The Bridge: The End of Everything

By Darryl James

At the end of it all, this is an ugly world.

This is a world that is callous, crass, unenlightened and mean spirited, where people will attack other people simply to make themselves feel and/or look better. And then people wonder why someone can write as eloquently as I do, but still curse people out when they are being assheads.

People can easily pose as thinking, caring people, particularly with the Internet and it’s aura of enlightenment, but really, many of us know that most people are stupid and mean, posing as something they are unwilling to work on becoming, and so will never be because everything around them has become broken and dead.

Common courtesy is no longer common.

Excuse me. Pardon me. Thank you. Opening doors.  We’ve lost all of that and it’s been replaced with an overabundance of information that most people have no idea how to process.

Instead of applied knowledge, people regurgitate phrases that they’ve heard too many times and get emotionally attached to the phrases in discussions they are ill equipped for, using the phrases by rote in place of understanding.

This detachment from knowledge includes religion, particularly because most Christians have never read the Bible, yet they rely on the preacher to (mis)interpret and deliver (mis)understanding. How else could a religion based on a man who loved everyone be used to separate people—in his name no less?

And it is separating us.

Before America, religion brought people together. But the bastardized form in this nation is designed to separate. And many people who claim to be about love will hate me for saying it.

Culturally and socially, things are eroding and falling apart.

The economy is falling apart.

From entertainment to the news, those things which were once standard are falling from grace.

Everybody has a blog, and misinformation abounds.

The housing market has fallen apart and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men may not be able to put it back together again.

When you study structures, there are necessary outcomes.

If you set up a social dynamic, you will get a specific result.

In this liberal democracy—theoretically, there is no substance to this system. The democracy side is all rhetoric and theory—it can only be actualized under certain circumstances.  It only creates classism, racism and materialism and debauchery. Ultimately, every system has its Achilles heel—it’s inherent contradictions which will ultimately bring down its people to their demise, from the Romans to the Egyptians—America is no different.

We have reached the point of overproduction and underconsumption.

Take a look at McDonald’s and the Dollar Menu. Why is food suddenly cheaper? Everything else is rising, but food is now cheaper than it was years ago. Really?

There are not enough jobs and not enough demand for the services that exist, even though morons still tell young people to go to college and get a job.. Historically, we can track where we are.

When you get to the end phase, you see the wildness.

We’re headed to a Third World existence.  While people can’t conceive of it happening here, it can and it will. People can’t conceive of it because many people who are two paychecks away from poverty imagine themselves to be “middle class.”

But the US will be like the vacation spots where there are only the ultra rich and people who cannot eat.

In the course of natural order, things will get a whole lot more ruthless and people will become more screwed up.

And they are screwed up. Rudeness is the order of the day, even as people demand to be treated with kindness right after taking their stress out on someone innocent. Soccer moms fight each other and in the pursuit of beauty pageants, children have been assaulted by each other and by parents.

Strippers of yesterday would be called modest in comparison to the way nerds move today. Dances amongst young folks are so hypersexual, they are more sex than dance.

Sex is killing our children, but sex education has been under constant assault.

And without education, more mothers are having children without a male parenting partner and no one wants to ask some simple questions:  If the man was a deadbeat to other women/children, why have sex with him and add to the fatherlessness? Even if there is no man in the home, why can’t the single mother teach her kids what is right and wrong? And, if the child support system has failed to provide proper support to children, why is it being supported?

Black people imagine that saying “Nigger” in public is revolutionary and everyone uses our Civil Rights struggle as a platform without contributing anything to history or to us while we take it on the chin from any and everyone and then ponder the abject lack of respect we endure?

At the end of the day, we are all linked together, yet even the most united of groups in this nation are disconnected from the remainder, and we all should understand that when one falls, we all sink a little lower.

With diminishing morals and standards, politics and policy, American is slowly grinding itself to an end.

We think we are untouchable, but if we are not careful, we could soon see the end of everything.

Darryl James is an award-winning author of the powerful new anthology “Notes From The Edge.”  James’ stage play, “Love In A Day,” opened in Los Angeles in 2011 and will become a feature film in 2012. View previous installments of this column at http://www.bridgecolumn.proboards36.com. Reach James at djames@theblackgendergap.com.