I reflect back upon my entire life, and, while nature and the scenery contained all the beauty that God probably originally intended for it, in the microcosm of human life, or perhaps animal life - it was just constant competition and suffering. I wish there were some "off" switch whereby I could simply take my husband, myself, and the children out of the world. I am so tired; my whole life I have heard Jesus will come back. I still have no good reason why a loving God would have left us here, except in some extreme anger towards us. I see no sanctification here - only varying levels of torture.
The barbarity of the animal system is paralleled in the human world by the competitive barbarity humans show each other, and resource hoarding. If only it were "just" that, it might not be so intolerable - but of course it extends. There's the endless cycles of "competition" and "deadlines" - with associated anxieties. There's the continual shaming of those who are "behind". Much like the starfish world, there's the continual "eating" of the poor by the wealthy.
I neither want to eat those below me, torture those beholden to me - nor do I want to be beholden to torturers. It does not help to know that our torturers are also themselves beholden - everyone trapped to everyone in one giant cycle of painful madness. Ultimately no one is responsible it seems - and yet, everyone plays a role in the destruction of the environment, the worsening of social conditions, and the creation of extensive and unlivable situations for all of us. The people running the few institutions here are seemingly abject sociopaths. The fact that they too are victims of the system perpetuating the same torture they experienced upon others is of little solace to those being tortured; it is easy to say "I forgive them" but the issue is of course not with them. The issue is with this world period. This world seems like inescapable torture.
I haven't the heart to do to my children what was done to me, even though I know it to be for "their benefit". I know I don't really have any choice. I see that even the best of people suffer pain, and this, quite a bit. Even if one is vegan and eats appropriately and even fasts, it is unlikely that they will escape the brutal competition and pain that seems to be this world in its entirety. If they do, they are still left with the observation of those suffering below and around them. They are surely only left with the solace that "this world is brief and ending", though evil.
This, I guess, is the solace.
I am no longer able to sleep without PTSD and fearful nightmares of some variety. As though my current world were not difficult enough, at night, even worse fearful outpourings of the mind.
Were I alone I would probably do as the Mr. Tuttle person do - I would pray and fast, and grow accustomed to a life of hard labor in some grocery store. I would patiently wait for my time to expire, appreciating some elements of nature, trying to help a person here or there, but ultimately just waiting to die out of this place where seemingly no beautiful conclusion can be worked out.
If Chris' job were stressful, I would simply say - quit it dear - come to the homeless shelter with me, and we'll make our way on minimum wage, where there will be no anxiety at all - or, let us sell the house and live in a little, ity bitty trailer, take turns working at the gas station, and just wait for this miserable condition to pass.
But, how trapped we are with the children! It becomes a sort of complete, inescapable insanity at that point. At all costs they must be safeguarded, kept away from this monstrous and abusive place. And yet, in the best of circumstances, we are delaying their abuse. It's only a matter of time before the world, its expectations, its deadlines, its science-math-technology obsession comes crashing down on them. I have no plan to safeguard them at that time.
We are at the mercy of God, and yet, it is so hard - does God love us? I read this over and over in the Bible, that, at least for some people - God did love them. But we read "friendship with the world is enmity with God". In the Old Testament all the people God loved seemed to get a free pass from suffering outside self-induced sinful suffering. In the New Testament, some kind of complete inversion happened where it was decided that the only way to love God was to suffer to death as a servant here.
Who wants a reality where the best way to please God is to suffer to death as a servant? And yet, it must be admitted, who wants rather that someone else should suffer? This is the nightmare of the place. Anyone with even trace amounts of empathy does not want others to suffer for them. But neither do they want to suffer themselves. And then the worst of all realities - everyone suffering with no net improvement, simply out of collective madness and/or the circumstances of this world.
"It is what it is" - and it is terrible!
So what to do with all of this. Every day there is the latent hope that perhaps Jesus will come soon. I understand now why this is the lynch pin of the Christian faith. It's intolerable to otherwise think of being a suffering servant, along with one's children, with no end in sight, ever. The suicide rate would be through the roof; all the poor, education or not, would throw up their hands and say "better to be dead than under these conditions!". But instead we are told every day "a little longer and Jesus is coming with a Utopia as well; you don't want to be the loser who didn't stick around to experience what is just probably happening tomorrow!"
And then the emotional punch of it too "if you really loved Jesus, you would just suffer here uncomplainingly, and wait without question, because your trust level would be so high for Him; so, here is evidence that you neither trust nor love Him - now if you don't do some more work and suffer more, and give all your wealth away, by which you could escape such a system of oppression, and if you grumble about being poor or on the low end of the totem pole of survival - then you, my friend do not love God!"
