A Long Thought For The New Year

We have all done this for far too long.

Dear friends, allow me to wax philosophical for a moment, please. I once heard in a movie that "he who burns twice as bright, only burns for half as long." And is that not the way of the world? Those who make the biggest impacts on the world, whether positive or negative, always seem to leave before they are done. On some occasions we are sad. Like when those who preached for peace often meet violent, undeserved deaths. And sometimes, under our breaths or maybe even publicly, we cheer as those who call for violence often, eventually have their calls answered. But what seems to happen is that the universe tries to balance itself. It tries to right some of the wrong. Eventually, he who reigns at La Cabaña eventually finds himself at La Higuera. But there are too many things that are tipping the scales in the wrong direction. Africa, sweet Africa is being eaten alive from the inside out by corruption. The world's "superpowers" continue to rape the Motherland of her minerals and resources to feed their greedy, overpopulated homelands (including ours). And certain government agencies continue to, in the name of "national interests," clandestinely appoint warlords to perpetuate war and domestic terrorism. In South Africa, a country with strong conservative beliefs, there has been a growing form of crime known as "corrective rape." It is a personal and horrifying attack where lesbian women are attacked by men in their towns/villages and they are forcibly raped in an attempt to "correct" them and make them straight. And in many other places like Burma, Sri Lanka, North Korea, etc., things like genocide, dictatorships, cults of personality, and suppression of information are conducted like business as usual. While we, (yes I said we, meaning including me) here in America, complain and bicker about the most insignificant of things: we cry about bullshit in our news feeds. Our supposed scores of "haters" kicking up drama in our lives. Having to update our smartphones. Or having to stand in line at the corporate giant known as Wal-Mart to get our overpriced items. And the list goes on and on. And basically my point in all of this, is that our country is spoiled and in return we spend our days acting like petulant children. In the media we bitch about healthcare. In everyday life we, (along with the Occupy Wall Street folks) bitch (sometimes rightly so) about the 1%, but as Penn Jillette so beautifully put it in an interview: "...300 million people in the United States is a very small number, when you're talking about knocking on 7 billion worldwide. Those people are all, every single one of them, are in the 1%. And every single one of them pays a cell phone bill, every month, that is the yearly income for a family in much of the rest of the world." So while things don't always go as well as we'd like them to go, we still have far too much to be thankful for as a country. While people get on their online soapboxes to decry Obama and his turning our country communist, unless your family came from Cuba, escaped Nazi Germany, or lived in one of the countries I spoke about above, YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT OPPRESSION IS! Unless you've had your neighbors spying on you and then had officials kicking down your door, you have not known true fear. Okay? Getting suspended from Duck Dynasty or having people question your precious Christian faith doesn't count. That's not tyranny. And while we're at it, yes, the IRS has too much power. Yes, the government has been spying on us. But do you think that this is a recent phenomenon? No. It's not. Don't be naive, friend. But we should use all of the freedoms we have to watch and be vigilant and make sure our rights aren't being taken away. And we should stop being hypocritical. We claim we want transparency from the government, then turn around and label people like Julian Assange and Edward Snowden traitors and/or snitches. But we are unaware of the terms we use. Whistleblowers risk everything to expose corruption. Snitches are people who committed a crime then give up their co-conspirators to get a reduced sentence. They wanted to do the crime, but now they don't want to do the time. People in the "hood" decry snitching and then when, goodness forbid, something happens to somebody they know and love, they want people to speak up and say something. Or they run around with shirts saying  "Free Lil Pookie" when they know full well Lil' Pookie has committed serious crimes and is not someone who should be walking around the streets. But again, my point in all of this is something my brother from another, Michael B. says: we should be great and be grateful. We must be aware of things that are going on at all time, but we should also enjoy the freedom we have to live and pursue happiness. Use our anger as fuel to do good things and hopefully accomplish great things. Because as one of my heroes Zack De La Rocha once said: "Your anger is a gift." So use your gift wisely. And I'm going to do my best to do the same.