The REAL Enemy of Everyone

An excerpt from the poem by Dylan Thomas:

“Do not go gentle into that good night, old age should burn and rave at close of day.

Rage.

Rage against the dying of the light.”

The enemy is not the immigrant. The enemy is not the hardliner who yearns for the way things used to be. The enemy is not the poor, the rich, the sick, the judgmental, the pious, or the atheist.

You know who the enemy is?

Entropy.

As defined by the almighty google, entropy is a measure of how much a system’s atoms are free to move around and arrange themselves in random ways. It’s also a measure of the unavailable energy in a system.

Or, as Dr. Ian Malcom (one of my favorite fictitious characters). called it - Chaos Theory.

In plain English, entropy is the inevitable change we all deal with. There is no stopping it, no slowing it down. It happens. Cancer, old age, dementia, Alzheimer’s, all that shit. Crime, pollution, greed, and all the shit we as humans deal with. Bigots blaming other races for it, leftists blaming fascists for the worst of it. A never ending game of Plinko and Tetris with one guarantee - you die at the end.

You’re probably wondering “what the fuck does this have to do with gratitude?” Well, let me tell you.

Entropy is responsible for all the things that move our world. No one is exempt from this. The butterfly effect is also what some call it. No matter how big and mighty our shoulders may be figuratively, we are at the mercy of atoms - the smallest bit of anything we know of. According to Henry Rollins, it’s what makes hardcore punks turn into parents. Rent turns into a mortgage. Life turns into a job.

And no one is safe from it. Right down to our own DNA replication. The slow and inevitable ebbing of the telomeres of our chromosomes thus aging us.

“But again, what the fuck does this have to do with gratitude? You’re starting to piss me off with your nerd shit.”

No one is getting out alive. We should rage against the dying of the light. We only have one life. And once you die, you are dead FOREVER. FOR FUCKING EVER. There is no reunion with life after 20 years of being dead, after 100 years of being dead, after 10,000 years either. At that point, you’re dust. Not that being dead prior to the “dust stage” makes you any less dead.

The gratitude is in knowing that this is how not just the world, but the whole fucking universe works. So ask that girl out. Ask that guy out. Tell your boss to fuck off. Go into business for yourself. Stand up for that victim of bullying. Go all out for your kids. And make the world less shitty while you’re at it.

Rearrange the atoms.

Rage like hell against the dying of the light. Rage against entropy.