cur⋅mudg⋅eon: noun - a bad-tempered, difficult, cantankerous person.
I'm getting crankier with age. It's sunny, about 70 degrees outside on a gorgeous November day, and I feel like the Grinch with the coming holiday season.
I've always thought there was a high correlation between general pissiness and age. Old people were cranky because their lives were devoid of substance. They can afford the time to stew on the things that bother them.
The better my life is in this bubble I've created, the more I feel powerless to change anything on the outside. The differences between 'them' versus 'me' harden, and where vestiges of sameness remains, it's aggrandizes the rage at my impotence to change the world.
There's the rub. The older I get, the more I realize that the world is populated by ignorance, the vapid stupidity that comes with sloth. So many wrongs fester because of this unblinking evil – and they seep into my life not by tempestuous events, but slowly, until they stain the fabric of my everyday with a weaselly kind of darkness.
Two sources of my crankiness at the moment:
Consumption: How many ads do I see over the course of the day? The only place devoid of advertising that I can remember was in southwestern China, near the border of Burma. It was only there, in the small radius of about two days hard travel, that I had respite from ads. How many useless things are pushed on us everyday? I especially hate car ads. They epitomize the utter uselessness of our culture, built on the engine of lazy consumption to drive greater pointless consumption. We are beseeched to purchase things we don't need, to want products that are designed to break down, to feed the monsters of greed and jealous wants, and by feeding it we are complicit, approving with our pocketbooks the exploits of the Exxons and GMs and Dow. We consign ourselves to the whirls and flashes of baubles -- our fears masquerading as dreams...
Religious dogma: Fearing – hating – people different from you is an awfully hard way of thinking to grow out of. It's doubly hard when that hatefulness is justified by beliefs derived from religion. By it's emphasis on faith, on the extra-rational reasons for morality, on the finality of a Higher power, any logical argument against such hatred or fears is nullified when you reach the (ironic) logical conclusion of "because God said so". It's an argument popular with exasperated mothers. It didn't make sense to me when I was growing up and it doesn't make sense to me now.
Racism, gender-ism and the worst kinds of evils in the world, from intellectual castration to physical and mental matrydom, derives from an unblinking belief in the irrational. Religious dogma seeps in sanitized versions into the everday, a clever cover-up of any contradictions through festivals and holidays and the welcoming embrace of communal traditions. Most religious people in modern society don't confront the hypocrisy of their lives until they mine deep for veins of intolerance and hate. But take the commandments of religion to their conclusions and the contradictions are stark – fight the supposed immorality or remain impure, cast those who are different aside or risk contamination, heaven vs hell, righteous vs sinners ... it doesn't take much before violence, bigotry and hatred rises from the recesses of our irrational selves.