serious talk.

All right. Time for me to get serious about something serious (just ignore my subtitle for the duration of this post). Today I'm considering my opinion of human nature. I don't know that there is such thing as peace among groups, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. It's a case of opposites. Without trauma there can be no compassion. Without fear there is no protection. Without struggle there can be no resolve. Without destruction there is no creation. I certainly don't condone the former in any of those dichotomies, but instead choose to see that out of ashes rises the phoenix.

It is idealistic to assume humans a peaceful creature and quite honestly, it's entirely unrealistic. While individuals may strive to achieve self-realization, we as a group are not in cahoots. Dada Bhagwan said, "Freedom will be yours when you see the world and others innocent." Perhaps I can understand the foundation of that statement and can create a situational metaphor to explain my take, but that's all it is: a foundational statement over which reality supercedes. The world and a human being in their most pure form are pristine, free of mental and emotional corruption, free of toxins: like a clear sky. But material collects, corrupting the pure openness of the sky. They never actually leave. How is it that we as a group could actually, realistically, reach peace and self-actualization? It would take every single person to overcome every single type of corruption and agree upon the idea that we are in fact innocent and peacefully interconnected. Not gonna happen.

Instead, humans are innately bound by the confines of their own mortality. Out of threat and fear comes action and generally those are unjust to anyone but that individual. People react based on threats made to their own lives and worldviews. Is that so hard to believe? I don't think so. Or how about the reality of 'an eye for an eye'? In Bin Laden's case, it's not even an eye for an eye; it's one eye for thousands of eyes. So don't feed me this bullshit about knowing for whom the bell tolls. To me that's someone's blatant inability to see the forest through the trees.

So when I come across articles that scold celebrators of a Bin Laden's destruction, I'm nothing short of annoyed. We do not celebrate for the end of a life; we celebrate the cause which has leveraged our power as Americans. The point of this raid clearly was not to end a life for the sake of ending a life. Come on. And there was nothing innocent about his particular life, for that matter. I'm not ignorant enough to try to explain what military intelligence actually had or has in mind, but I know enough to be a realist about how this world actually works.

The world is not a Disney movie; however, in spite of terror there will always be the opportunity for hope. Thank God.