The Earth

I feel an urgent need to post something today...

First off, I apologize for never continuing the story that I began a while ago. If you must know, in my mind's eye the fin was a friendly dolphin, but feel free to use your imagination to come up with any ending that seems fit. If you must, kill me off, but I really would prefer to hold on to my life for the time being.

Which brings me to the gist of my post, actually. What do I want to do with my life? If you haven't already noticed, I love to write. I want to be a writer. I know that my writing is neither mind-blowing nor worthy of being compared to some of the classics, like Steinbeck, Dickens, even the more modern Rohinton Mistry (we are reading A Fine Balance in English at the moment), but I love attempting to sort out my thoughts, I love to create fictional worlds with fictional characters, and I love to adopt a persona; my ideal self, I suppose you could say. But lately, my passion for this Earth has grown (no pun intended). It all started when I read Ishmael, which was given to me for my last birthday by my good friend Dave.

Reading Ishmael was, as they say, a life-changing event. I will not give you a summary here, because I will in no way do it any justice. All I will say is that if you have any ounce of respect for the very entity that gives you life, in all respects, then you would order yourself a copy of this book, this beacon of hope for the human race.

My first response to it went as follows:

I'm starting to believe that China may have the right idea in mind, that China (while it is snootily aware of it) may be ahead of the rest of the human race. We are facing extinction, and it is coming sooner than we think. All of these warnings about the end of the world (in the form of movies, books, and religious crazy talk) may not be so crazy after all. Humans, prepare yourself, because the end may be near. What does China have to do with this? With some exceptions, Chinese law dictates that families can only have one child. All politics and ethics aside (having a boy versus having a girl), the law may actually be helping to curb the already exponentially expanding human population. New medicine and technology allows for longer, healthier lives, resulting in more people on the planet. More than that, however, is that humanity is not allowing natural selection take place. A natural law that is meant to regulate all of the animals on this Earth, including humans, who think they are above this law; after all, we are humans, and the world was made for us. God created life so that we could come and conquer it, did He not? But natural selection is not just a law that you can vote to change. Sooner or later we will be punished for breaking it.

I don't believe the world will end in a "zombie apocalypse," but I do believe that is doomed to end for us unless we can step up and do something about it. However, I have trouble even playing with the thought of the human race admitting its mistakes, stubborn as it is. Science is trying to dominate the world, and I don't think it will give up the chase any time soon. I didn't realize it before Ishmael, but everything we do in the "name of science" is an attempt at controlling "our" surroundings. But are they even ours to control? Of course not. Yet, just one look around you and you know that it is exactly what we have been doing. From being able to split atoms to landing on the moon; from genetically modifying food to inventing plastic. Moreover, while the human race seems to be becoming more politically democratic, liberal and free-minded, it is a tyrant. It is a tyrant of the world, of the universe, of other animals, and even of itself.

For now, I must leave it at that. But don't you worry, I will be back. If anything, I will attempt to convince the one or two people that actually read anything I write...