Little Fish, Big River, Bigger City

I don't get it. I thought that life was supposed to be this wonderful, happy thing by now. I thought by this day and age, there wouldn't be any more wars or fighting. I thought we finished all this when the USSR disintegrated. But here we are. People are just dropping bombs on other people.

AxL is snoring away on the floor nearby but I can't sleep because I'm still wide awake watching TV in fear of terrorist news which would cause me to pack up and get out of town to the wilderness. The US has dropped bombs on Baghdad and now Iraq is dropping bombs on Kuwait. China is calling the US unlawful and demanding we stop military action immediately. Before we know it, bombs could be flying in every direction.

I don't get it. Why do we do this to ourselves? We're all on the same planet and for some reason, no one really seems to get that point. What we really should be doing, instead of spending billions on figuring out ways to kill each other, is figuring out how to get our act together on this planet.

Why are we using oil at all? Why do we produce so much garbage and why do we keep killing off other species on this planet in addition to ourselves? Why are we chopping up the rain forests? Why are we burning a hole in the ozone? Why are our cities covered in smog? Why do kids take guns to schools? Why do we harpoon whales?

It's sad, but I guess it's life. We've probably always killed each other and ruined things around us. I guess that's why we call ourselves "civilized" and "intelligent." Yea. Right.

Sometimes I dream of "Utopia" all over the planet. What if everyone got along? What if we all worked together to figure things out, like how to fix a lot of the things we've ruined or nearly ruined? What if all the effort that has gone into war, crime and industrial pollution was instead directed toward medicine, science, conservation and space exploration?

I mean we've figured out some amazing things, like cell phones. From a tiny little thing, you can call any other phone number on the planet, and they hear your voice! I mean think about that...your voice is going into this little piece of plastic and immediately, someone who you wanted to talk to, even if they are thousands of miles away, can hear you perfectly. Freaky, huh? Your voice is invisibly traveling through the air over insane distances and popping out of a piece of plastic on the other end. It's just one tiny step away from being able to communicate through telepathy.

What about the MRI? Instead of an X-ray, you go into a tube where a giant magnet lines up every cell in your body and then releases it. Each cell gives off a frequency and from there a big radio antenna reads the frequencies into a computer which then translates them and prints it out into a perfect picture of your body's parts, bones, muscles, etc. etc. Okay...do you get it??? Someone figured out that this can be done and then a machine was built to do it. Nuts. Total science fiction but also total reality for years now.

It comes down to this: we're an amazing species. Period. Well, almost period because there is a huge BUT...it seems that we're amazing at good AND evil things. We're good at being destructive or productive. So, it comes down to this: who is guiding the world? Who is leading the charge to create things like cell phones and MRI's and who is out there creating the next missile to kill someone? How come everyone doesn't just work on the good stuff? How do leaders wanting to attack other countries keep getting into power? How do people become convinced that terrorism is good to the point that they will commit a suicide act? Why do we keep printing billions of phone books each year only to throw them into landfills?

I don't know. I can only shake my head...because I don't get it. It wasn't supposed to be like this. I only wish I had my dog's ability to sleep through it all.