[dropcap style=”font-size:100px; color:#992211;”]H[/dropcap]uman activity (since the advent of the oxymoron known as industrial civilization) has been defined by the exploitation of human labour.
Also by the mass slaughter of mechanized warfare, and by the wanton destruction of the life-sustaining forces of the earth.
Its landscape is comprised of archipelagos of dehumanizing factories; foetid landfills; slaughterhouses; sterile, commons-devoid, atomized, faux housing and apartment clusters; the sterile monuments to egoist vacuity known as office high-rises; enervating work spaces; battlefield deathscapes; crass McMansions; brutal prisons; individuality-scouring schools; and emptied asylums, whose inmates, now homeless, shuffle through, huddle and die in heart-bereft cities.
Someone messaged today, asking: “From parent to parent – how do you stay sane when bringing up a kid in this world, Phil?”
I replied:
Sane? That’s a tough goal… in insane times.
As a small child, my mother escaped Nazi Germany as the nation went mad, on Kindertransport, while, during the first year of the Great Depression, my half-Native American father was left, as in infant, on a church doorstep near the reservation where he was born, with a note pinned to his clothes reading, “I can’t feed my baby.”
Although, if the world was not insane, my parents would have never met and I would have never been born. Somehow, in all their trauma and madness, my parents muddled through. And my son will have to do the same. I suspect he will.
To wit: Our children’s generation, unless they take up the challenge to end the ceaseless, lethal folly might very well be the last generation of our species. The thought is unbearable. But that is the reality of the situation. Yet, by not shunting away from conscious awareness the reality of our plight, the heart becomes startled awake to the manifestation of a ferocious and pitiless beauty.
Illustration by Dan Booth not to be reproduced without his express prior permission.
Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City.
Yet a bio amounts to dharma for dimwits: It defines a human being in the same manner and degree of veracity as a restaurant menu describes the various slabs of meat offered … commodified things that were once living beings.
