"Burn it Down"

Yesterday, a friend of mine posed an interesting question on Facebook in reference to the current state of America, and not so far removed from the events in Ferguson. He asked, "If I was a face or leader with what's going on would I ever say 'burn it down?'" This got me thinking...

I absolutely, without hesitation, would say "burn it down." But the "burn it down" solution comes with one key problem, its successful execution. Because how do we get it to all come down at once? Burning little by little, bit by relative bit is a very easy problem to solve overnight and ignore over decades. If it's gonna come down, it's gotta all come down. That's the only way it'll stay down. But we've been asking for it to come down for a while haven't we? Right? When we get on Facebook and tell everybody else on Facebook that when they're faced with injustice they need to stop "saying things" and start "doing things." I'll ignore for a moment that this advice has a usefulness equivalence of telling homeless people to "stop being homeless if you don't wanna be homeless," and reiterate that yes, yes we have been asking for it to come down for a while now. It's that change we've all been talking about since uh... if I had to pick a year... oh, I don't know, 2008? But why hasn't it happened? Why haven't we "burned it down?"

Well, we simply haven't lost enough yet, that's why. In fact, you in particular, yeah you, you haven't lost anything at all. Your life's pretty good. It's still too easy to be comfortable. There are too many alternatives, and we have too many freedoms. It's too easy to just exist. You don't want your rights being taken away? Vote for the other guy. You don't want to get shot by police? Stay home. Problem solved, revolution averted. Existence remains simple. A quick sidebar, I find it pretty funny that we're still fighting for these so called rights, as if preserving them - or achieving them - actually entitles us to a different state of existence.  You wanna know what your country really has to say about your rights? Google "Japanese Americans 1942," and see what your country has to say about your rights. About the existence that you are and always will be entitled to. Ha. But I digress...

We simply haven't lost enough yet. It's just too easy to exist. For "burn it down" to work, it has to all come down. For it all coming down to be what we resort to, we'll need to lose more than we ever thought we could. Loss unlike anything our generation has ever seen. Our simple existence in itself, not our imaginary rights, must be what's at stake. Then, we'll be faced with a problem harder to ignore than it will be to fight. Our backs will be to the oceans where we can only push back or drown. Then, "burn it down" becomes a solution worth pursuing. Then, "burn it down" becomes a fire sale where everything must go. Why? Because we won't have any alternatives; we won't have any freedoms. There will be nowhere left to go but up. It has to come down, or we don't survive it.

The evolution, civilization, and industrialization of the human race has earned us, for better or worse, a much longer wait from inception to destruction. We've been conditioned to survive, and for that we are many, many, many years and many, many, many atrocities away from the final solution. But history does and always will repeat itself. And if history has taught us anything, it's that the one thing all governments have in common is that they can and will absolutely fail. Just look at every single government in the history of the world prior to present day. Every government fails, it's just a matter of time.

Which brings us back to today, and what we're supposed to do in the meantime when we're trapped in a system we've outgrown and in whose very essence makes it physically impossible to repair. Well, you might not like the answer, but we wait. After all, it's still pretty easy to just exist isn't it? And kind of pleasant when you think about it. So we wait, and we see how this plays out.

Random thoughts of the day...