Erosion

"The same mistakes we made as cavemen" says Mr.
    Whittier, "we still make."
    So maybe we're supposed to fight and hate and torture
        each other...

Mr. Whittier rolls his wheelchair to the edge of the stage,
    with his spotted hands, his bald head.
    The folds of his slack face seem to hang
    from his too-big eyes, his cloudy, watery-gray eyes.
The ring looped through one of his nostrils, the earphones
    of his CD player looped around the
    wrinkles and folds of his beef-jerky neck.

Onstage, instead of a spotlight, a black-and-white movie
    fragment:
    Mr. Whittier's head is wallpapered with newsreel armies
        marching.
    His mouth and eyes lost in the shadow boots
        and bayonets that worm across his cheeks.

He says, "Maybe suffering and misery is the point of life."
    Consider that the earth is a processing plant, a factory.
Picture a tumbler used to polish rocks:
    A rolling drum filled with water and sand.
    Consider that your soul is dropped in an ugly rock,
    some raw material or a natural resource, crude oil,
       mineral ore.
    And all conflict and pain is just the abrasive that rubs us,
    polishes our souls, refines us,
    teaches and finishes us over lifetime after lifetime.
Then consider that you've chosen to jump in, again and
    again,
    knowing this suffering is your entire reason for coming to
       earth.
Mr. Whittier, his teeth crowded too many in his narrow
    jawbone,
    his dead-tumbleweed eyebrows, Mr. Whittier's bat-wing
       ears spread wide
    with the shadow armies marching across,
    he says,
    "The only alternative is, we're all just eternally stupid."

We fight wars. We fight for peace. We fight hunger. We love
    to fight.
    We fight and fight and fight, with our guns or mouths or
        money.
    And the planet is never one lick better than it was before
       us.

Leaning forward, both his clawed on the arms of his
    wheelchair,
    as the newsreel armies march over his face, those
       moving tattoos
    of their machine guns and tanks and artillery,
    Mr. Whittier says: "Maybe we're living the exact way we're
       meant to live."
Maybe our factory planet is processing our souls...just
    fine.