First, first

So shall I bow to you before I take the stage? Shall I ruffle my notes, ceremoniously laying them out flat on the podium, so that (beyond a shadow of a doubt) you know that I am ready? Shall I clear my throat in a commanding sort of tone, speak in a compelling sort of voice, state all my points in a clever sort of way?

Or shall I take off my shoes, instead? Supplicate my body and kiss the ground?

I fear all the holy has gone out of our ground, all the trembling gone out of our fear, all the ethic gone out of our work.

So instead, shall I address you as 'the audience'. Would you prefer a more personable title? I could add on a ma'am or a sir to that; would that make you feel more atoned? More respected? More revered? More significant?

Perhaps the problem isn't the amount of reverence or respect we carry around in our coat pockets on any given day anymore. Perhaps it's our impotence, our infervance, our unaffectedness that's causing all the must in our lives. Causing fissures much deeper, much realer than some simple gap in the generational education about how to know you're properly civilized.

Perhaps its the very idea of civilization that breaks generations down - that spike our neon hair, paint thick black lines on our pretty blue brown eyes, cover our banquet tables in booze and our ballroom gowns in gauze and gore and lies. Shattering the windows of our prevailence on 'good moral issues', causing what we've come to call the degradation of humanity's 'good' youth. (I'd say 'American', but that's not fair. China and Kenya, and yes even Iraq are as bad off as we are.)

But what if, maybe it's not that. Not just the materialism, the consumerism, the capitalistic savagery of our economy that's tearing at our hope of really be alive someday. What if. If it isn't just chemical imbalances and bad situations and a long list of things-to-get-done that's making us manicly depressed; isn't just the way we go about the things we go about anymore that's making us hollow, aimless, meaningless things.

What then?

What if, to prove the point - for a brief moment - the theologians stopped blaming the scientists, the Christians stopped blaming the Muslims, the children stopped blaming the elders, the individuals stopped blaming the masses, the guilty stopped blaming the innocent. What if - for just a glimmer of time - the radicals stopped raging against the institutions and the institutions stopped oppressing the minorities. What if all the movements stopped being exclusive, all the individuals stopped being egocentric, and all of soceity stopped being falsely ethnogeneric.

Would we still be standing on holy land?
Could we still watch our blood seep into alien ground?

Would we be stop forging weapons, stop feigning peace?
Could we go on in ignorance until dying from defeat?

Would we stir up new symbols, instilled with new rites?
Could be simply sit back, sip our tea, avoid fights?

Could we start being humans, even at such costs?
Or are we too frightened, too lazy, too lost?

Are we so desensitized that we don't even try?
Are we so used to unhappines, we can't even cry?

-RK