In Continuum.

Ideally, this is how your body should work. I am, by no means, an expert in this field. In fact, my knowledge of human anatomy is purely from primary and secondary school textbooks, along with episodes of old school E.R. and House. But even a primary school student can tell you, in brief, how the body works. You take it oxygen for the organs to function in proper, and the oxygen is absorbed by the lungs. The blood carries the oxygen around the body by the pumping of the heart, and the organs get their energy from metabolized food that we eat. Everything is related to everything in our body, you need everything to be functioning normally in order to lead a healthy life. Sure, you can live without one kidney, but it still feels strange to have one kidney do the job that really should belong to two. You can't exactly say that you are perfectly fit when you have one of your organs overworking, now can you? Anyway, there are a lot of other smaller processes occurring in our bodies at any one time, and of course a single paragraph in a single entry is not going to explain everything in proper. However, given an ideal circumstance, your body should be working normally right now, and I sure hope that it stays that way for a very long time. 

Autoimmunity, quoting from Wikipedia, is "the failure of an organism to recognize its own constituent parts as self, which results in an immune response against its own cells and tissues". That is to say, in layman language, your immunity system gets confused and starts to treat cells and tissues as invaded viruses and bacteria. They cannot tell apart whether or not they are dealing with the real enemies or their own people, and they are just firing arrows into the dark and hoping that they'd hit the right people - when, of course, they are just shooting at each other. Such a disease isn't exactly new in the medical books, and certainly isn't unheard of on real battlefields. Soldiers have been known to kill each other during wars, and especially so during the Vietnam War. It is easy to confuse friends with foes, and the immune system in our body gets confused in very much the same way as well. There are benefits to watching television, and I learned about this disorder from House. Now I know terms like CT, MRI, MS, Lupus, Legionnaire's Disease, Wilson's Disease, EEG, and a whole lot of other terms. I like shows that make me a tad bit smarter, even if I don't exactly know why certain diseases occur. Well, I know fever may be a symptom of infection, and I feel proud about that. 

Anyway, a thought came to me that day while I was waiting for Felicia at Kovan Melody, her sister's place down in Hougang. It's not that she is always late, but because I am always early. I waited for her outside the main entrance of the condominium, where cars mostly came out of the basement car park to go to work in the morning. School buses came and picked the children up, and parents held the little hands of little children as they entered through the gates of the Catholic kindergarten across the road. I've been to this place numerous times, been there waiting for her to come downstairs over the couple of weeks and destroyed numerous mushrooms along the way. But it gets boring at times, just waiting there and watching the children go to school in their cute blue uniforms, some of them nodding off while their legs carried them towards school. It was amusing, to say the very least, to observe the most basic of human conditions at work. That day, however, I had a thought after kicking a few mushrooms and watching a few buses and cars drive pass me at the front entrance. As I tucked the earphones into my ears and listened to the deep sounds of Kronos Quartet's cellos, I had a thought. 

The cars that drove in opposing directions along the road reminded me of red and white blood cells somehow, and the road itself was a vessel. You know how it is when you are looking at cars from any one point on the road, the lights are always red on one side and white on the other. CTE looks like a tiny vessel from my bedroom window, especially during peak hours of the day. All the red and the white lights cramming up together, forming a enormous parking lot on the expressway. I've always imagined the cars with red lights carrying imaginary oxygen cells somewhere, while the cars with white lights going to places to fight off invading troops. The people that I saw that morning, they were all like cells in our bodies, working to keep the human being alive somehow. And this human being in this analogy is this country, or this continent, or this planet as a whole. The countries are like organs, and all of them are working within the bounds of this giant being that is our planet. It is a living and breathing thing, and we are its microscopic cells, working mindlessly while minding our own businesses. We are but tiny organisms in this giant body, keeping the society in function because we have been institutionalized to do so. 

