Welcome to the Cruel World

I never took to gospel when I was young, mainly because I had a heart for slow mournful hymns, those pained slow waltzes people might associate with Southern Funerals, that are closer to Irish ballads than they are to Southern Soul music.  It's just something in my make-up that shaped my ear, my taste, in the core of me.  It just so happens that Ben Harper would be the one to nail down the ideal sad song for me as well as I could ever hope, for these modern times.  This song, on the album bearing its name, is, to my heart and soul, a masterpiece.  The album was a mixed bag for me as far as the feel of all the songs when taken collectively.  I was coming straight from a diet of strictly hip hop, and a good share of grungy alternative stuff back in 97'-98'. The country and folky leanings of some of these songs was just beyond me, but not Welcome to the Cruel World.  That hit me like Amazing Grace at the time.

It was in that school year that I would discover "singer songwriters" and immerse myself in the kinds of music that would redirect my entire existence from that point forward.  Ben Harper was an artist who bridged the divide between the best of the past and the best of the then present, in said genre.  He connected with the contemporary agony of existence that had settled into my generation, who were spending their late teens and early twenties watching our cultural trailblazers die or be killed every few months, while our friends self-destructed or wasted away trying to either find, or lose themselves in response to the alienation that seemed to come part and parcel with our existence.

Now we're in our late 30s, and our surviving heroes from that time are in their mid to late 40s in most cases.  Things have changed, and contrary to what they tell you, the world hasn't become a better place, just a different one.  There are less of some things, and far too many of others.  The things that captured my imagination or corrupted my character 15 years ago seemed like rarities, strange synchronicity at work, and now they are as common as a payphone used to be.  The darkness that loomed overhead has descended and lingers like a perpetual fog now, muting our senses.  Altruism and idealism are a hazy muddy muck.  We've been played for fools and worked and handled to the point where there isn't any legitimate fortuitous left in us that isn't supported by some manufactured mold meant to fashion us into a product for consumption.

The world is an organism, a machine, that mangles what it can not use.  It's proven over aeons that those it can not use it will end.  The memory that remains will be massaged to fit the purposes over the production line.  People are ok with that.  All the alternatives have been co-opted.  We quibble over the petty, shudder in the face of the substantial, and are silent when the inevitable stares us down coldly, silently, emptily.  We have embraced escalation and destruction and will be our own undoing, violence need not be a part of it.  Our fatalism has rooted itself so deep that we have all become nihilists in action, but in denial of it in our thoughts.  We live in a world that has built itself on a schism.  Life is a gift, but we destroy it in the world we have made, perpetuate, and take part in.  And yet we are told to celebrate the share of it we get.  In reality, you show how valuable a thing is by cherishing it consistently in its every incarnation. Instead we are taught to selectively covet the things we relate to above all else.  It's an implicit part of enculturalization.

When I drive down a paved road, embracing the convenience of it, I think about how nature tries to reclaim itself, and how we literally mow it down.  I think of these mazes of roads we've laid out, how they scar the world, the same way I have scars, unfortunate reminders and harm I've been done from whatever might have torn my flesh asunder.  Should something ever remove humanity as we know it from this world, the plants won't stop growing, they seemingly grow in spite of us now.  The animals will continue to mate, live their lives, again, possibly flourishing in our absence, as there will be so much more habitat to occupy, less resources hoarded.  People get worked up over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but don't often recognize that it's a microcosm of the greater struggle for existence taking place on this planet, where we see creatures facing extinction due to human material expansion, with no regard for the consequences because we simple do not relate to that form of life or put as high a value on it as we do our own.  It's no great leap to understand why we have no problem killing each other over valuables and perceived needs and wants.

This sinful covetousness is a part of the machinery, part of the overarching contemporary human identity.  To be born into a world of ravenous consumption, devouring itself, there is something very dark and sad about that.  It's a blessing to be alive, but a curse to be born into this life somewhere it will be a struggle from the moment you take your first breath until you take your last to remain so. This truly is a cruel world in that regard.  It's precisely the world humanity has shaped it to be.  That is tragedy of it.  It is because of this that I can say with conviction, that it will take a miracle to right humanity from its path, something greater than and beyond what we now are, because we are so far gone collectively.  The only hope most of us find for peace in this world, rests on our capacity to transcend aspects of it mentally or spiritually.  To find peace in the midst of embracing all that the world is now, all that humanity embodies, denies fundamental morality, and I can not deny what I am. I am emotional, and I perceive good and evil, innocence and corruption.  I cling to the hope of being Humane, and not simply Human.