THE BAD GUYS ARE WINNING

The bad guys are winning.

That's all that needs to be said of the world.

We have all of the ingredients for a perfect world - We have amazing minds that can catalogue then defy the rules and laws of the universe. We can create life, we can create energy enough to power and to destroy the world.

However, if we can create life, why can't we cure cancer? These days, the main thing stopping us from cloning human beings is vague ethical concerns, and yet all of the diseases and conditions that haunted my hypochondriac childhood are still looming over us, uncured. Our greatest scientists are on a quest for money, and genius that could be used to save the world is being used to think up new and inventive ways to bomb foreigners.

We have so many talented artists, but they sit in cubicles frittering away their lives forwarding stale email jokes instead of dreaming the great new art.

We could have utopia, but we don't. We have all the ingredients, but they are mixed wrong.

We can make this world right, we can make it work properly - All is not lost. Yay, you say, but; Listen to the worlds - WE can save it. Only we can do this, because no one else is going to.

We need to stop hating and start working towards helping people.

Now, that's easy to say, and there is a problem. Say "love people" as an abstract, and people assume (not without cause) that you're a hippy, head in the clouds, with unrealistic ideals, spouting the rhetoric of "Love" and "Peace" as words with no real practical implementations. You start giving specific ideas about what to do, and people think (not without cause) that you're just some socialist agitator, a whining student who doesn't know how the real world works.

I can say "Be nice" and you can respond "Yeah, good in theory, but how is it practical?" I can give you real-world ideas like signing petitions, ethical protesting, campaigns such as those against Shell, Mobil and McDonalds, and you can respond that I'm just some filthy socialist whos parents pay for everything, and who doesn't realise that Wall Street isn't gong to shut down just to make some trees feel better about themselves.

So what to do? Well, I don't know - I tried to make my voice heard by shouting, but I was drowned out by the screams of a thousand lunatics all howling louder than I was. I tried to make myself heard by talking, but hell, no one listened.

So what do we do to stop this mutopia from self-destructing?

Well, I don't know. All I can do is keep telling people around me what I think is right and what I think is wrong. I'll sign the odd petition, and doubtlessly burden the young ideologues with some more tedious "back in my day" stories, picked up after a little while spent trying unsuccessfully to change things around here.

But how to make lasting change, how to really make a difference?

Hell, if I knew that, don't you think I would have done it by now?

--Apathy Jack

7 January 2002