NO DIFFERENCE
No Difference - by Shel Silverstein
I tire of swimming upstream. When I look around, I see a world I do not belong to anymore. I bide my time, have done so rather successfully for several years, but the truth wears deeply on me now.
I keep deluding myself, wishing this world is something other than itself. I carry my cross, girded up with false hopes and promises that things will change - a fool's hope that some force much greater than this world or the flawed race in charge of its stewardship will swoop in and imbue it with sanity and conscience - but suspect deep down no such force will do any such thing.
Internally and externally, I'm surrounded by obstacles over which I have no control. All the while, the insanity marches onward with such conviction it makes me wonder who's really insane. After all, isn't the human struggle for happiness just the latest chapter in the evolution of life on this planet, a history at present dominated by the dominant – where both indulgence and progress are made possible and enjoyed by those bold enough to take it from others, to the strongest, smartest, most creative, and most assertive among us?
Why should I so abhor this dog-eat-dog, winner-take-all, survival-of-the-fittest construct, when life has existed and perpetuated itself by this one maxim since it first began? Why should I loathe that the powerful should set up systems to entrench their dominance and wealth, and do so with just enough regard for everyone else to maintain order? Why shouldn't life's winners take everything they can? Isn't that the way things are in nature, the way life has always been?
These questions genuinely trouble me, because the history of life on this planet has consistently produced versions of this same brutal construct. As senseless as this seems to me, it has fueled the evolution that led to us. And yet, in humans a viewpoint has emerged that resists the laws of evolution, that swims upstream against its flow. This viewpoint is called love. Antecedents of love have existed on the planet for some time, no doubt emerging as a social mechanism that helped aid in group survivability and prosperity, but in humans it takes on such importance that it struggles against the very evolutionary flow that brought about its existence.
I'm not fool enough to claim I love without at least some regard to myself, but I can say I embrace it enough to recognize that honest and hard-working people should never be the tools of power-hungry egomaniacs who work them to death while leaving them on the verge of destitution. And yet this is the way of things.
Somehow I've managed to play to my strengths within this system, been smart enough and crafty enough to find a roomy niche here. Despite this, or rather because of it, my conscience aches each and every day for those who value honesty and hard work but just aren't quite smart or crafty enough to work the system as well as me. I hurt for them, hate on their behalf, because this should not be. Where is the compassion? Where is the honest evaluation of personal value and contribution to society? Where is the conscience to sustain this planet and ecology that vitalizes it?
I find myself rambling, asking questions that seemingly have no end. Why dare swim upstream against eons of evolutionary success? I do it because I simply cannot stand it.
On the other hand, I cannot find within myself the courage and creativity to change myself or my circumstances, so how could I foolishly hope to change the world? In the end, I find no home in either place, either embracing the current insanity or helping to solve it. Merely loathing it, and myself by virtue of it, is all I find myself capable of mustering. And so I regularly consider letting go, surrendering to whatever may lay beyond this world, and leaving this place to those more willing and capable of fighting to either maintain it or transform it.