It's about two in the morning as I sit here and reflect on my day. Interruptions of Star Wars (the original trilogy) flash to mind feverishly, devouring up my brain activity because the title of this is a quote in relation to Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader. That's for those of you who didn't pick up on that. If you did, I suppose that's cool.
I often write about how the mind is a computer that can be programmed and molded to think, feel, act, and perform a certain way. It's a slave, in a sense, to the programmers that install software into us all. Now, one can take the stance that this is done intentionally as a means of populace control or for a similar devious purpose. One can also take the stance that this is a self-perpetuating monster we designed that has spun horribly out of control.
One could make the case for a multitude of scenarios, but neither one of them is important for what I am going to discuss.
While that software fucks us all up and perhaps makes us prone to stereotypical, cliche drama we see plastered all over our LCD screens, our minds are not without defenses and countermeasures. For one reason or another, I never mention this topic. I always tend to write about the grim. It's darker and more humorous, more alarming and confrontational.
Yes, human race, I bitch about you, me, and all the rest, but there is still good in you. I see it in little instances all the time. I see certain people trudging through the solemn, serious, poisoned masses with chipper demeanors so intense, a warmer beat pumps hotter blood through my body. They took to heart some of the less poisonous programming, something akin to the Gene Wilder Willy Wonka viewpoint on life - utilizing pure imagination.
If that song is echoing off the ridged mass that is your brain, listen to it for a moment. Note its mood. Note how it makes you feel. Note its positive intensity that inspires you to build a world as ideological as that. Those statements are written imperatively, but in actuality I'm more asking than telling.
Sure, we can tear down the simplicity of it all, break down the beauty of those ideals by using a milieu of negative examples. We can live in the now and focus on how the world is too complicated to build such an innocent, high vibration.
That reminds me.
I have a friend who was watching 'Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure' and noting how upbeat the movie is about the future. This was a feeling 80s movies shared as a whole, according to him, that through music and art, the future would be this wondrous, fantastic place. Of course that sentiment has been lost in time since then, or so it seems.
However, I see all these weird people popping up, these beacons of light trudging through rivers of shit. I see all these web sites jacking into the web promoting simple and FREE techniques to reprogram a better quality of life into the human brain. They're everywhere, and the more time I spend actually paying attention to this facet of life, the more I realize that their numbers are stronger than I originally imagined.
We're not doomed, and we will never be doomed.
That's the fear talking - the overpowering "little man" that surrounds us daily. He climbs from our TV sets. He leaps from the newspaper headlines. He assaults us from the radio, telling us how physically sick we are, how scared we are, and how deadly all these unseen enemies are.
Along with being programmed to be neurotic wrecks, we're programmed to need more and more pharmaceutical drugs and fear "terrorism" on every step. Muslim Extremists are everywhere. It's in the headlines all the time. They're out there... watching and waiting for us to "let our guard down", even though border security has never been much of a concern to halt this supposedly impending epidemic of anti-American suicide bombers. If it was, the fear-mongering may be somewhat believable.
One of the issues concerning fears that irks me the most are these signs I see in increasing numbers stating: "if you see something, say something".
On the outside, that may seem like it's convincing people to open their mouths and "stand up" to "criminal or suspicious behavior", but on the other hand, it's just more of this weird mindset. Yes. Look for suspicious activity. Maintain a mental demeanor of "being aware" of all the crimes that could possibly be happening this very second. Fear the unknown. Use your "better judgement" to target suspicious activity that may or may not be an agent of this unseen enemy sweeping across the land.
We don't war with countries or clearly defined bad guys. We war against ideas.
Drugs. Terrorism.
Vague terminologies meant to keep us all on our toes - never to succeed and never able to try something new. Never able to shake enough of that dark energy to follow in Willy Wonka's footsteps and "make the world taste good".
