Bursting bubble
Most people spend their lives in a bubble of their making, one carefully crafted, isolating them from life, from the bad, the good, and the ugly. Life is good, they claim. I’ve made a life for myself. As long as no one bothers me, I won’t bother anyone. It’s a fair trade.
In truth, no matter the placid mask they use to hide their true selves and emotions, they live their pallid existence in a quiet desperation, screaming at the world.
The current world and the situation we all find ourselves in aren’t just bad. It’s horrible, in a thousand smaller and bigger ways, on all levels of society. And the bubble-people know that. They know it in their hearts of hearts still beating somewhere, outside the bubble, the soft cell they’ve made for themselves. The strain increases every day, but still most people pretend everything is peachy.
There is life left in the world. There is still fire deep in the night. But this is in spite of, not because of the thousand pinpricks of pain and open wounds of a world we exist in today. It’s a testament to humanity that there is still anything even remotely similar to passion and freedom remaining among us. There is hope. There always will be, as long as there is a tiny spark left of the fire we once were, the fire we still are. But that pleasant fact can also be a danger, a reason to not act, not be what you should be. People not hampered and pampered by hope can be very dangerous, and dangerous is exactly what we all need right now.
Because people closing themselves off in their bubble pretend the world is all right, pretend they have a semblance of a life, no matter what. They are the greatest pretenders in history (and there have been a few).
Suffering is surrounding us on all sides, and has done so for so long, for five hundred generations, and during that time humanity has been chopped into pieces repeatedly, been devoured and spit back out endlessly.
And that is a danger, too. We’ve become used to suffering, to continuous torment, to the point of becoming numb, becoming living dead. But there is hope, even though there is little reason for it. Humans are powerful beings. Our potential is hardly diminished after ten thousand years of diminishing. And we are angry. And there’s good reason for it. And there is rage. And there are a million good reasons for that. Suffering has exploded today in this bubble, this torture chamber called civilization. A choir of beyond angry voices is rising from the pits, the abysses of the current world.
There is hope.
The bubble is about to burst.
This is an expanded version of the post first written and published in 2006