Fireflies

This is a story. This is a story about four very talented people (and a few less-talented people) who came together and did the impossible within less than eight months, creating a technical accomplishment that is being sold to this very day.

And then the story ends in the typical maneuverings of men of wealth and the insane games they play with the lives of people, and all that talent, all that potential, is scattered to the four winds, none to ever achieve anything of note again.

When is it, I wonder, that dreams become lies, that hope becomes futile, that one must face the certainty that this is it, that this life of pointless mastication and defecation and fornication and unending drudgery is all you will ever have, all that you will ever be, and that the only hope for the future lies with your children, not with yourself? For in the end, the vast majority of us are fireflies. We shine brightly for one moment, then our light disappears forever, lost in the fog of everyday life as we go through the motions every day pretending that our life matters.

Which, in the end, is a hilarious notion, for we are monkeys. Monkeys with delusions of grandeur. We live, we die, and in the end, all turns back to dust. In the end, no human accomplishment survives. Even the Great Wall of China and the Pyramids shall eventually be nothing but dust. Yet we persist in believing, persist in shining our tiny light, no matter how feeble, into the face of the universe, even after it fades to a dull glow on its way to dying out. That futile flickering in the face of the immenseness of eternity, that desire to say to the universe, "Here I am! I live!" is perhaps the most ludicrous, yet, strangely compelling, story ever told.

And that, perhaps, is the most horrifying tragedy of the Bush regime. By deciding to govern via fear and hate and violence, the result has been the death of hope. Those who have seen their dreams crushed, their children killed, their homes destroyed, they have no hope, and they kill and kill and kill, not caring any more if they are killed. Those who are sent to kill, those who are sent to destroy, themselves are destroyed, their feeble firefly light quenched under the load of horrifying memories and the weight of hate that settles into their souls and corrodes all like acid. And those here in America who want to believe, who want to hope, have their dreams crushed by the immense costs of perpetual war for perpetual peace, see their children's futures pouring out of the nation's coffers into the sands of Mesopotamia, see the inevitable future of an impoverished uneducated and increasingly marginalized nation that will be mean and ugly and filled with violence and hate and no hope for the future. Some give in to despair. Some, some refuse to acknowledge reality, refuse to see anything but the hopeful future in which they wish to believe, shine their firefly light for a brief moment into a cloud of destruction for it to be seen by none at all. And others... others become a little bit crazy, embracing the mean, embracing the ugliness and violence and hate.

And in the end, none of matters. The Republican values of "greed is good" and "he who dies with the most toys, wins" have no more effect upon the universe than a firefly's light in the evening sky. A thousand thousand years from now, nobody will know how many millions of dollars Dick Cheney had when he died. Nobody will care how many nations George W. Bush conquered during the course of his insane plan to create peace through war. Yet we persist in our belief that we are something other than monkeys with delusions of grandeur, that what we do somehow matters. Yet we persist.

And that is both the tragedy of our lives, and the only meaning it will ever have.

-BT