Chaos

In the summer of 1973, I sat with my friends Steve and Jeff in the front yard of Jeff’s parent’s home. We were saying goodbye to Jeff as he had recently joined the Navy and would, the next day, be deployed to the middle east where Israel and Egypt were engaged in an armed dispute over the Suez Canal.

We were all three convinced that this would be our final goodbye and that the middle east conflict — having been festering between Jews and Arabs for thousands of years, since their common forefather, Abram, made an Arnold Schwarzenegger move with Hagar the maid — would finally spread worldwide.

In a way, I was envious of Jeff because when Armageddon erupted, he would be on the front lines and get his suffering over with quickly while the rest of would await the arrival of doom from halfway around the globe. Although the final showdown remains unseen, and the middle east chaos took another sixty years to reach our continent, it’s here now and spreading like cancer.

Did this mess really come about because one man couldn’t keep his zipper up? Or is it merely an outer symptom of a more serious human malady?

My contention is that every ounce of chaos, strife, anger, hate, and fear on this planet is a result of people just like you and me, who are bound and determined to dictate our own personal circumstances. And we become irrational when someone else’s planned circumstances interfere with ours. We shake our heads at the lunacy of the middle eastern strife and then we fume at the asshole next door who fails to maintain his landscaping like we do.

The even bigger problem is that no matter how hard we try, we simply cannot mandate the terms of our existence. We live in a closed system that’s still evolving and is essentially unpredictable. Tornados, volcanos, floods, famine, and pandemics are beyond our control and that doesn’t even begin to account for the self-centered lunacy of the broken human race we inhabit.

Bottom line: there are no guarantees. Our single hope is that there’s more to life than what we experience with our five senses on a daily basis — something that is orchestrated by a power far more omnipotent that us, yet with our ultimate best interest in mind. Perhaps even an entity with an actual plan. The real question is whether we’re busy adding to the chaos or striving to understand the underlying order.

A meeting of great minds who think alike