“Despite knowing that life is so much more than money and gold
I fall in line like a good boy, and close my eyes to my guilt and others’
My heart is heavy and my head is bent, my steps echo grey and empty
The snow lies black and toxic on the roofs
I turn on my TV and sleep it off
And when the acid rain falls, I put up my umbrella…”
http://dfg.rosnix.net/musik/det_sura_regnet/
A freely translated song by The Lost Generation that I fell in love with when first I heard it. It’s so heavy and melancholic! It captured so well the feeling I had...
I have later realized that this is the lefties’ idea of how rich people are, or the greenies’ idea of how “normal people” are… and that they’re wrong. The rich or normal are not closing their eyes to any guilt. They’re not FEELING any guilt!... It is these “progressive” people’s idea that they SHOULD be feeling guilt, and so they wrongly assume that they do. The progressives also feel this guilt, themselves, and so naturally – but wrongly – expand their feeling to all of human kind.
Our hearts were heavy and our heads bent… not theirs. And I truly, genuinely believed that this depended on them closing their eyes to reality!... Because I felt that this was how it had happened for me… That one day, I opened my eyes to all the misery in the world, and all the pain came gushing in… and ever since that day, I was carrying all the grief of the world. Those who didn’t hadn’t yet opened their eyes.
But you know what, it doesn’t have to be that way! Because I still have my eyes open to all the misery in the world… but my heart is not heavy and my head not bent! It is a fantastic world we’re living in! And an absolutely fantastic time!... Sure, there’s lots of misery in the world, but it’s only a tiny, tiny part of it. And most of it is actually part of life, part of nature, part of what makes life so fantastic! Death, for instance. Suffering, dangers and death are parts of nature, and included in the things that make life fantastic. But just look at how much we have actually reduced these, over the last few hundred years!... We humans defy nature by having a survival-rate to adult age of more than 50%!... This is unmatched. In Sweden, this rate is over 99%... which is insane. And fantastic!
And if you look at it that way, there is of course no reason at all to grieve. On the contrary, these are times for celebration.
The funny thing is that you seem to have surpassed me in grieving, now!... This was NOT a development I saw coming 10 years ago, that I can tell you! But now, you “normal people” are walking around feeling guilt over the climate and are all worked up over Covid-19!... You think it’s a tragedy that 200,000 Americans – most of them already near their deaths – have died in Covid-19, and you think I’m cold and lacking of empathy because I don’t. But how could I, when I’ve already been aware for over a decade that 20,000 children die every day from poverty, and I’ve found peace with that knowledge? That’s 7 million dead children every year, and pretty much ALL those deaths could have been prevented if resources had been there… I used to feel THAT was a tragedy… but I’ve gotten over it! I’ve realized that 20,000 per day, in a population of 8 billion, is after all extremely little. No other organisms have a youngling mortality that low! People never had it before. 200 years ago, more than half of all children died before they were 5 years old.
Also, I’ve lived for several years now in a country where the child mortality is skyrocketing compared to Sweden, and I can see that it doesn’t mean that people are walking around suffering. Quite the opposite! They have much more peace and happiness in their everyday life than the Swedes have. I would have gladly lived here the rest of my life, if they only hadn’t harassed me so much for my white skin.
And so it appears to me that the great tragedy is not death, but the modern Westerners’ attitude to death. Which probably springs from the fact that we have too little death in our lives, rather than too much. Had we had more of it, we would be wise enough not to grieve so much, but instead to celebrate every day that we are alive.
I’ve become like the guy in the song, who puts up his umbrella when the acid rain falls. But I don’t close my eyes, I don’t bend my head and I don’t grieve!... My eyes are completely open,
as I’m singing
and dancing
in the rain.
Read also:
How I've changed in my foundation over the last few years, July 30, 2018
The terrorism in France and me, Nov 17, 2015
Karolina and the Climate, July 20, 2015
