Inconvenient Reality

Humanity is owned by Wal-Mart and Microsoft, a stranglehold on our information, on our food, our tools, and all the other things we need in life. Innumerable splinter companies enslave us, taking our souls away in imperceptible pieces for bits of worthless paper that the government tells us is valuable. The banks take our worthless paper and give us bits of magnetically encoded plastic, so that money can become nothing more than a number on a spreadsheet. We live in barracks of concrete and cardboard, propelling ourselves with blocks of finely machined metal and plastic while devouring the ozone layer, and corrupting the very air we breathe. Two hundred years ago, black men were slaves, now, we are all slaves, and yet we do not realize it. We hide from reality, because the television says everything is alright, that being cool is better than being human, that being trendy trumps being human.

Men and women are sold by share, their fates, their livelihoods in the hands of those who could never earn another dollar in their lives and live comfortably. Greed is good, so sayeth Man, but we must not call it greed, nor avarice, nor any other such term. It is ambition, it is the American dream, it is capitalism, but it is never to be called by it's true name. Nothing matters other than the dollar sign, the end justifies the means. These men will never wake up, and see what they have wrought, for they are blinded by their lusts, and fancies. The brotherhood of the golf club and the cigar bar, blessed to never stare reality in the face.

Men who have vowed to do no harm, to help, and to heal have loopholed their way around the oaths that make them the men they are. They have put a price on life, and most often ignore the suffering masses, that they may pad their bank accounts and return to their own concrete and cardboard barracks, thinking themselves better than their patients. Pharmaceutical companies take ten cents of raw chemicals, mix them, package them, and sell them for a thousand times the production costs, representatives trade the ethics and morals of doctors for vacations on once unspoiled land, and dinners that in life suffered more than those who consume them could imagine.

Humanity views itself supreme, because it is smarter, because it is meaner, because it is stronger, without ever considering more than they, and their family's well being. Skill means nothing, without a sheet of vellum with a fancy script and signature, and the country of self made men has set out to unmake those who disagree with them. War for 'freedom' is war for oil, murdered children are unfortunate, but inevitable consequences, families are shattered by destruction from the skies, lives ruined, bodies mangled. Should they stand up and resist their invaders, they are terrorists, enemies of America and McDonald's and Coca-Cola.

Even God, if some are to be believed, shows no behavior different than his creations, ordering the blessed, or depraved to kill, and kill, and kill in his name, to burn what is impure in the eye of the believer, and to forbid the offensive. We are children, and there is nothing so pure, and cruel in this world. We simultaneously shelter and traumatize, protect and abuse, for we are civilized people, and the knowledge a child would once have had is forbidden for them until a predetermined 'Adult Age' decided upon by men in the winters of their lives. Reality is the will of God, warped in a thousand different ways, to suit the one who sees it. Perhaps there is a Heaven, perhaps there is a Hell, but I suspect that many true believers will find their placement unsatisfactory, a grave error, and perhaps there will be justice. Just as likely, though, there will not be, for the world was built on the principle that might is right, and as cultured as we believe we are, it is but a mask over our primal natures.

I once saw through the veil of reality cast by television, the words of out of date Gods, and beyond our barracks and paved pathways to cool, and trendy. I saw reality in the eyes of a dying animal, it's tears, it's desperate, choking breaths as it tried to rise to it's three unbroken legs, to come and comfort the man who had killed it, the man it knew had killed it, and yet, it loved him anyway. From these few minutes, I forged my own reality, I deluded myself, and still delude, and normal reality has given me the convenient stamp of 'mentally ill'. Perhaps I am, but I have watched the world through my own veil ever since, sometimes sorrowful, sometimes brimming with joy; most often, neutral, dull, unremarkable, but such is life.

Reality does not make the man, I believe, I believe that man makes the reality. Perhaps everything is but a figment of my imagination, perhaps the world, and everyone who may read this exist only in my mind. Perhaps, even, I am a fragment of another's reality, writing this only so that it can be read by that one person. Perhaps the world is nothing more than a dream, no more real than our perception of it. I know this, however: I have never gone to sleep in a world that was better than the one I woke up in, and as such, perhaps the dream of reality is shifting into a nightmare. Only time will tell.

-Seth McGuyer