becoming the onlooker
Can we, only for a moment, step outside and attempt to view our culture and society as if an onlooker. Before you lies a vision of the world, the values of modernity in which we hold up flash before your eyes at unknowable speed.
Our fantastic metal machines zip by on gray, monotonous roads. The complex web of roadwork leads towards a stunning metropolis.
A vibrant street in the night paints the shadows of hundreds of people walking, a somber lady in a red velvet dress calls a cab.
The stunning shine of a gold wristwatch is seen, only for a moment. The flashes of cameras beckon forth the picture of a newly appointed rising talent.
These are only a select few of the moments you manage to catch in this stream of consciousness. To us who were born into this society we find these things so natural, so necessary in our world. Now, you are confused by all that happens. The world is foreign, you have lost all context for why any of this exists in the first place.
Like a newborn child learning about the world, you look on in amazement and curiosity.
Whiplash. Your vision stirs, A new picture begins to form.
A man at a drive-thru orders a bucket of chicken wings, he is the only one in the car. A child searches the trash can for any semblance or scrap of a meal they can find.
An empty vacation home sits near the beach in silence, the colors of autumn begin to show. A man lays on a bench in the park nearby, cold.
A lifeless drone lays waste to a village, creating a vivid canvas of blood and rubble. The drone operator talks about his wife and kids to a coworker.
When you become the onlooker, gazing upon society without the context and reasoning, what would you feel? Watching over the people, like ants, going forward and backward to the same place every day. Their short lives dedicated to something that looks empty; devoid of meaning.
Would you feel sad?
But you are not the onlooker, you are human. You exist in this system, yet you feel as if you stepped outside of your world and viewed another, one you are not a part of. You watched wars take the lives of innocent children, you watched poverty sweep through many countries after a hurricane, you watched people be denied a place to live and wither away in the streets of a wealthy metropolis, you watched families wonder when their next meal will come, if ever.
When you were the onlooker, you wept.
Now that your learned and lived experiences of society and culture have returned, your tears seem to have dried up.
