WARNING: Strong language and opinions.*

Goddamn it, I’m pissed.
The whole world is going right to hell in a hand basket. There’s huge, deadly, grim and seemingly unending world war and civil dispute as well as the usual urban violence and misery - homelessness, poverty, domestic trials - and yet good, sensible, loving people still find it necessary to fuck themselves and one another over in the places where it is absolutely unacceptable.
None of us is perfect. None of us are machines capable of going on endlessly with no relief. We have fragile psychologies and we need constant maintenance – understood. But we are also brilliant, thinking, loving beings capable of achieving actual divinity, and yet, we do this utterly stupid, mean, thoughtless shit to each other and then SOMEHOW wonder WHY THE WORLD IS SUCH A SHITTY PLACE.
It is a shitty place because we do not love ourselves and we do not love each other enough. Bottom line.
Hurricanes and rockslides and cancer all suck, but they are completely beyond our control. We are experts at surviving these kinds of things and going on with our lives. We can recover from these enormous, terrible things and the losses that come with them. What we cannot get over is the little tiny (and sometimes really HUGE) horrible things we do to each other and ourselves a million times a day every day.

I am not trying to preach something I don’t practice, either. I am not perfect**, and I will never be perfect, but I have realized/figured out/decided/been told OVER AND OVER AND OVER again that I MUST try harder to be a better person. I must learn to love myself, I must respect myself so that my friends and family don’t have to worry about me, I must keep myself strong so that I can handle the gigantic, overwhelming volume of SHITE that the world throws at me every single day, I must be able to recognize when I CAN’T do these things anymore and let someone know, and I must do all of these things for every single other person that I come into contact with as well. And I dare anybody to say that I am not trying. I may not be trying hard enough yet, but I’m working on that, too. Every single day.

People say to me and to each other: “you can’t take the problems of the whole world on your shoulders” and “you can’t do all this alone” and “you can’t worry about things that are beyond your control” and “it’s not your responsibility”, and all that, but you know what? If I don’t do it, who fucking WILL? And if EVERYBODY tried a LOT harder, it would be a LOT easier on every single one of us. Who REALLY cares who you wanted to vote for?*** Who cares about gay marriage? Welfare? Who cares what your stand on abortion is? The answer is ‘at the end of the day, it doesn’t really MATTER.’ There are real issues and real babies and real friends (including some who might want to marry people of the same sex) and real strangers – including the ones we’ve been conditioned to think of as ‘enemies’ who need something NOW. And those are the things that we can give them, and teach them to give themselves, if we could ever step out of our pre-programmed little settings and actually use some common sense and logic and actually give a damn. Sure, maybe you're pro-life and Christian - doesn't that mean that you're still supposed to love the girl who made another choice? Help her in her time of need? I’m not saying ‘Don’t vote, don’t stick to your guns on the issues that matter to you…’ but I’m saying that while you work toward those things that can take YEARS to change, especially considering our democratic system, put your bullshit aside in the REAL world and do some things that will really HELP, like volunteer somewhere that you are needed, like a library, hospital, senior center, homeless shelter, build houses for habitat, organize a bake sale to provide Christmas for kids who need it – SOMEthing. Put aside your moral stuff and just HELP.

We – myself included – need to quit worrying and whining about what we can’t do and do SOMETHING to better this world. And not just a little something. If enough people decided to stop half-assing around and make the choice to devote their entire lives to making the world a better place – starting with themselves, then even if we fail, we will be able to say we lived a life worth living. Every single one of us needs to strive for this. In my opinion however, it is impossible for people to try that and fail completely. No way. Even in my own half-assed way, I have made a HUGE difference in a LOT of people’s lives. You all tell me so, and I see it around me. What could I do if I tried just a little harder? And what if I tried a lot harder?

And you know what? Yesterday proved to me that stepping outside of yourself and focusing on other people’s problems can be the very thing that saves you from your own self, at least for a while. We all need to be aware of and concerned about the Big Picture, but we need to chip away at it by dealing with the first things that come our way, one or five or twenty at a time until SOMEthing changes. And if we all did that, then when I finally take on more than I can handle at the time, and just collapse, there will be people there to catch me too, because we will all be awake and aware, or at least AVAILABLE.

This is only a truly Sisyphean struggle if we look at it in a Universal sense. Yes, we will eventually all fail and die, yes, our galaxy will eventually be sucked into a black hole, yes, the environment will eventually cease to be able to support human life, but not today. And today we can do SOMEthing, ANYthing to hold back the tide, make a small difference SOMEwhere, to SOMEone. And if EVERYone gets off of their ass and stops making excuses and stops pondering their existential doubt and who’s zooming who and what J-lo’s wearing and “I told you so…” and DID something, it couldn’t help but get better – or at least it would change and not be the same old same old that we all keep bitching about.

If people read this or more likely just know this and still make the choice to hate or just be apathetic and make excuses and wallow, then you are no better than the people who spend their time actively trying to do harm. If you have a choice in your day-to-day doings, and you consciously make the choice to do the bad thing or the truly selfish thing, then you are as culpable as any true villain. If you ever call yourself someone who has a loving soul, someone who cares about themselves, your children, other people’s children, the world, then you cannot make excuses any longer. You MUST try harder to make a real difference. No more excuses, no more slacking, no more bullshit. Find a way, in every thing that you do, to try to improve 1. your outlook, 2. your world. If that means thinking twice before you flip off someone in traffic, finding more ways to carpool, calling on friends when you need help, calling friends to offer help when you have some spare time, picking up a piece of trash on the side of the road, volunteering somewhere once a month, meditating while you’re in the bath/shower/potty, telling someone you love them when you want to call them a dumbass, putting someone else’s feelings before your own IF it’s not detrimental to you (and if it IS detrimental, try to find another way, a compromise), letting someone cut in front of you in a line, dropping the pennies in the bottom of your purse in the lion’s club box, baking cookies for a neighbor you don’t know well, trying harder to like someone that you have problems with, trying to listen harder when someone is saying something you don’t agree with – there are a million ways. None of us are trying hard enough. Every one of us needs to try harder to be Ghandi or Mother Theresa.
We need to reach out, we need to give until it hurts. We need to find ways to say what we feel and get our needs met without hurting anybody. We need to share the wealth, whatever kind of wealth we have. We need to think not only twice but THREE times. We need to truly love our enemies. We need to do everything in our power to make peace. We need to try MUCH harder to make the right choices about the REALLY important things and try harder to forgive ourselves when we screw up the small stuff. We need to take ourselves and each other to task. We all need tough love, sisterly love, brotherly love, motherly love, fatherly love, godly love – MORE LOVE. We need to increase it, share it, spend it, spread it until there is NOTHING else.
Nothing else is going to save us. Nothing else will work. ‘42’ is cute and funny and ironic, but THIS is really The Answer. It is the only thing that will work, the only thing that will save us, the only thing that can make us into the grand creatures that we THINK we are.
Period.

MUCH love, and more where I can find it or make it. This is a vow. I expect the same of all of you, but I will do my best to keep my promise whether anyone else tries or not.
-sam

*This is not the erudite plea for peace and understanding that I have every intention of posting here when I can finally stop gritting my teeth long enough to put it together and type it. This is just something I HAVE to say. This is my monkey-self ranting as need be. Sorry.
**woo, am I not!
***The government damned sure doesn’t.