Rising, Falling

I stood looking into the well of the corporate building at which I work. Two small moths were -what? fighting, mating, playing? - battering back and forth at each other as they rose, as two, in a spiral, upwards. They ascended almost to the level, one storey above, at which I stood watching them. Suddenly, their spiral collapsed, and the moths fell, still locked in battle/love/play, to the ground.

I turned away, thinking of Police forces and ex-policemen I have known.
Three of them, to be exact - all of them carrying intense burdens in their spiritual, mental and emotional baggages. Two of them have worked alongside me in corporate Fraud and Security, and one continues as a Private Investigator. The anger just under the surface of control is unarguable. One of them - the PI - seems unable to set boundaries on his ingestion of alcohol and prescription medication. He also has stomach cancer.

We point our fingers and snarl at corruption in the Police Force, seeming shocked that such defenders of the peace could be so open to bribery and kickbacks. And we really scream when they descend into the pits of crime themselves.

But there's a fine line - not easily walked - between the perpetrators and the preventers of crime in our society.

Talking with colleagues earlier in the day, asking who taught the African politicians and business people to be so materialistic, so grasping, so greedily aspirant.
Why, that's an easy one - we did. By we of course I'm referring to the people who usually ask this question, who sneer down their patrician noses at the banana republics of Africa - the white colonials. In whose number I count myself, but with whose attitudes I rarely agree.
The folk of Africa have had a few hundred years of stewing in the cauldron of material wealth being the ultimate goal of every human...every decent human that is. Those who can send their children to the best schools, shop in the luxurious malls with ever-flowing plastic money, drive the biggest, fanciest cars, and live in the quietest suburbs.

And this itself is Corruption - deadly, insane and toxic corruption of the very soul.
The idea that good education a good person makes. The values which imbue wealth with saintliness. A foul, life-trampling, crock of shit.

People arise and realise: the State is Not Your Friend. The Police are the Armed Militia of the State, masquerading as defenders of the populace.

We're so in this together, but some of us think we're above the mass.

Will we awaken and see what deathly harm our civilisation has inflicted upon us?
Some few of us stir, even now, fluttering our eyelids open in the raw dawn. But the clarion may have sounded too late. We may be just about to collapse our spiral, falling like dead weights to the ground. The only question worth asking now is - how much other life will we take with us?

Pic found on Sunneley's Tribe page