Le Marche Futile

At last, we have arrived. After centuries of trying to improve our lot, become more humane, democratic, better educated, after getting to a point where we started to believe in our best ideas and finest ideals, to actualize them, to become inclusive of difference, to explore the world under the umbrella of multiculturalism, we have arrived at an unexpected destination. We have arrived at "teh stoopid".

This misspelling appeared on the Internet a few years back in response to some inanity posted by some looney on some forum. It was a rightwing comment that elicited this wonderful riposte. The original was something along the lines of "Teh STOOPID! It hurts!!"

This covers our current situation. All our collective efforts to create a "better world" have produced the opposite effect. The current state of our world is not good. It is our sad fate to have ushered into this world almost exactly what we have been trying to delete.

A sober contemplation of our world reveals that we have failed to achieve our visions of justice. We have failed to achieve peace, brotherhood, equality, solidarity. Instead of caring about each other, a viciousness has set in and hardened our hearts against each other and against the beauty that is this world.

Not because we reject our ideals as unworthy, no. This has happened to us because we didn't care enough to do anything about the incremental steps that led us here. Instead of extending ourselves for the good of our neighbors and society, we turned our compassion on its head and decided that the needy were somehow unworthy. We did this by denying in our hearts that human suffering is a condition of humanity and not of the one or two examples we cite to alleviate our own suffering. The poor, the homeless, the less fortunate all became the scapegoats for the hollowness that we feel inside. It is this hollow that has emptied out our world of all the qualities we aspired to express.

Many will say that this prognosis is naive or too idealistic, but I reject such self-serving criticisms from those whose real effort is to deny that what I am writing is indeed true. All of us who bought into the idea that money is more important than humanity, that acquisition of wealth is superior to distribution of resources, that privilege trumps the rights of all other humans, it is we who are the destroyers of our world.
For when we choose for ourselves and forget to choose for others as well, we end up choosing for the others all that which we would never choose for ourselves. In choosing for ourselves ruthlessly, we negate all the others who lack the opportunities that come our way.
But these choices were as fake as the consumer choices one makes in the soda aisle at the supermarket. Selfish choices create a selfish world. In choosing for the lies of market freedom and political liberty, we have fallen in step with those who know only greed and selfishness. We march in a futile parade, because the parade is not about any social values, only about personal and alienating values.

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