we are stumbling. this age of complete expression.

I was flipping through channels. A show on sex toys. Willie Wonka and the chocolate factory. Hillary Clinton's office held up by a bomber. The fabulous lives of the rich and famous. Biggest celebrity splurges. A movie about the conquest of the native american west where the US govt threatened "if you do not touch the pen and sign this treaty, your people will perish."

In a clip of American Beauty the main character refers to his living room and says "this isn't life, this is just stuff".

I felt a deep deep sadness tonight. I realized for the first time that I live in a country, in a time, in a culture, in a political system, a religious system, a monetary system, and ultimately, a place in history. Someday, all of these memories will be washed away, much like Rutger Hauer's character in Blade Runner says "like tears in the rain"

We are in an age of everything, everything to the max. Self expression and entitlement is the new face of youth. Greed and composure the new face of middle age. Regret and health care the face of old age. It's an odd time to be alive.

It can also be a remarkable time to be living, depending on where your head is at and where you were born.

Everytime I turn around I learn that you must leave your own heart and become yourself to survive, but what if one aspires to live like Christ?

Not really. Let's get real here folks.

How about "aspires to live in attainment of self fulfillment while occasionally giving God the glory for your state of being"

That's probably a little closer. Guilty as charged.

I was, probably for the first time, ashamed to be an 'american' tonight. Not ashamed of America, which is a wonderful thing, a dream, and a great idea, but ashamed of the way we as a culture behave. Have always behaved. Instead of sharing the vastland and resources that exist in the hundreds of millions of square miles of territory in north america with it's original inhabitants, we allowed our European roots and clouded racism to take over and we destroyed entire cultures for our own gain. I am ashamed of that. Instead of working hard and innovating to create new ways to work farmland, or at worst, offer jobs to African workers, we instead boxed them up and hauled them 7,000 miles from their homes (again destroying an entire culture) in order to enrich our already enriched society.

I'm not going to lie - I am a capitalist at heart - I believe in free speech and free commerce. I'm a filmmaker and a musician, I HAVE to believe in those things to live, to exist, to have any hope of making a living doing the things I feel I was meant to do, but good grief do we have a history of doing two things: 1. destroying other cultures for monetary gain and replacing them with our own and 2. creating wealth

A great amount of the world has been 'americanized' because of our wealth, commercial imperialism and arrogant social underpinnings. It's just the truth.

I still love America the beautiful, this great nation God has blessed so richly, but durnit, I wish we could go back in history and get a 'do-over' in some areas.

Arguably, we are the most tolerant, pluralistic society the world has ever known at this point. I think some social progress has been made, but it's also evident that moral regression has happened as well. IS there some sort of trade off? Cruelty and intolerance leads to higher standards of moral purity? That's not how Jesus saw things.

Everything is just a big frieken circle people. We'll eventually end up where we started.

Alone with nowhere to look but up.

trying to look up.