In response to “Meditative Musings,” Matt’s post last week about the nature of the world and the artist’s place within it, a reader asks why Matt feels hope in the face of the world’s many cruelties and injustices.

Matt responds:

Hope is being the stupid idiot in the newsroom, looking around calmly as everyone is running hither and thither and yon, and someone comes and says, “What’s wrong with Lamb?”

And someone answers, “Well, he doesn’t really understand the situation.”

I am cognizant of all the bad things going on in the world, and I could sit and do what I consider is the easy thing:  grab a bottle of Jack Daniels, sit in the corner, and wave farewell, slurping it down and looking for a nice chocolate cake to wash it down with.

But I’d rather look for the pony in the pile of horseshit.  I can hear it whinneying!  I know it’s in there!

If we make an effort to do something to change the world, maybe eventually the tide will turn.  The shit will grow flowers, the flowers will make seeds and make more flowers, and the world will be changed.

I have to believe that most people do give a damn about their families, themselves, the environment, and so on.  These are the majority of billions who are the unspoken, unheard masses.

The small percentage who want to dominate us, starve us, kill us, throw us in ovens, and cremate us before our time, are here—there’s no doubt about that.

But if we give up, then it’s a self-fulfilling phenomenon.

When I watch old documentary footage of wars and you see tens of thousands of people in interment camps, they’re surrounded by barbed wire and guards with guns.

It reminds me of the old stockyards:  tens of thousands of cattle moving around, surrounded by a fence and a slaughterhouse.  They don’t know what to do except stand and moo as they wait to be slaughtered.

I aim not to be one of the ones standing in line.

I’m going to continue my stupidity until the New Los Alamos takes root and our species becomes what it really should be:  a loving creature, not a little shit that thinks nothing of anything but itself.

It might sound stupid, but if all of us stupid people got together, we could clean up this mess.

I’ll go to my grave hoping, praying, and most of all, doing.  I’ll be the idiot in the shroud that thought I could change the world.

I’ll find out about it on the other side.

I’m glad you asked.  It’s a very valid question.

Matt