Chocolate Vanilla Swirl

I often wallow, these days, in the inevitability of it all. It seems stunningly obvious to me that man will never change. War, pestilence, lying, bad movies... they are here to stay. The poor will always be with us. It's a depressing thought.

This painful realization has been offered with perhaps some qualifications here.

I don’t presently care to argue that there is never any “need” to go down any given low road. In some cases I may support some low roads for some purposes. Locking up murderers, for instance. In other cases – torture – I have a much easier time saying “Never go there.” But what we see over and over again is that we judge high-road approaches as failures unless they produce nigh-instant and complete favorable results, while we show nearly infinite patience for journeys down the low road.

Our man seems ready to accept this proposition. Why else would humanity so doggedly pursue war as a means to an end if it weren't the war itself which interested it?

But in what may be the flickering of that blogger's hope we perhapssee the reignition of this blogger's. For sandwiched around the fairly perceptive insight that people will stick with the horrible for much longer than they'll countenance the "weak" we see a naive blindness to the nature of the dark. It speaks of a persistence towards optimism just as large as the endless rush towards conflict.

What we see in the article is a familiar phenomenon that represents either a sickness in our culture or a sickness in the human species. I can’t decide which.

(...)

The open question, to me, is who “we” are in the above. American culture, or the human race? I suspect the latter, and that relative power simply gives the US a greater opportunity to take low-road approaches. But I’m not sure.

So we see a man staring into the abyss that – as he seems to grasps – extends in all directions in both space and time and yet it does not stare back; It merely winks. It taps on the shoulder. It gapes only large enough for our bebloggered friend to have the inklings of a doubt; a sneaking suspicion that maybe it's not the internet that did it. Maybe man has just always been a killer. Maybe we just likes to go to us some war. But only maybe.

As infinite as the maw is, there are just as many bridges across it, it would seem. The wonders never cease.