Time never passed, the present is a replay, and the future is a travel ad.
Humanity's evolutionary process is slow, and chronological time is laughable. When researching history and archaeology, you only need to turn one page and a thousand years are gone. Ages above 90 years seem long, but from a cosmic standpoint they're just as fast as any 20 years.
We live very little in a time built on lies. You open your eyes and 50 years have already gone by. Your 20s are somewhere in the desert dust, a flimsy memory. What did you do in 1980 that Carnival Saturday, what did you do on January 1st, 1990? What did you do yesterday around 4pm? Events get swallowed up in the night and end up down the drain. What sticks in your throat is only debris — that's what always stays.
The 20th century flew by at the speed of Formula 1 engines. The 21st century will fly by at the speed of F-15s. Yet here we are, a quarter into this century, with parts of humanity still dragging carts pulled by donkeys. That's the 16th century. In some countries, carts are pulled by humans — that's the 11th century. In Brazil there are areas still stuck before Christ, with murky water and sewage pooling in holes in the ground.
Around the world there are 90 countries with regions still in the Stone Age, about 3.6 billion people without sanitation or clean water. Clean water, for that matter, is a rarity even for the other 5 billion. Companies treat water with brute force, dumping heavy metals to kill bacteria, and end up killing us instead with chlorine, ozone, potassium permanganate, fluoride, aluminum. Whoever has an artesian well with water straight from some forest reserve holds a goldmine of life. But that goldmine will soon be wiped out once the forests are burned.
Not long ago people died of smallpox. The vaccine, discovered by chance in the 18th century, helped save a great many people. But what is a vaccine, really? Nothing more than an offspring of the virus (or bacillus) thrown into the human body to activate its defenses.
When the real, full-blown virus shows up, the body is already primed and repels it. The vaccine is nothing but a messenger carrying the warning of an attack. The heavy lifting is the body's own job — it has to sort itself out. That's how science operates in the service of capitalism — it hands the body ammunition so the destructive model never has to change.
The dead are just side effects. The dead count for nothing.
We're in the 21st century of the new era, and yet we're still in the 21st century of the old one. Right now, at least ten bloody conflicts are underway around the world. Beyond Russia, Ukraine, Israel against women, children, the elderly, and Hamas, new wars are devastating Burkina Faso, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, Myanmar, Nigeria, and Syria.
The difference compared to antiquity is the type of weaponry. By the 30th century, the difference will be the speed of each death and the preservation of buildings and vehicles. The trouble with wars has always been material loss. Fine, that's part of the deal — afterward the engineering companies make fortunes rebuilding cities just to destroy them all over again. To be fair, this model isn't even prehistoric. Cavemen and cavewomen never destroyed their own homes.
The centuries march on, technologies keep outdoing themselves, yet humanity keeps crawling under the barbed wire of combat training. Today I learned that war games are an epidemic in elementary schools. Seven-year-olds hooked on shooting and killing. It's become a real struggle for parents and teachers to keep this destructive frenzy from invading schools and homes.
The entertainment industry runs on warfare. Free War Games online, Star Wars, Tug of War, Combat, free Bloody Games, Shooting Games dominate the landscape. Nobody wants happy-ending little stories anymore — endings need to be chaotic. That's the 13th century: executioners cheered on, bonfires celebrated along with their witches, warriors blessed by the gods and later by priests, pastors, gurus. Time never passed, the present is a replay, and the future is a travel ad.