not through misadventure, it was through a condition otherwise entitled "natural causes." You see, I'm of the opinion that most of the human race spend their time on this planet preparing to expire through unnatural means; the "self-destructive lemming syndrome."

You know? those rodents from time to time get a thought in their collective heads where they figure it a good idea to jump off a cliff and gargle their last in a river or an ocean, or maybe just some dry, hard, stony ground, and they do this for one reason only; that self-destructive or suicidal thought was not matched by a second thought housing the contrary view. If one lemming at the front of the queue suddenly ground to a halt, and began to tap his chin with his forefinger, looking up at the sky and the clouds and gets to thinking on the wisdom or otherwise of his actions, he may just prove to be the ace lemming ... the guy who finally cracked the big lemming mystery ... he'd be regarded as the revolutionary lemming; the one who saved "lemkind." And when he finally flakes out gracefully on his deathbed, he'd be buried with full state honors, and all the lemming newspapers would report that old Jack Lemming passed away due to "natural causes."

It ain't natural to jump willingly off a cliff to die, and it ain't natural for Homo sapiens to snuff themselves out unnaturally in any other way. All it takes is a second thought contrary to the first, to make your future history more future still.

"The future is here. It's just not widely distributed yet."

William Gibson

But even this process is subject to the thoughts and decisions of others. If old Jack Lemming stopped short of the fall but found no time left to communicate his second idea to the rest, he might well find himself dragged over that cliff by the force of the lemming crowd to die all the same. It's not just your second correct thought that matters, it's also the timing of it. My ongoing life autopsy has taught me one major thing, and that is to make every attempt at making my first thought the correct one every time, the second I only use on those rare occasions when the first was ill-measured. I've learned to accept the failings of others together with my own, and this has led me to be extra careful in the business of life and the company of others.

My own thoughts, and resultantly the thoughts of other people, succumb to my reasoning-scalpel. Since I've come to recognize my own faults and failings, I'm compelled to accept that they also exist in others. I believe that the quest to live life and leave life by natural means is more difficult to perform in this day and age than at any time in the past, because the world of politics and politicians is the ruling factor; everything they decide upon will, sooner rather than later, infringe on our liberties. Bill Clinton's recent success at reducing the cost of aids drugs to the Third World is a prime example, because, whether you like it or not, if you're a regular airline passenger you're the one who's footin' Bill's bill.

I may be living in the modern world, the 21st Century, the enlightened age, as we're so often told, but I happen to be a man of the past and also the future. I regard the bit in the middle as the time for those who will burn to have their fun, and those guys are whoopin' it up at our expense. But my day and age, as dim and distant as it appears to "those who shall be toast," will one day return to replace the bad-thought age of the present. I've worked long and hard on myself. I'm comfortable with my past, and happy to face the future. I aim to make every first thought the correct one, in spite of the machinations of others, because without the occasional Jack Lemming in this world there's no hope for the generations yet to come.

We need more independent free thinkers, ones who stop short of the great fall, and transmit their alternative to the heaving mass surrounding them; independent free thinkers who will explain the benefits of being an individual, of accepting responsibility for their own lives. We're people who make mistakes once in a while, errors of judgment that could quite possibly be hurtful to ourselves, but on those occasions we know that we're responsible for the repair costs, it's no one else's responsibility. And this is something that needs to be explained to politicians: They get elected into office to serve their own people. They're not chosen by the people to become some kind of surrogate god, and if they believe they are, then we all should expect that like the real God, who is sufficient in everything, they are too, meaning that Bill's aid's bill would come out of his own pocket.

You see, there are some of us who know that we're not God, resultantly we accept that the world is not a perfect place to live in. We know, more than most, what life's like in other parts of the world because we've been there, worked there, and lived there. But in those other parts, be they Sudan, Congo, Zimbabwe, Mauritania, Nigeria, Indonesia, etc, exist other political types who also believe they have been elected as surrogate-god-of-the-people, and all of them are nothing more than human lemmings. Although they're responsible for the well-being of their people, they choose to serve themselves at the people's expense, then the expense, the bill, lands on our lap for their wrong-doing. We're forced by politicos to help them play god in the world and we know the folly of their actions, along with the supreme folly of acting with them. Though there's a distinct difference between being co-actor and co-conspirator; the first involves political moves such as Bill's bill for aids drugs, where this hidden tax is unavoidable, there's no opt out for airline passengers; and the second involves the acceptance and willful help afforded them by the people ... that's what being co-conspirator is all about.

Somewhere along the way I made a connection between my thoughts above and this little ditty by William Blake;

"The good are attracted by men's perceptions
and think not for themselves;
Till experience teaches them to catch and to
cage fairies and elves.
And then the knave begins to snarl
And the hypocrite to howl;
And all his good friends shew their private ends,
And the eagle is known from the owl."

I mentioned at the beginning of this week's scribblings that I suspected that I could be suffering from world-weariness, but now I know that I'm not. I feel what God feels as He watches our false-god leaders performing their task of wearying the world. Resultantly we're all responsible for their actions if we don't speak out and at least prove that we're not co-conspirators with them. They can go to hell, it's their responsibility. Our responsibility on the other hand is to accept our part in the fight-back process. We were winners in the past, and winners in the future, but during the middle period we're certain to lose. Nonetheless, we can rest in the knowledge that honest, right-doers and right thinkers shall some day be heirs to the future, and inherit a place that the other false-god control-freaks will never enter.

© Johnny D. Symon