As you may not yet be aware, your advantages in this life are substantial as compared to your efforts. Your bootstraps were hung on the highest rung of the ladder and your efforts have merely prevented your fall. It's an uncomfortable truth, chronologically. Your apparent advancements through the narrative of your life appear to be the fruits of a great, uncommonly intelligent labor. What edifices have been contrived to further this belief, in spite of much contrary evidence. At this point you will wonder, are you not on my side? Are you an enemy sufficiently blithe to carry a sword to this fine wine lunch? You are wrong. I am on your side. I wish to advance the interests of life, and you are alive. And I am like you. I used to look upon the porcelain throne after my coffee and say, my god, this is the shit of a ruler, one who must direct the world to its best possible conclusions. So we are siblings in struggle. And you may yet find your footing alongside your fellow creatures. It's the animals to watch, for you. See them play. See them care for young. And do this in "person". I put person not in scare quotes, but between four cautionary fingers; you will be tempted to see the kingdom to which you belong as belonging to you. Such edifices! Your beliefs can yet bend toward understanding, if you look into the eyes of these animals and imagine kindness, forbearance, understanding, pain, and yes, even guilt. These fellows are human in every sense in which you mean the term. The humanity of what we do must come to account, and you and I must be among the bean counters and builders of a new peace, a peace between humans and those who most wouldn't yet call humans. Upon the foundations of this peace, we shall have neither reckoning nor war; as I have said, good sibling, we are strugglers, together. I see neither utopia nor transformation, only recognition of life by life, follow what may.
Roman Ryan 