PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

Well, no.



Again I have succumbed to one of the myriad atrocities I commit against my existence akin to self-mutilation:  Internet TV.  Free Internet TV.  Free Internet TV reruns.  And even worse:  Star Trek reruns.   Yes, it is even harder to look up and see the bottom when any reruns at all constitute the substance of one's life, especially science fiction reruns.  This evening, I treated myself to the ridiculous torture of Star Trek:  The Next Generation.  The episode was was entitled "Who Watches The Watchers"--or something like that--  which was playing on Spike TV, which I have dubbed "The Testosterone Channel."



How much longer will my intellect endure such assaults from me, before it commits suicide by jumping the sinking ship that is my mind?



In this episode, captain Jean-Luc Picard and the crew of the Enterprise have accidentally violated "The Prime Directive":  No interference with the development and culture of another species.  On the planet surface a hidden Federation observation post nestled in the face of a mountain goes on the fritz and is exposed; a local villager is badly injured  when he receives a jolt by the post's malfunctioning cloaking device and tumbles from a rocky precipice.  Captain Picard makes the decision to beam him up to the ship's sick bay.  They repair his wounds, but Dr. Beverly Crusher must erase any memory the alien might have of his experience.  But WHOOPS!  Something goes wrong:  The memory block fails to take, the guy remembers seeing and/or hearing the name "Picard." The bewildered village man goes back to his people, telling them of his experience.  Thus, a new god is born:  "THE PICARD."



The solution? The Picard beams the female village leader up to the Enterprise and she witnesses the death of one of The Picard's own people; even Dr. Crusher's medical intervention is not enough. This is proof enough to the woman that these "gods" are just highly-advanced people. But the village idiots on the planet need more proof.  Meanwhile, counselor Deanna Troi is about to be sacrificed to The Picard; since their village chief is nowhere to be found and the sky fills with lightning,  that must mean that The Picard is angry and they must sacrifice Deanna to appease him. Captain Picard beams down to the village with their chief intact, and he has to endure a wound from an arrow shot into his left shoulder by one of the idiots--the same guy who fell off the mountain.  That village numbskull actually had to see blood exiting from Picard's wound, in order to be convinced that there is no god.



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Wild, huh?



Look:  I am not Paul Harvey.  If you want to know "the rest of the story,"  I suggest that you pray to the god of syndication, engage in the religious rite of channel surfing wih your remote control devices, and watch the episode yourselves.



Of course, we highly logical earth people of today don't kill or torture people because the invisible man tells us to.  Humanity does NOT have a history of burning, crucifying or stretching people on a medieval rack to the point of insanity or death, simply because our victims aren't part of the International Coalition of Religious Psychos. And we have NEVER sacrificed virgins to The Volcano God nor any other god our cracked craniums can dream up.  Even when an extremely empathetic and gifted Jewish guy came along over two thousand years ago, humanity remained ever loyal to the pursuit of reason by NOT crucifying him because he enraged the religious hustlers who were unable to ride on his coattails of popularity.  What these despots did instead, in order to restore their absolute power, was to steal his body from its tomb and promote him to the status of a deity.  Oh, that's right:  THEY DIDN'T DO THAT.



Oh, and we do NOT deny people their basic civil liberties or human needs--food, housing, clothing, friends, family, love and acceptance, etc.--because they don't worship as we do.



I wish that all the above events weren't true.  I wish they were only a part of a TV science fiction episode script.  No, this is not a TV episode; this is reality.  If you the reader want to continue to fling poo at "non-believers," that's your choice.  We can choose to remain in ignorance.  Or, we can choose to believe in ourselves and our own abilities.  We can use the god-like gifts the universe has given us (at least I can see the universe) in order to make somebody's day on Earth a little easier.  



Or--as we have done since our beginning--, we can choose to believe in something that does not exist, turn our backs on humanity and evolution, and wait for the end.



No, there is no Picard.  And no, I have not won 10 million dollars in the U.K. lottery; no, I do not have 13 million U.S. dollars waiting for me at some bank in Nigeria.  But I do have me.  "Bad stuff" doesn't last forever. Though my body is ailing, I can still feel breath entering my body.  And, as it exits, I know that I'm alive for now, and that life is good.