Letter To My Unborn Descendants

The life and times I was reared in were soft
compared with the10,000 years of human history
that ran before me. I lived in a country
where people were not forced to labour
to strive for money. But competition for paid work
induced mental illness in as many as were pushed into work,
and their reward for work was lifelong indebtedness.
Employers seemed to like this process,
though they rarely commented on stress vs reward
as a process, lest they be exposed as hypocrites.
Health treatment was free at the point of access
for many, which meant that probably the greatest number
had the best health for the longest period of time
that any nation state would ever know.
Driven by advertising, this became a license
to eat and drink foodstuffs that would make us ill,
and to become careless with alcohol and recreational drugs.
Worse was the record size of  medicinal drugs bill
-paid for by the state through taxes,
which many corporations avoided paying,
as tax law went prolix beyond measure in trying to be logical.
This combination made as much profit for the drugs companies
as it did for the vendors of unhealthy foods,
and made many wonder what tax was for in a peace time economy.

Billions of people saw fitness as fitness to breed,
with little forethought as to their preparedness
to parent a child to adulthood and then let go of it.
I saw many spread jealousy and unhappiness beyond measure
in their wantonness. I was 'gay', homosexual. For many years
I thought I was the only one of my type that I knew.
I was led to believe I was selfish for not breeding,
and everything I wanted was illegal for me. Later
I learned that there were many men who were like me,
including close relatives, and they/I made a secretive ugliness
out of their homosexuality. If I were truly like them
I would have been secretive about it too. After all
who, if they are vain, wants to know about their ugliness?
Or accept an ugly hubris thrust upon them? I was too modest.
For decades I shrank from the horrors that lived cheek by jowl
within me. I would never have learned to let go of  these horrors
except through the hindsight of a companionship
where daily, over decades, I struggled thousands of times
to find the kind word, thought and deed,
that would lead to more of the same tomorow.
Each time I struggled for the kind moment it cast it's light
on the darkness I had once lived in, as if back then it was all there was.

Do well in letting go of the ugliness in your own desires.