Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

I find it harder every day to keep living in this society, it sickens me so much. I believe these illnesses that plague me are simply the death I live amidst seeping into my body. I have friends who believe that through protest and social activism, change can be made, but I really don't think so. The system is built on a poor foundation that is fundamentally flawed, and no social change will ever fix that. We need to either overthrow and recreate this system, or simply move away into land the system doesn't care about and build our dreams for ourselves.

One of America's greatest — and least recognized — heros, Scott Nearing, wrote not long before his death, “We live in a society of butchers and murderers. We butcher fellow creatures for food and sport, and murder fellow human beinds for pelf and for power.”

Sadly that is true in that it is where and how we live, but it doesn't have to be true. Civilization is built from grass, sun, and water (Pablo Lugari, another one of my heros, said “civilization has been a permanent dialogue between human beings and water”). It's not built with the blood of soldiers and guerilla rebels, be they government sponsored or be they suicide bombers. It's not built by companies, and it's not built by machines. Another person that I strongly agree with is Gonzalo Bernal, who when faced with the decision of moving to the Gaviotas settlement in the harsh plains of Columbia or joining la guerrilla, pointed out “the idea of creating a peaceful society through armed conflict seemed doomed by its own contradiction.”

I've said it here before, but all live needs to be healthy, happy, and full of beauty is food, shelter, and Love. All of these things are free. Ask yourself — is live hard? How many times does your heart need to beat for someone else's evil as you slave at a job that destroys the soul of the universe? Why are you willing to do it?

I ate a nice dinner the other day at a fancy restaurant full of ghosts — these empty soulless carcasses dragging their wallets around. The meal cost over $180, and it made me ask myself:

What is an apple?

An apple is intended to be eaten. Trees “want” you to eat the whole apple, walk around for a while, and then deposit the seeds in a nice growth-inducing pile of feces. There's no death when consumption and rebirth are a combined process. On top of that, nature has spent millions of years creating perfect food (if apples are intended to be eaten, then they evolved to perfect food), but what do we do with apples 99% of the time? We grind them up, poorly extract their component chemicals, and rebuild a simulacrum that pales when confronted with the original whole.

For all their brains, humans are pretty stupid most of the time…