A Manifesto

Ours is a nation of insecurity and arrogance.

Our idols are false and we know this

(yet we continue to pursue them as ideals).

We perpetuate a profoundly deep and damaging existential crisis

as we seek these impossible (and inhuman) standards:

gods that never existed

in whose image we were not created

and with power they do not have

damn us to continue in an existence we do not want.

but it is the only existence we have.

We hold them up, these golden calves,

though their enhanced features disappoint our mirrors,

and their success is but a smelting of our tawdry desires,

of them we are so proud—

whose can compare with ours?!—

And the dissonance continues

because we know that these gods will never be,

and that we will never be these gods,

that we’ve placed our meaning in the meaningless.

But we are so proud.

And we do not match up.

But we are all we are.

We fear intimacy

and out of this fear we bastardize it.

We fear vulnerability

and out of this fear we lose our chance to matter.

We fear failure

and out of this fear we fail—

we fail to try,

we fail to live,

we fail to be human.

But human is all we can be.

Let us reject this insecurity.

Let us reject this arrogance.

Let us live

to try

to be.