A Lot Of Work To Do

THE POOR LADY who walked into a spanish bank the other day and set herself on fire probably did so due to extreme anxiety, anger and depression concerning her financial situation. Spain has a twenty five percent unemployment rate,and a foreclosure epidemic. Kinda like america on steroids. 

The fashion design student who jumped off the george washington bridge recently seems to have done so for reasons having to do with her relationship to other students, her peers. She was deeply committed to her success within her profession, including respect from peers, and perhaps felt she was being abandoned and abused. 

And the american singer who shot herself recently had no financial concerns or problems with acceptance within her peer group, but instead suffered extreme stress from personal relationshps involving marriage, children, and custody, leading to legal and possible substance difficulties.

Three separate pathways to self destruction. The lady who set herself on fire survived, and it is to be hoped she heals, learns, and teaches what she learns to others. It would seem that we all have a great deal to learn.

You ask any extraterrestrial the same question, and you're gonna get the same answer, and that answer is gonna be "of course you don't have to be miserable. Your whole species, and all other species, could thrive and be prosperous, merely using tools you already have."

It may very well be that home sapiens (us) is the only intelligent species on the galaxy  among whom suicide is practiced.  The most advanced of our extraterrestrial monitors, maybe the ones sitting in huge, beautiful but invisible spaceships hovering just above our heads, could well be shaking their heads.

Self destruction and organized dextruction, as in war, might very well be an expedient to progress, an evolutionary mechanism, a means of culling genes. For that matter, homosexualtiy may be nature's means of population control, like war, and microorganisms, and death. 

But chancers are, the more advanced forms of life have found a better way to that end, a more effieienct, more civilized way than crude violence. Compared to bloody battlefields, same sex sex loses its aura of shocking sinfulness.  Meanwhile, here on this planet, there is a lot of work to do.