The Final 14 Seconds of the Cosmic Calendar

I've written a bunch of posts on spirituality, the meaning of life, humans and human interaction, and yet, I continue to gravitate toward the subject. The learning is never over, and while watching the finale of "Avatar: the Last Airbender" (yes, the children's cartoon series), I was reminded of my queries all over again. I am going to quickly recap the moral struggle faced by Aang in the last episode:
The main character, and the last airbending nomad alive, Aang, is conflicted over how he will be able to defeat the scourge of humanity that is the Fire Lord. This guy is so in need of an ass-beating, it's insane. Everyone knows it, yet no one is powerful enough to defeat him except Aang, but Aang is doesn't want to kill him. Aang's crew, even his true love, Kitara, all want him to kill the Fire Lord to save the world. Conflicted, Aang, sleep-swims (?) to an island off the coast of the beach where he and his posse have set up base. When he wakes up on the island, he realizes that it's moving. He's far away from his friends, but tries to use the time to meditate and to reach his former lives. Even his past incarnations as the Avatar, including the previous airbender avatar, all ask him to consider sacrificing his convictions to save the world. Their arguments are based on ridding the world of evil and injustice, and rooted in utilitarianism. Logical and based in their own experiences as the avatar, Aang cannot deny their wisdom, but also cannot accept it.

Finally, he confronts a truly universal master, an ancient Lion-Turtle, whose back Aang has been riding on (it's so massive, it's an island). The Lion-Turtle, once a guardian of humanity,  had something very interesting to impart on Aang, "The true mind can weather all lies and illusions without being lost. The true heart can touch the poison of hatred without being harmed. From beginningless time, darkness thrives in the void, but always yields to purifying light. In the era before the Avatar, we bent not the elements, but the energy within ourselves. To bend another's energy, your own spirit must be unbendable, or you will be corrupted and destroyed." 

Aang literally "sees the light" as the Lion-Turtle shows him how to bend pure energy. In his final battle against he fire lord, when given the opportunity to kill him, he does not. As any real villain would, the Fire Lord interprets this as weakness and tries to destroy Aang. Yet, Aang ultimately is able to bend the Fire Lord's energy to remove his ability to bend fire and wreak havoc on humanity. He takes away the Lord's abilities instead of killing him, leaving him to think about his abuses of power until he understands and accepts what he did. 

I agree with Aang. I don't think I could kill someone even if they were evil and destructive. It's not my place to wield power like that, nor do I think it's any human's. Today we couch our killing in legal language to sanitize it, take the "messiness" out of it by ensuring no blood is spilled (in the US anyway), and call it "capital punishment." It's still expunging another life and it's still against most everything that is preached in every religion and moral code employed by humankind. Killing is killing. The STATE killed Murderer X, but we are the state. It's not some sort of external entity that we passively watch, although many of us do act like that. 

My beliefs in this are only further strengthened by something that I saw/heard on the science program "Cosmos." Host Neil deGrasse Tyson was walking along a "cosmic calendar" to put into perspective universal versus human existence. Only in the last 14 seconds of the cosmic calendar do ALL recorded human events (re: history) exist. He says something so simple and yet so poignant, that I can't stop thinking about it. All the heroes, kings and queens, anyone we've ever known or have heard of, all did it in the last 14 seconds of the cosmic calendar (here's Carl Sagan saying it - and it makes me cry every fucking time). Wow. No, like seriously contemplate that. Wow. Recorded history is 14 seconds of almost 14 billion years of time. And to even understand the whole of what brought you (yes, YOU) here right now, is almost unimaginable.

How many twists and turns every atom that makes up your presence has gone through - how many life cycles of birth, death and rebirth (in some way), each particle, each cell has experienced to bring you to be here had to have happened an infinite number of times and could have turned out a similarly infinite number of ways. But it didn't - because you're here now. And I think that just makes me wonder what the hell we ARE doing - as a species, as a society, as individuals. ON ALL LEVELS. We're here because we're here and now what? We've been awakened to the vast beauty of the world around us only recently, and have squandered so much with our careless touch - even the destruction of ourselves.

And an argument for killing (notice I didn't use execute, or remove, or get rid of, but kill) rapists and murderers is that it's impractical to provide for them for the duration of their lives since they've wronged others. And yes, it's impractical if the key point of human society was to be efficient and tidy. But is it? The Nazis were pretty efficient. And no, I'm not conflating capital punishment with genocide, but utilitarian arguments have the same cold edge to me no matter the scale.

So now what? Way back in my first post, I joked that we needed a fascist of love to spread a new message. But I really don't think forcing anyone to do anything will ever work. Again, it's a clean and efficient way of working - force submission and expunge the outliers, but it isn't sustainable. It breeds more problems than it solves. Aang's crew, all those who supported his power, but questioned his sanity when he could not use it to destroy, were converted into believers when they saw how his choice played out. He didn't destroy the destructive force. He took away its power and yet showed acceptance of its existence. Maybe those "evil" beings that use their power for wrongdoing and self-gain need to experience the removal of their power, whether it be physical strength, intellectual acuity, money, et al. To sit and realize that they're HUMAN just like everyone else. That their power will fall one day - to another, stronger power, or even just to mortality. Our desire to create a name for ourselves, to live forever in the annals of history is laughable when we put it in perspective - the final 14 seconds of 14 billion years of time. And those 14 seconds won't mean much if humans aren't around to continue to propagate the message through time and space. Seems so futile and desolate if you look at it from an angle of self-preservation, but freeing and beautiful if you consider that you even got a chance to play at all.