handful of ashes

-“At the edge of doom, beside the last grave of mankind, they will still be counting their paper. Praying over their balance sheets . . .”

The central question of life, then, is how to find meaning in this post-nuclear world. CNN and the Internet were supposed to bring us closer together, but the distance between us has become immeasurable. The little pockets of traditional indigenous culture are quickly being wiped out, being replaced with a homogenous sameness that threatens the sanity of the planet. We all long for a sense of belonging or community, but there is no real binding “world community” for all us to join. We have thrown off the yokes of tradition, trashing the very things that made us uniquely interesting, and replaced it with hollow concepts of being.
We exist only to consume and or worth is judged solely on our ability to consume the products and ideas that add nothing to the quality of our lives. We have more convenience than we know what to do with, but our lives remain empty of meaning and direction. The airwaves are lousy with empty boasting and posturing about things that have nothing to do with the average man, woman or child. The media is biased, but it has always been that way. The bias takes us away from reality, the everyday, all the essential elements of what it means to be human. They have sold us on pre-fabricated ideas of meaning and worth. It’s all crap—not just the right or the left, but both and everything in between.
We define for ourselves what is important, what is real, through the act of living. The now slips away from us, loaded down with false ideology. The now is all we have and we give it away freely, for a handful of ashes . . .