Pig People from the Twilight Zone

Remember the pig people from that episode of the “Twilight Zone” who had the so-called normal looking woman convinced she was hideous because she didn’t have a snout? Just goes to show you that anything seems normal if everyone is doing it.

That’s pretty much like this world we’ve built. It’s so far from what should be normal that it isn’t funny. We have all become convinced that it is normal, and right and fitting to foul our habitat. To consume poisonous bio-engineered food-like substances. To spend our days and weeks and months and years toiling away at some job that is as meaningful in the scheme of things as a

pimple on a flea’s butt.

To birth children who we know will live a worse life, not a better one than what we endured. To send them to schools where, at best, they’ll be miseducated and at worse, taken out by a bullet. To tell them the same lies we were told about hard work, perseverance and earthly rewards when we know that once you get there, there is no there there.

To base our entire lives on currency and pretend that there’s nothing wrong with that. To practice viciousness on other people in other countries because we don’t know how to wean our dependence on other people’s resources and mostly don’t care to learn. To act like there’s nothing wrong when our solution to every problem is to criminalize it – and that Black men’s natural habitat is prison.

To walk on the crusted, concrete-clad earth, breath toxic air, drink chemicalized water and act like there’s actually a point to this madness. To keep killing this planet and its other species along with ourselves as if we didn’t understand the concept of tomorrow -- like what we’re accomplishing today is all that important.

These things we do on auto-pilot, we teach them to our children, we ostracize those who don’t accept our paradigm and we victimize the rest of the world so that we may continue our pointless journey.

And the insidious truth of it all is that nobody seems to notice how utterly crazy our lives have become. How completely destructive our loftiest goals, how hollow our search for the next best newest shiniest everybody-wants-one thing we will clutter our minds with so we don’t notice the emptiness of our aims.

We have become convinced that such is the stuff of life, and have inflicted our warped definition on every group of people in every corner of this earth. And we will insist on grinding forward in our spiral path to destruction, sucking everything and everybody down along with us until we arrive at the bottom.

Or maybe we’re already there. How would we know?