Death From Above – blog

I can’t tell you when the world changed, but it did. 

We changed with it. 

The change in us took time, naturally, a slow change that has been painful to watch but is there just the same. 

A change that you ask – when did it start?

Vietnam?

The AIDS epidemic?

September 11th?

Columbine?

What changed us so that we suddenly expected the worst?

What changed us so that the world no longer felt safe any longer?

What changed to make us look to the sky, to the cars, and to the people around us with keen distrust?

Sure, the politics has made us uglier, meaner, and crueler, but this happened before things got as bad as they are today. 

This happened slowly, as society started looking into the mirror longer and longer and as we realized how big the world was we suddenly realized how small it was as well. We realized how our sins and mispoken beliefs of the past can live forever to return to haunt us.

And we learned how easy to be cruel to someone across the globe we will never meet and who will never know our real name.
With that though came the dawning that those same people can do that to us as well and cruelty became the norm. 

The expectation. 

The default. 

When I was a kid I grew up in fear of the bullies around me, people who could see and touch me. 

Now though, you have people who can target you a world away and send police to where you live, can find out all of your information that is out there, and can track where you are and have been. 

Stalkers became more powerful and more horrifying than ever before. 

Our culture is stressed out about love, about money, and about power. We are easy to anger because we feel put upon and like the world is against us when truly the world just isn’t for anyone, it serves itself. 

We don’t trust the world and we don’t trust one another. 

With every shooting we argue over what was used, what side of an imaginary fence the killer stood on, and whether more people with guns could have stopped it. 

We give lip service to the idea of mental health aid. 

We refuse to talk about how these people were made. 

We refuse to ask whether the society as a whole is sick. 

Every time there is a school shooting we hear how there needs to be armed guards and armed teachers, not thinking how the kids might feel about being surrounded by guns and cops of one sort or another. 

We don’t think about what it does to the child. 

We want to point fingers at the inner city schools and say how dangerous and violent they are when most school shootings are not in the city. 

I won’t declare that I have an answer to why we are so violent and angry. It’s something we need to talk about, but rarely want to. 

But you can see it even on a larger scale, as world powers push closer and closer to global conflicts and war. 

The need for power and to retain it is stronger than ever. 

We are now looking to the skies because they too have become a warzone, or at least a place for more types of spies. 

Sure, it’s nations now but how long until domestic terrorists realize they can weaponize drones, or larger balloons or who knows what to start harming the people they have decided they hate. 

It’s a horrifying idea that the things from the sky we need to fear are still one another, that we can’t even get beyond that to a deeper threat, that perhaps we’ll always be all we have. 

Oh, there is life out there somewhere, but it may just steer clear of us, and I wouldn’t blame it. 

It’s scary to think that an outside intelligence could be watching us but the reality is scary enough to imagine that nations want to know where we hide the guns even when we are not at war. 

Just in case. 

The reason anyone has a gun with them or beside them. 

Just in case. 

You just never know. 

And deep down we all think we’re just another good guy with a gun in a world of dangerous people. 

In a world of ‘bad guys’. 

Maybe that’s why religion has gotten ugly as well, as people cling to the nastier parts of their beliefs, that they are only ones deserving of salvation and in turn, that they are given the glory to damn people as they see fit. 

There’s so little love in this world, and all of us look to the sky for answers and see a slowly moving shape, uncertain what it is. 

From near, from far, we cannot fathom, just that it’s up there, and may be watching us, may be sent to harm us, and all we can do is watch. 

We all changed sometime ago, evolved into something meaner, and uglier, but more clever than ever. 

We evolved to become the nightmares that we feared as children and heaven help us if we should dare to look to the sunset for hope, because that distant shape we see may be coming right for us. 

…c…

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