Questions

Here are some question, maybe they add up.

Are you just another worker dreading the next day, while being amused to death by the entertainment on your phone? Are you one of the amorphous mass buying clothes and drinking mass-marketed soft drinks? Are you a member of the consumerist hordes clamouring for big Macs and cheap clothes, while you live out your live in fear of losing your job, while you’re blaming all the other poor schmucks for wanting the same things you want and looking to take it all away from you?

At the end of a day’s work, be it at the office, be it in a factory, be it in the fields - at the end of the day, can you say your world has become a better place? Have your works made you happy and proud, or have you merely gained another day’s wages? Has the time spent been in the service of something worthwhile, or at least something that benefits those who are at the mercy of others, has your work benefitted those at the mercy of people like you?

When you watch the news, do you see what is happening? Do you watch the satisfied faces of the powerful men whose orders are causing the unhappy deaths of hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of people? When you think about the power these men yield, are you wondering who their henchmen are? Do you look about the room you’re in, and are you not quite convinced that you are in no way complicit?

Let’s assume you’re on a trip, not a drugs-induced haze, but an actual journey through a country, and you gaze out the window - are you surprised by what you see? Do you gaze in wonder at the trees, the fields, the houses? Is there a deer hiding amongst the trees, can you see its tail as it grazes or moves about? Do you think there might be a deer at all, or do you think of these woods as bereft of life? Do you feel about the life of the deer the same way you feel about the life of insects?

What is that life about, anyway? Is the life of animals a mystery, some kind of experience you have no connection to, is animal life a phenomenon that is of this earth but not of your personal world? Is it morally allowed to kill animals for food, even if you don’t really need to eat their flesh? And let’s assume for a brief moment you do need their flesh, because the animals can be eaten and you have nothing else to eat, even then, wouldn’t it be better to lay down and die? Or is anything better than death? Is it better to live in a world where a river of animal blood runs through?

And what is death, can we know? Is this life we lead, this human experience, is this life a form of living or a way of dying? Is there a difference? We cling to life, surely, but do we know what it is? Are we alive so we can kill animals and eat them? Is our life sacred and animal life not so? In our defence, can we point at nature and say, ‘It’s eat or be eaten, kill or be killed’; and if we do say that, do we really believe this is so? Then does it extent to human life, or doesn’t it, and why not? And how do we apply that to our daily lives, what are the actions that make these thoughts of death and dying more than thoughts about say, spectator sports or dj’s? Or is the death that surrounds us and the killing we willingly or unwillingly participate in not something worth a thought, just a nagging noise at the back of our minds?

So, the people we see, most of them we don’t know and don’t care to know; do their experiences mean anything? Not just to our own lives, although also to our own lives, because people create energy, they live and make choices, they make changes happen and not always for the good; but do the experiences of people outlive them or are these experiences ephemeral and gone when the people are gone? And if the experiences of other people don’t really matter to us, why do our own experiences matter so much? Or do we just pretend to care, but do we not care at all, not even about our own lives?

What would life be like if we would really care?

(Note: wherever it says ‘you’, this of course refers to all of us.)