An Epiphany

When it rains... I'm attaching two things I wrote for my Creative Writing class last summer. This is the first.

I had an epiphany... well sort of.

A friend of mine, let's call him Jan (because that's his name), and myself have been exchanging slightly ludicrous emails about godhood – mainly my godhood or rather what I would do if I were God (or at least, a god).

It got me thinking – no I haven't seen Bruce Almighty but everyone has thought about this at least once and if you haven't you don't have a shred of creativity or imagination – what would I do if I were god?

At first all the "me" stuff came in: the requisite riches, wealth, palaces, talk show dates, and open auditions for my angels. One must have a heavenly host to sing one’s praises after all. Now Jan, poor naïve Jan, thought that what I had in mind would not fit the idea of the "purity" and "holiness" of angels. Poor, poor Jan. Angels are not little cupids. I mean these guys razed cities, rebelled against the Lord and overpopulated the Earth so much with their illegitimate children that God had to send a deluge (which is like a flood but more dramatic) to get rid of the vermin. Does this sound like "pure" and "holy" to you?

Angels aren't those renaissance cherubs that grace the paintings of the masters; they're more like incandescently-beautiful rock stars. Think Jude Law, Colin Farrell, Brad Pitt (I know they're all movie stars, I'm a film buff not a rocker), piss-eyed drunk, stumbling out of the bar, eyes all bloodshot, clothes all over the place, wings gray and dirty, with an underage girl in one arm and a boytoy in another, singing "kyrie eleison" off key and to the tune of "Bullets and Butterfly Wings" and you're getting close to what I have in mind.

Fun as this train of thought is, I decided to seriously think about it – or at the very least go beyond my usual ego-trips. If I had the power of god, what would I do?

Would I do anything for the environment? Contrary to what you might think, I don't think the planet's going to hell in a hand-basket. I think the planet's doing fine. It's the capacity for the planet to support human life that's going to Hades. I mean cockroaches and mosquitoes would probably survive (wouldn’t they just?). Tubeworms will not give a hoot if we burn out all our oxygen and the only thing left to breathe up here is methane. Heck the common cold will probably kick back at the end of the day, downing a cold beer at a pub somewhere and talk about us humans like a cool vacation spot that went potty.

What I think is terrible is that we're bringing so many critters with us to extinction. Life will probably go on, just not how we know it. So would I do anything? If I could wave my hands and make the air breathable, let the trees grow back, bring the endangered animals out of risk, clean the oceans, make all that garbage go away, take out the toxins and radiations in our water and our soil, would I do it? If it were me, Jubal, yes I would, in an instant. But if I could do that then I'm not just Jubal, I'm god. I'm the parent, not the child. So I have to think like a parent.

Changing things drastically overnight won't help because people would just go on as they did before. They probably won't even notice. The way we're built, we don't realize the importance of something until it's gone. What would be the point of doing all of that if it doesn't fix the problem in the first place? The problem isn't that we have too much garbage; it's that we don't know how to handle our waste. We just throw it away and hope someone else will take care of it. The problem is not that there isn't space in this world for humans and animals to live together; the problem is humans want more for themselves. If I were god, I can't make this decision for everyone else. I'd sooner just remove humans altogether (and where would be the fun in that?).

One thing I know (head-knowledge, I don't know this in the gut, haven't really experienced it personally – but sometimes head-knowledge is better than gut-knowledge. I don't need to be shot in the foot to know that isn't a good idea) about power is that once you use it, you have to keep on using it, all the time. You see, by using your power you elicit a response. The kind of power you use and the magnitude, how much you use of it, will bring about a similar response with equal kind and measure (don't believe me? Ask Newton. Still don't believe me? Try this experiment: go outside of your house and push the first person you see as hard as you can. Keep doing this until either he/she can't get up or you can't (either because she beat the crap out of you or you are now presently in jail awaiting trial for assault and battery) that’s how you exercise power and how the use of power elicits a response).

So it is important that you carefully choose what kind of power you exercise. That's why power through force never works in the long-term because the choice of using force breeds more force. You push people, they push back. They might not always be successful but they can be a damn nuisance (or get someone else to push you back harder, like your mother – sometimes force is not always a physical manifestation). You can cut down trees to create farms and furniture and buildings and stuff, but you also open yourself up to landslides and mudslides and the full fury of hurricanes.

This is the reason why I don't like guns (and in the bigger picture, nukes). I've fired a gun and I got this huge buzz from doing it. It scares me that someone like me, who hates guns, can feel that way (and if you're wondering why I fired one if I hate them so much, well it's like giving a movie a bad review. You can't, with integrity, diss a movie you haven't seen) about firing a gun. Don't get me wrong, I watch action movies, read books where people blow each other away in a grand scale but I think guns, and their ilk, is the easy way out. By using guns, i.e. force, to solve our problems we only invite other people to use their guns to solve their problems, i.e. us.

So what kind of power should we exercise then? There are lots of choices: persuasion, bribery, deceit, love, compassion, passive-aggressiveness, and so on; but my favorite is Enlightenment. You can show people the way but you can't force them to take the path. Like the USA and the Kyoto Protocols. You can show them that the best way for all of us to survive is to sign up, but it would wrong to force them to sign because they wouldn't be enlightened, just resentful. Ever had a resentful employee? They can make your life a living hell, particularly if they're smart about it so you can't really fire them.

If I was god, truly a god, I would – though I hate to admit it – probably do the same thing the current deity is doing now. God could make your life easier, but when was the last time we appreciated anything that came easy?

Despite what I've said, I believe in the human race as a whole – maybe not my fellow Filipinos, we are all so focused on the short-term it's surprising we haven't imploded this week – and that we'll come to a realization, an epiphany if you will, and come out all right. We’ll be bruised, battered and scarred but, on the whole, all right; with a deeper appreciation of the worth of things around us. The world will be a whole lot shittier by then, but by gum, we’ll appreciate it!