Perhaps this is the worst and most heartless thing a person could say towards the poor of this world.
And yet who is not poor? The rich person at the top feels just as trapped as the poor person at the bottom. They feel like they could "do nothing else" because they would be "outcompeted" by their ruthless competition. They feel that mercy is weakness, and if they exhibit any of it, someone will come and hit them hard while they're being weak, and then they will just join the long line of "the exploited".
Nevermind the gains of this world are temporary, and worth nothing. Everyone is simply living for the day. The starfish completely overtaking some poor little creature wrestling for its life has no ability to show mercy, because if it doesn't eat it dies that day. I am sure it too, has starfish babies.
And yet we read that before the flood, humans didn't eat each other. And at one point, animals didn't predate on each other at all. And God promises some kind of Utopia where this madness ends.
But as beautiful, and painfully so, as these statements are - what good is it in the present moment? What good is it in the lonely "enduring to the end"?
I reflect on my life and I don't know what to do or where to place the children that they don't suffer. Everyone in this world laughs at me as though only an idiot would have a child into this world and expect that it doesn't suffer. And yet I marvel at them - what kind of parent but a sociopath would want their children to suffer? What kind of parent wouldn't arrange everything so that their children would suffer less?
Here I am trapped. At best I can teach my children to be engineers - but, I know how shitty of an existence that is. It is a shitty existence - fraught with anxiety. Chris is bearing the brunt of it for the whole family. And how long can he withstand doing that? He is encountering the system that has shat on me my entire life, for the first time - because it shits differently on the poor. On the intelligent captives, it forces them into systems of bondage and deadlines, and makes sure they are always anxious and competing against time itself. Never can a person have a 30 year job any longer, or simply learn a trade and stably do that. No, we must maddeningly continually compete every day to get things in faster - useful things, useless things, things that destroy the world, things that don't torture animals, things that do - it doesn't matter, as long as you're sitting there worried trying to either push someone else to do things faster, or yourself getting pushed. Everyone is in fear in the end; nobody can stand such a system. The survivors have "low morale" and PTSD, and it doesn't matter that they sympathize with those getting axed. Those getting axed have their families destroyed, a lot of their self worth, and often their minds. Cycles of abuse with everyone trapped in them.
And the poor, who to some degree manage - in some cases - to escape some facets of the anxiety that comes from this insanity - have to deal with physical pain. They bear their overwork and exploitation in the form of obesity or depression, they rarely get dental care, and they are continually promised by any whore of a politician that, "in the next four years, things will be better if we just win."
To some degree a person might think, I could simply work extremely hard, get rich, and then isolate with my family. But this is not so. You would be continually bombarded with images of the suffering around you. Everywhere you go, and perhaps you would be even more keenly aware of it, you would notice suffering and feel out of place, and even immoral, having escaped it. Only with some kind of totally deadened to other sense of empathy would you manage to so called "live it up" in this world - and then the question is - what kind of monster have you become that you are able to manage this indifference to others?
So what can I do? I hole up in the house with the children and delay the inevitable. I have no plan. In the end I hope Jesus comes within the next 10 years. If He doesn't, I contemplate the fact that life may not be worth living for my children in this world. Perhaps there could be someone strong and powerful who would take them under their wing and protect them - but look at the sociopathic nature of many of the rich in this world. And even if some sort of spouses were obtained - I don't know, I just don't know.
Alternatively I could do what - beat them into learning now so that their life might be easier in hyper-competitive and dehumanizing ventures later? This is what my parents did with me. It builds up in the child - this constant beating. And in children like my own, who are soft and empathetic, it cannot produce the sterile results hoped for in others. It is just pushing them with pain, to try to get them to escape pain later.
What I earnestly think about is, that better than all of this, we can just enjoy each other's companionship and love for as long as we can; I can be, first and foremost, a mother to them, rather than some asshole teacher, pushing at them like some kind of madman, for their benefit admittedly. Maybe that makes me lazy and heartless. It probably does. It probably makes me a monster, not to prepare them for the future like this.
I have to live with that.
