for milenia, man has been creating games and passtimes for the purpose of mimicking life on a smaller scale.
games like go, chess, and risk teach us the strategies of war. monopoly teaches us how to ruin the lives and well being of others by being a morally bankrupt real estate mogul. life helps us deal with the surrender of all meaning and ambition in our lives to the the empty, cookie-cutter minutiae of suburban living. jenga teaches us how to build precariously tall, structurally unsound towers, and grand theft auto teaches us how to punch a hooker in the teeth, rape her in the back seat of a stolen "toyolla corota", then steal her purse and leave her for dead. and, apparently, rubik's cube teaches me how to be some kind of queer who thinks he's better than you (that's what that guy at the bar told me, anyhow).
imagine what a bleak world we would live in if we didn't grow up subliminally learning these life skills, by making them into fun, family time games.
oh, it's raining out, what should we do? i know! let's bilk mom out of her rental properties on baltic avenue, then crush dad's railroad empire while he's in jail, shooting craps for his freedom.
done with your homework, hoytt? good boy. you've earned some xBox time. now run along and practice gunning down the cops. remember, old people make great human shields.
but as funny (and scary) as it is to think that our possible futures had been shaped by innocent games for ages 3-99 (the hundred+ crowd play much more dangerous versions. instead of operation, they play high risk invasive surgery. instead of risk, they play a game called dubbya dubbya 2: post traumatic stress. the point of that game is to avoid snapping into a dementia driven, fight-or-flight, homicidal rampage when everyone jumps out and yells "surprise!" at your birthday party, because they didn't know you haven't been taking your meds since your insurance filed your PTS as a pre-existing condition last month...) it's even scarier to think that a large part of the problems we face as adults, not just in our personal lives, but as a society, and a species, in general are probably caused by forced adherence to religion since before we are old enough understand what is going on in the world around us.
think about how many wars, invasions, revolutions, colonizations, coups, and crusades have been driven by religion. think about the fact that the founding fathers included not one instance of religion in the original constitution, declaration, pledge of allegiance, monetary imagery, or any political oath, aside from the protection of freedom of religion, which interestingly enough, comes secondarily to the statement "congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion...", yet, by now, god has found his way into every one of those things. think about the moral, and even simple life choices we make with religion on our minds. how many people care whether or not they have sex before they get married? how many people care that they are supposed to care? hell, the fact that anyone would even think of marriage as a part of life is a testament to how deeply ingrained religion is in our psyches.
but we've come to a funny little crook in the road of god-fearing human existence. we've come to a place where we now have the capacity to play god, and not just in the sense of games like the sims, or warcraft where we get to control every tiny little detail of an entire microverse, or a game like second life where we get to create an entirely new life for ourselves, and reimagine it the way we would prefer, if we were in charge of "godly" decisions like what color our skin is, how big our sexually desirables are, how much we get paid, and whether or not our garage alt-rock bands made it big after highschool. no, in the real world we have taken ourselves down a road to a place where we have no choice but to play god.
case in point, we have created (yes we have created them, however incidentally) intersex fish. not the kind that throw trash at you from the back of their pimp's scooter on a backstreet in bangkok, either. the kind that have both sets of reproductive organs and swim around in the potomac river.
the glorious potomac, once a babbling beacon of america, is now a sludge filed cesspool of liquid toxic crap (the title of babbling beacon of america is now held by gaffin' joe biden, and the title of sludge filed cesspool of liquid toxic crap is being hotly disputed by rush limbaugh) full of deformed, hermaphroditic fish swimming around in circles, impregnating themselves. herein lies the rub: we did this to nature, but nature is simply responding and evolving to a change in the environment that was put in place outside of natural control (does it seem funny to anyone else, that we can discuss human actions as though they are not natural actions, yet we refuse to believe that human behavior is unnatural?). so do we accept that humans are, in essence, the next ice age, the catastrophic element that will significantly alter the nature of life on earth forever after us? or do we try to change it back?
the fact is, we can't change it back now. sure, we might fix the river before the entire population of fish goes both ways. but what about the plastics we use? they can't be taken back, and will eventually have to be digested by some new animal, or some newly evolved animal that has the capacity to do so. if we don't allow this adaptation, then we risk living as humans for a far greater period of time, but in a pile of our own trash with no other living things to keep us company. what about the oil we pump out of the ground? we leave gaping caverns in the earth that will, once pressure is released, and pumping stops, collapse in on themselves, creating canyons and craters of gritty petroleum sludge, where nothing we know of today could live, and it's too late now, the corks have been popped and the tops of the oil reserves have been pumped. if we don't go all the way on this, we don't stand a chance of avoiding it, we only doom ourselves to rocky petroleum lakes, rather than goopy petroleum valleys.
the fact is, we've already shat all over the planet. we can't take it back now. the best we can do is stop. just, for the love of god, if you believe in one, stop for a moment and think about all the things we don't need in our lives, all the ways in which we play god, all the reasons for which we feel we are the gods of earth, all the reasons we care what god thinks of how we live our lives, and when we start our lives up again, leave out those things we don't need, stop living as though we are the most important thing in the natural world; the last line of defense. stop living as though we have a higher purpose that justifies the depletion and destruction of the natural world for our own devices. stop living as though an invisible geriatric in the sky will give us a good grade when we shuffle off this mortal coil (my highschool english teacher was right, i would use that later...)
stop and take a moment to come to terms with the fact that, if there is a god out there, we are nothing more to that god than a bunch of mutant fish swimming around in a diseased river. or perhaps, if there is a god, we are nothing more to that god than a silly game to pass the time.
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