TOWARDS AUTONOMY
-by Kevin Tucker
Our culture suffers from an extreme personality disorder. It seems that it is wearing so much armor, that it forgets it’s even connected to its’ body. The face is so preoccupied with make up that it forgets to look down.
We’re built ourselves up so high that we forget that we need our foundations to stay afloat. We just say, “Here we are, now let’s deal with it.” Nowhere else can this be clearer than in our ‘race for the cure’ approach to life.
It surrounds us. It is BP selling stuffed ‘endangered animals’ toys with fill ups. IT is Phillip Morris out to find the cure for cancer. It is Weyerhauser protecting the wilderness, and Police protecting urban youth from violence. It is Monsanto feeding the staring ‘third world’ children, and Channel One teaching ‘first world’ children.
This is it, the dichotomy of good and evil (life and survival, damnation and salvation, dictator and leader, take your pick), which underlies the conquests of ‘progress’, comes down to public relations.
Sink or swim, has been changed to float with us and you’ll worry no more. We plunge into “It”, the undying, righteous, creator/sustainer. You can live forever, but the fine print is getting harder to read as we drag on and lose our vision to the luminescent glow of TVs, in-store track lighting, computers, and streetlights.
We want more than anything to never die. This constant search for limbo permeates our lust for life, since pure freedom doesn’t have the catchy jingles that its’ zombie replacements willingly offer.
The dying desperately grasp to the life they’ve never had.
Obsessions with the progression into a future of such technological magnitude that we need never even breathe for ourselves, compressed with an over-reluctant ness to push the ‘past’ further behind (onto ‘e-history bookshelves’), has placed us into a ‘might is right’ corner where ‘the Ends’ (progress and growth) have presumptuously justified any ‘means’ which may arise (bio-devastation or avoidable diseases, perhaps).
And where does a cure fit it?
The search for cures is a part of the unquestioning ideology of civilization. To search for a cure is to ‘level the playing field’, so to speak. A cure presumes one is needed, that the problem is naturally occurring. This turns cancer, retardation, and stupidity into a natural genetic ‘mishap’, rather than what they are, results of the ‘means’ to a non-existent ‘end’. The search for such is digging our own graves. The cure for one problem is the cause for the next, and as long as we isolate each problem, the cycle is self-perpetuating.
What we need is solutions. We can’t turn a blind eye to the foundations of civilization, and we must ask ourselves if this is really what should be occurring. The reasoning for the entire social order must be brought into question.
Only when this is done can we stop sacrificing for the future, and start living now.
