The Heroes Are Dead
By The Colonel
This morning on my way to work I was listening to ‘Beyond Here Lies Nothin’, a new song off Bob Dylan’s new album ‘Together Through Life’. The opening of the song is unexpected and uncompromising, and there’s an intentional bitterness, despair and exhaustion in Dylan’s voice and how he delivers his words, and you’ll know what I mean once you listen to it:
I love you pretty baby
You’re the only love I’ve ever known
Just as long as you stay with me
The whole world is my throne
Beyond here lies nothin’
Nothin’ we can call our own
Over the course of 4 decades, Bob Dylan has proven to be a great critic and observer of the western culture and civilization. He has described it’s rise and fall, flourish and failure and triumph and demise in words that are sometimes clear and vivid, sometimes cryptic and enigmatic, sometimes uplifting, sometimes gloomy and always fascinating. Take for instance this new song: it’s amazing how he nails the very essence of our frightening emptiness, fading hopes and slaughtered dreams in such few words.
Our materialistic ideology, our inflated sense of co-dependency and entitlement and our delusion of righteousness and invincibility along with our absolute disregard and disrespect for every other beings, cultures and species have infected, blinded and corrupted us. Our hearts are blackened and our spirits are poisoned; and as we stand on the verge of self destruction and oblivion, we still refuse to see the truth, we still refuse to learn from our mistakes, and we still refuse to let go of dreams that for far too long have turned into haunting nightmares.
We live our lives inside convenient, safe boxes, we’re like a fish swimming in a bowl without knowing about the big waters outside it’s safe four little walls or daring to explore them. We are taught to worship one god, pledge to one love, serve one government, and live and die under one roof. As if all the purpose in the universe, all that is and ever will be, the alpha and the omega is us and our small lives, and going back to Dylan’s song, beyond here lies nothin’. That my friends, is indeed ignorance, intellectual bankruptcy and spiritual disease, a gripping, inescapable doom that no savior can save us from.
For far too long we have exhausted, exploited and exterminated every possible life source on this planet: we turned free animals into our amusing pets, trees into our toilet papers and oceans into our dumpsters. We invaded people in their countries and homes, raped them, tortured them and murdered them and justified our unjustifiable acts as bringing liberty and justice to them.
In pursuing illusions of happiness and prosperity, we became slaves to the grind, servants of gluttonous evil corporations and allowed them to invade our privacy and shape our emotions and thoughts and dictate our needs and priorities: every American must live in a borrowed house and consume multiple credit cards to buy Chinese manufactured garbage and eat junk food and watch amateur idiots on TV. The greed is good and the more is better; and look what it’s gotten us, look what they did to us. Broken pride, shattered lives, lost souls. One nation under god, in debt, on it’s knees. Is this what you want? Is this what you were searching for? Is this what you were promised?
It’s too late for delivering humanity from morbidity and saving the world and making it a better place, it’s too late for coming together and living as one in peace and harmony, it’s too late for foolish fantasies that exchange the cold, hard facts of the real world for an imaginary Utopia. We are way too corrupted and decadent for any of that. The game is over and the heroes are dead.
But what each of us can do as individuals is educating ourselves, seeking purpose beyond the four little walls of our convenient boxes, understanding and accepting our place in the universe and realizing that we are neither the beginning nor the end, that we are only a small spot in a much larger picture, that all things may not end with the death of our physical body and material world, that there’s much more to it than we can comprehend; and therefore becoming dependent on a materialistic life and being defined by it’s merits is like building a house of cards, all it takes for it to be scattered is a push. We need to take the best of our lives and the time that has given to us to enjoy the simple pleasures of life and better ourselves and explore our consciousness, awareness and spirituality.
A life based on self deception, greed, ignorance and enslavement can and will never be fulfilled, for if a materialistic life within a safe box is what you’re seeking, brother you are going down. Beyond that life lies nothin’.