flying squirrels et al.

The stained coffee mug reads, in German: I am the master of the house. Four days of drippings streak its side, evidence of my laziness and unwillingness to spend forty-five seconds each day washing the dishes.
Who is now the master of the house? Certainly not I; a transient I am, here to sit out the terms of my punishment, my mood oscillating between abject woe and patient indifference, too often lured to the TV for a good numbing of the mind. At work at night, my thoughts run wild, the painful images of past loss recycling until I am reduced to tears. At day, during my few hours of leisure, I rebuild my confidence and make the small steps needed to keep this house and my life up and running.
After thirty years of painstaking neglect, the saying may be true about the house, but no one is master of the five other acres of this property. Thick vines run between the treecrowns, building wide epiphytic networks that will eventually pull the host to the ground. The underbrush is thick with thorny and poisonous brush that rends the flesh and causes it to itch. The stream is lost in places to overhanging masses of bamboo and other opportunistic weeds that make empty spaces their home.
A thousand shades of green explode in the sudden sunlight while a million droplets descend through layers of leaves, their passage a wild staccato in a cloudburst's sullen wake. I approach an ancient weathered tree and knock thrice to check its soundness and with a frantic scramble out pops a flying squirrel who climbs ten feet and then stops, flaps of gliding skin loose about his sides, his wide flat tail shuddering slightly in time with his thundering heart. I merge quietly back onto the path and move along the top of the northern ridge, slowing at the sound of furious scolding up ahead, hoping to see the mother owl, and yes, there she is, her wide shadow the only evidence of her passage, and I turn just in time to see her flap into the eaves of a massive oak, harassed as she flies by a handful of smaller, seed-eating birds I recognize from their winter begging.
No, I am not the master of this house, of this land. The beasts are the masters here, living out their lives in this postage stamp of natural bounty, safe from harm by all but each other.

Ultima Ratio Regum.
JP

for heroes a palpable need

Throughout history, heroes have emerged from the ranks of average men to change the situation of all for the better. They are often unwittingly thrust into their elevated positions, intitially reluctant to bear the responsibility at hand. The hero sees the change that is needed in the world, and although it might yet be an evil that is bearable, she rebels against the status quo and puts herself at the ultimate risk, the loss of liberty, in order to become the change she seeks to make in the lives of others. After living and working among these simple minded people, and observing their ways, I find them too deeply entrenched in their petty, predictable, utterly mundane routines to even entertain the hope that they might one day live better or more fulfilling lives, let alone take upon themselves the responsibility for making that better life a reality.

Shall I, as they apparently have, abandon all hope that the way things are is not how they must by default be? Far better to insulate myself from their ignorance and small-mindedness, and to keep within my breat the fire burning that will light my way along this dark and torturous path to a future of bright and shining toil, that place where the full breadth of my faculties find expression, not in service to another, but to the benefit of mankind.

The greatest challenge I see is how to stir up these masses of working poor, these people who likely fill the forgotten pockets of America's exurban landscape from one coast to the other, and to convince them that the future lies not in service to others, but in the decisions they themselves make daily, and in their hidden and untapped abilities, whose expression could lift them from the daily useless toil in pursuit of cheap and simple goals and redirect their efforts to the discovery and propagation of Happiness.