Maybe. Maybe not. I'm a few years off sixty, so with any luck I won't have to face more than another decade or two of this madness anyway. I'm gonna ramble a bit - apologies in advance. I suppose it's worth mentioning that I'm not really too unhappy with my state of affairs. Sure, I've a lot of bitterness, but when you look at what my generation has allowed to take place, then it wouldn't exactly be normal or rational for any of us to be all that chipper about the whole thing. Some still are, though, and it weirds me the fuck out. My misanthropy stems from nothing less than an honest appraisal of society: Most people are peasants, with peasant mindsets, all too eager to be taken by the neck and led to wherever their leaders tell them it's good to go. They take no initiative, even to save themselves from destruction, instead happily swallowing a pleasant lie and going on with what they were told. Maybe part of this comes from being a '60s kid, and growing up during a time when it was felt that people could stand together and demand change in their world. Too bad we blew all that momentum and energy demanding the worst things. Or maybe it's because I grew up in the states, and adopted a very white-man view of compassion - which led later to a sincere appreciation for all of the world's peoples and their cultures, all of which I now see facing destruction. In aggregate, there's no strength, no virtue, and almost no courage remaining in humanity. There are just small, isolated pockets of people, trying to stand up for something and being viciously attacked by society at large for the unforgivable crime of not falling in line. In my heart of hearts, behind all the pretense and the violent rhetoric, I find violence both regrettable and inevitable. I look around me and see a world of shallow, selfish tribes, who will be kept from getting what they want by nothing less than the puerile demand that everyone else get what they want as well. This used to pain me because I was left wondering why nobody corrected them, why nobody stepped up and showed them the right path, *why nobody helped these people*. Then, with experience, I came to realise that people had - or at least that they had tried. Dozens, hundreds of them, all in the same futility; because the fuckers don't want to listen. So, we're forced to pick sides, to choose not good, but the lesser of evils. "Good" becomes the lie we tell ourselves. A post-facto justification for the evil we were forced to become simply to survive. But all the same, thank you. I appreciate the sentiment, and maybe in balance, my general misanthropy and grumpy demeanour can be counteracted by an unflinching loyalty to my friends, and an unwavering commitment to true virtue; to actual human flourishing, for all peoples under their own terms. Maybe that's just the pleasant lie I've chosen. Regardless, don't be too taken in by my mutterings. I'm just another internet rando, bloviating endlessly into the void. Maybe all of this can someday stand as a historical record, if one only perused by those weirdos who study the strange minutiae of times gone by.