To the small, good places of a big bad world

There is no such thing as world peace. Never was. It was a lie granted us from baby boomers who were looking to dress up the shitty prospects of this world into a “How To” for their greatest generation predecessors. If you’re not digging the word ‘lie’, what about metaphorical valuation, how’s that? Whatever you want to call it, it wasn’t real, it wasn’t something we could attain, like . . ever. I don’t believe those peeps led us astray purposely. Everyone was allowed an exuberant proclamation back in the sixties. Or anyone who was anyone. It was a decade which saw great gains and even greater losses. We reached the moon, but we lost many of the voices who had inspired the trip.

John Lennon survived the sixties, only to be taken from us a decade later, proof that hate doesn’t take a day off. I’m big on ‘what if’ scenarios, and so I’m always going to wonder what life- not simply music- would have felt like if Lennon hadn’t been stolen from us outside the Dakota that night. I couldn’t help wondering what he would have had to say about Paris. Would he have been able to fetch the right words for the wrong times, the way he did so often? I’d like to think he would have talked me into a better sounding way of dealing with the unthinkable. He would have been a voice, no doubt about it.

He would have had a lot to say about a ‘new normal’ that isn’t actually new at all. What happened in Paris is what’s been happening in too many parts of the world for too long a time. It’s not new to my parents. My mother grew up in a time when she lived in fear of Nazis storming her neighborhood in Rockaway, New York. My father barely made it out of Cuba before Castro’s guerillas began their final assault from the mountains. My children had just started elementary school when they were coloring pictures of airplanes crashing into buildings as a way of ‘processing’ their emotions. So, no . . there is nothing new about this hate filled place.

It’s Paris, it’s Spain, it’s New York and Boston and Oklahoma City. And it’s knowing that this isn’t the end of the horrors. The Pope talked about how World War 3 is happening right before our eyes, and I have to believe he’s onto something. The world, and the rules, have changed. Storming beaches and occupying countries ain’t gonna stop these scumbags. The macrostrategies of war have gone microsized, and winning is all about intel gathering and covert operations that rarely, if ever, see the light of day.

As a writer, I’m a big fucking mess of Jekyll and Hyde right now. I want these savages to get the Rick Grimes treatment and I want all those murdered innocents back. Mostly, I’ve borrowed from that line I wrote last week, because I found myself wanting the world to pack up its tent and get the fuck out of my face for a while.

And then I remember all those souls who don’t get to say shit like that.They don’t get the chance to bitch and moan, they don’t get the chance to make plans for tomorrow. Hate stole them away, and it occurs to me that if I accept that? Well . . . that would be so much worse than a beautiful sounding lie about world peace.

I think maybe, Lennon’s lie was a necessary one, because his songs were inspired from those small and good places of a world gone mad. He knew how to make sense of the senseless, how to keep promises the world just wants to throw away, and he knew what it meant.

Everything.