I'll Offend Someone, As Usual.

The notion that you can simply 'identify as' whatever you wish and that everybody must instantly accept it and play along 100% without asking any questions, is possibly the silliest idea in modern society.

Just as well there's always that phrase the Alcoholics Anonymous organisation uses to focus on when I'm reminded the lunatics have escaped the asylum, and not only live among us, they're allowed to vote in political elections too.

You know the one I'm speaking of - "God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."

Let's face it - and I think I've referred to this before, now that the lunatics have finally escaped the asylum, the world has become their stage, and life, one big theatre consisting of ego artists and other attention seekers overplaying their largely self-important roles in one drama after another. Drama, more than usually, perhaps, created by themselves, because it's become standard practice to worry about absolutely everything, and, for the most part, out of some bleeding-heart desire to "save" just about anything and everything.

Now, while being fully accepting of that well-known AA mantra being more self-reflective, and personal, it also serves well as a reminder of how we should all view the world around us.

Accepting that we cannot change the forever conflict between the Jews and the Moslems. Accepting that we are all inhabiting a dying planet. Accepting death as we do life and more. Instead, we appear to have a growing resistance to the 'bleedin obvious' and it's becoming fashionable to engage in outpourings of tears and despair that, by comparison, would make a tropical monsoon look more like a quick rain shower, or turn the Sahara into the world's largest lake.

Thankfully, we haven't yet reached that tipping point, whereby the overly sensitive, and emotionally incontinent, Millennial progeny have outnumbered their more emotionally staid predecessors who, although far from sensible in some cases, would at least largely provide a 'feet on the ground' robustness in dealing with world affairs, without the need for alarmist terminology, such as 'emergency' and 'urgent' - for example.

Like a viral disease, words that instil fear in the already emotionally vulnerable of this millennium are a powerful weapon in the world of climatology lingo. To get the younger worrying about their offspring, and their offspring's, offspring's future in such a programmed way that distorts thinking, instilling irrational fears and beliefs in all areas of life.

Such as politics, religion and the media. In fact, everything we see going on in the world around us right now.

Fears that make the world feel less secure are indeed a powerful weapon in leading towards a much wider framework of control in terms of what we eat, and how we live in the future. Potentially, a one-government world that inevitably will create a greater distance to the world's eventual leaders where the decisions will be made, unlike now, where we have Ministers and Parliament. A government so far removed from the ordinary, if I may use that term, person like Joe, or Joanne Bloggs. In the words of medical anthropologist, Theresa MacPhail,

"Fear can be as tricky as a virus, and just as contagious. It can infect you without you being fully aware of it. It can change the makeup of your personality and, if you let it, end up shaping the contours of your world."

Fear is out there and evident already. Admittedly, this is nothing new. It's just the fact that the 'fear virus' if you will, has mutated again and mentally infected the Millennial, Gen X, Y, and Z population to such a degree that it's creating somewhat unprecedented levels of violence between people who would not have otherwise engaged with one another under 'normal' circumstances - and this is just in Britain!

I will steal the words of Anne Morrow Lindbergh, and expand them outwards to the wider world when it comes to the subject of 'love'.

"When you love someone, you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment. It is an impossibility. It is even a lie to pretend to. And yet this is exactly what most of us demand. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships.

We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible, in life, as in love, is in growth, in fluidity - in freedom, in the sense that the dancers are free, barely touching as they pass, but partners in the same pattern.

The only real security is not in owning or possessing, not in demanding or expecting, not in hoping even. Security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what was in nostalgia, nor forward to what it might be in dread of anticipation, but living in the present relationship and accepting it as it is now.

Relationships must be like islands, one must accept them for what they are here and now, within their limits - islands, surrounded and interrupted by the sea, and continually visited and abandoned by the tides."

Love is nowadays a grossly misused word, as it means all things to all people. Of course, we can love our partners and children, and in pretty much the same breath then love our favourite meal put on the table. In this disposable, throw-away world I would argue that 'love' has become so watered down, loving 'humankind' is as throwaway as leftovers from yesterday's dinner, and used more frequently nowadays by the lithely of English-speaking ‘Generation Whatever’ world.

In truth, over the generations, we have gradually fallen out of love with the world, and those far distanced from ourselves.

We can pretend all we want. In reality though, and given the choice between protecting our nearest and dearest, and those who have become victims of an earthquake, our protectionist personalities will kick in time, after time, after time, and that's a fact.

So, we can go right back to the beginning of this post and pretend to be whatever we want to be, or whoever. It makes not one iota of difference while we, as humanity overall, continue to live by ego alone. When faced with a bullet, or a bomb, identity has absolutely no meaning whatsoever.

And, in a world where we consciously choose to further divide ourselves into even more labels, and same mindset groups and cohorts because our egos dictate as such, we are both worsening, as much as shortening our own futures as one species of humanity.