My plan is actually to love them for this brief period of time that I can still have them to cuddle and love. To give them, at least for 10 years, total freedom, as much as I can anyway, and then...to accidentally and painlessly off all of us at some future juncture. Before they have to suffer through engineering college. Before they have to suffer through the disappointment of romantic relationships and all the defilements of the world. Simply to explode a CO2 bomb in the bathroom at that point, and quickly and quietly take my children with me out of this world. Though it would leave Chris with a little bit of pain, I am sure it would give him the strength to follow suit as well. I could take my greatest treasure out of this place of mindless suffering, and I don't know what happens then.
I guess it's terrible because I will be breaking one of God's commands on the way out. But I think the true and merciful God will understand. I think the God that desires a painless utopia - whose original plan that was - and whose final plan is also a utopia of animals not hurting each other, and humans being good stewards, and everyone serving and loving each other - the God of all Mercy - and who put love in my heart anyway - will that God actually stare at me implacably and condemn me forever for doing what was the most merciful thing I could do in my reasoning for the children? When my very motivation was not to hurt, or destroy, but rather to end their lives on the highest, purest note - before this world would rape them of all joy and happiness?
I feel so strongly that despite the indoctrination of this world, that God would have a heart of understanding and compassion. I don't think it would be a great mystery to Him as to "why couldn't you endure to the end better?" I just don't see a loving God asking this sort of question. My reply, in any case, would be rather easy - "because I didn't want my children to suffer needlessly in a system that seems to me to be just mindless, useless, suffering and decay." Will the God of all compassion and empathy really not understand that? Really have no empathy for that? Will the God that made me really be surprised by this action, the God who clearly designed me to be able to think of such an option, and to view it as the best one possible under some circumstances? Does not compute.
I guess there are the 10 commandments, but I really do think God will have mercy, in that - it could very well be argued that we were sadly born into the worst of times. A world with no Christian social support. A world with some kind of tyrannical capitalism torturing people through the full spectrum of their lives (whereas just 100 years ago all you needed was to add and subtract and you could live as a farmer). A place where you can't hold a job with any stability for 30 years, or have any hope of affordable healthcare. A place where everything is burning, and all the animals are slowly going extinct. A world where suggesting a turn towards more compassionate living brings total social ostracism, where women are viewed as expendable sex objects, and who themselves in turn adopt grotesque, impure ways of being, where all of nature is seemingly against you, and where increasingly, there's less and less place for family, much less large, stable, wonderful families. Will God really have no mercy in the face of all these extenuating circumstances?
I don't know.
Part of me feels like "it cannot stay terrible like this forever." Part of me feels, perhaps there will be some people's movement, or some regeneration of the churches, some shift in how everyone does things, or even the return of Christ Himself in the interim. That keeps me going a little bit.
But if it should come to the point where my children have to begin going through everything I went through, I will very lovingly, very kindly, assure them that all who call on the name of the Lord will be saved, and we will call on the name of the Lord, and explode our little CO2 tank, and I will die with all my children undefiled in our little house, and hopefully that will permanently end our affiliation and that of any of our spiritual progeny with this world. Because it is not a world worth prolongedly living in.
If we should lose an eternity in heaven over it, at least it is something that we will have never known. If we should lose the experiential love of God over it, then, surely that love was not so great to begin with having no empathy for our situation. But, I believe that God does have empathy for our situation. And given that our motive would not be to hurt or harm others, I believe God would understand. Perhaps we would not be some "pain heroes" in his Kingdom, or perhaps we would just get offed eternally, but still out of the available given options, I think even my children will agree, it will be best, especially if the world continues to get more wicked. And it's already pretty bad.
My life will conclude in the most intimate, best possible terms. My children and I, in a loving embrace, could be boldly going where no man has gone before. So to speak. Having loved each other all of our lives without any interfering mentality from the world - perhaps having spent a lifetime drawing pictures together - we would depart and leave this inferno to whomever enjoys it. We will have really gotten, all that could be gotten out of it - the togetherness of our own love.
Increasingly, I have less and less reservations about this being the best solution for the long term. I am no genius to join the ranks of the very intelligent who turn to suicide, but, I have something worse - "life experience". I in no way want my children to have a "curriculum vitae" here.
We will think happy positive thoughts. We will take into remembrance all the good things. The beauty of Autumn. The beauty of shared experiences beholding happily little animals. The shared experiences of meals together. The shared trips to the beach. The moments the world could not ruin. And hand in hand we will leave this place and leave it to someone else to contemplate when God might return to it, or what cosmic plan there is for it, or why so much cosmic suffering, etc. These interesting to daily contemplate questions will all end in the silence of sleep, and if Christ is coming back for us, it will be no big deal for Him to raise us up dead, than alive.
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