SAD OF THE EARTH Ayad Gharbawi As thinking creatures we must evolve mentally towards achieving a humanity within ourselves for whereas physical growth proceeds unguided mental growth requires a continual and firm guidance on the part of ourselves with the help of society and culture. So people believe, as adults, that they are ‘human beings’. Biologically so, but mentally they are not for the truth is most of Mankind do not struggle mentally in increasing their awareness of life’s constituents. The average person is no Ghandi or Martin Luther King or Guevara. To be ‘human’ means mental struggle, it does not appear casually - for ironically most people’s lives are routine in terms of work, and lifestyle, yet mentally most people exist casually, rarely thinking in and of itself, rather, more often reacting to events that surround them. Why do most people exist so casually with their minds? The vast majority of people are sad and sadness is a stigma, just as in truth, loneliness is also a stigma. Rarely will a person who is asked, ‘How do you feel?’ reply ‘I feel lonely’. Furthermore, sadness amongst us all seems a relentless enemy clinging to our routine daily lives. The sad of the earth see futility’s face when it comes to mental evolution for themselves. The sad of the earth exist with a thousand and one griefs: self-hatred, self-shame and fear and so on. So, abused, reviled and chronically ignored by culture, the sad of the earth exist on through their lives daily coping with their mental burden via drunkenness, violence and self deception. We speak of the sad of the earth and that segment of people who endure and suffer the most from grief - women, for they do not evolve mentally while their identity is raped and their womanhood is rendered extinct and repressed and so they are not true ‘women’, but the acting out of the patriarchal ideas. The average woman today is not mentally a woman from the aspect of the profound and unique sense of womanhood. The greatest absurdity is the self-deception by women who seriously believe themselves to be mentally women. Thus they do not struggle to be a woman, and to embrace her exotic womanhood that has nothing to do with patriarchalist’s dreams perverse. Sad of the earth everywhere and within us and within you. Recollections of life dramatically vague, while conversations appear empty, repetitative and predictable. Despair is not merely a resident of the so-called ‘intellectuals’, rather it lies with the vast majority of troubled humanity. What a liar and hypocrite politics turns out to be, for if the latter’s aim and goals and tasks are to alleviate humankind’s woes and stress then little of that goal and task has been reached by politicians, political authorities and so-called ‘scholars’. Politics has been boring to the masses precisely because the authorities and the so-called ‘scholars’ have rendered its essence chained and unheard and thus the authorities with the political power, along with the ruling elites, have stripped politics of its basic and fundamental raison d’etre. Politics that is stripped of its essential task has become a boring entity – it is an irrelevance to the majority, for in politics people do not see the essential humanitarianism within it. Humanitarianism has been murdered, sacrificed for greed and a world that easily sells manufactured and utterly destructive symbols and concepts like sex, violence and drugs for Man’s mental consumption. It is indeed the lobotomization of human beings, and those in despair will readily fall ill from the bland Disneyland ‘culture’ and ‘philosophy’ our poor planet is gradually drowning in. The withering of humanitarianism is masked by the powerful euphemism of high technology – for they tell us we are entering the ‘Age of High Technology’ which is actually a threat but which is always spoken in the most kind tones – even though their intentions are grievous, for high-tech is a grand tool to make Man a mere idiotic, passive so-called ‘human’. The ‘Age of High-Tech’, the ‘Globalization of our World’ – all these phrases and facts are deliberate and simple attempts to retaliate against what is really, in truth, the Age of the Death of Man. Ayad Gharbawi