You see the businessmen going to work, the ex-pat taking a cab out from the condominium. A lady walked pass me with heavy make-up on and a small suitcase, her heels clicked on the sidewalk like a metronome. With their lazy and droopy eyes they drove, their Hondas and their Toyotas, to work they went and right on time. The taste of their breakfasts probably still fresh in their breath, and they've probably went through the same routine of waking up in the morning and going to work hundreds and thousands of times. Yet, they are still doing it every single morning, though there are the occasional irregularities. It rains heavy, the traffic is thick, and you are late for work every once in a while. But still, the routine never ends, and you are replaced by your offsprings who carry on the job for you when they grow up, after they've gone out of school. And it begins in the kindergarten across the road, then to a primary school in the neighborhood. Little children go through a compulsory education system, to grow up and to learn about the world, all the while trying to survive and to become mindless drones just like their Papas and their Mamas. No matter how much you begin with, you always end up with being so much less. 

Sometimes you can't help but wonder what these people are working for, what you are working for. The recognition you get from scoring a series of As, the big sale you acquire for your company, it almost always seems like it is done for anybody else but yourself. You can't help but wonder about the meaning of everything, if there is more to sustaining a norm that we've grown so used to. The society tells us that we should study hard, that we should study real hard. Then the society tells us that we have to work, that we should work real hard. You get a girlfriend, she turns into your wife, you get married and you have children to carry on what the society has planned for itself in the future. You get old, you are less capable, and you eventually die, only to be taken over by someone younger and then effectively forgotten. That is how the society works, in every society, of every day. The society is like this giant organism that never ceases, it never dies. It will never stop breathing, never stop living, because there is an endless supply of human beings to keep it operating. The ozone may have a giant hole in the south pole, and the stock market may crash one day, but there will always be human beings around, to keep things working. 

But every being gets sick, we all fall ill. The end of the world, as we know it, just feels like the world contracting an autoimmune disease somehow, where the cells start to battle each other because they became confused. You know, we start to kill and destroy one another until there is nothing left at the end of all things. There'd only be miles and miles of barren wasteland, and then beyond that you get hills of corpses and not even the flies or bacteria to feed on them. That'd be the end of the world, and it'd be caused by human beings, killing each other. If the world is truly going to end in the future, it is going to be caused by us humans. It is not going to be the result of a giant comet crashing into earth, or an earthquake wiping away cities and bringing up tsunamis. It is not going to be caused by a volcanic eruption that covers half the world in baking hot ashes. It is going to be because of us humans, our stupidity and our greed, and we are only going to die in our own hands. If there is a disease that this giant organism, our world, is not immune to, it is going to be autoimmune disease - when we start to kill each other off, one country at a time.

Oh wait, actually we have already started killing each other. It didn't start off like that, though, when humans were less human and more like animals. There aren't a lot of animals that'd murder members of its own species, and if they do it is almost always due to their instinct to protect themselves from harm. I have seen documentaries on chimpanzees killing each other in the most ruthless ways, though. There was a particular video of a group of chimpanzees maliciously murdering another chimpanzee that accidentally wandered into their territory. Chimpanzees aren't carnivorous, they don't kill an animal for their meat. But that was what they did to that poor chimpanzee that got lost - they ripped out its eyeballs and ate its testicles, then trampled him to death and broke all the bones in its body. For what? You might wonder, why did they do such a human thing? It wasn't something barbaric, animals don't usually do that. Only humans and chimpanzees - where humans came from - are capable of these acts. We are the only species that actively kill members of our own species because of our own selfish reasons. Humans are just better at doing that, and we do it well. In fact, we do it so well, that we have developed a variety of reasons to kill each other too. 

Humans kill because they need money, they need food, they need water, or they need sex. Sometimes they kill for their religion, their employer, their wives, their husbands, their children, or their relatives. They also kill for money, they kill for even more money, they kill for even more money than before, and sometimes they kill because that someone else is gay, ugly, fat, or just smells funny. Humans also kill for girls, for boys, for chewing gum, for cigarettes, for drugs, for alcohol, for hamburgers, for fun. We are forgetting the seven deadly sins too, because humans also kill because of wrath, gluttony, sloth, envy, pride, greed and lust. Sometimes, just sometimes, humans may kill other humans for no apparent reasons as well. They don't have reasons to do things, they just kill because they can, and they do it. The fact that we know how to love, makes us experts in hating as well. We are conscious and unconscious at the same time, and we are mindful as we are mindless. We think we know so many things, and yet we know nothing at the very same time. So you shoot someone because he is black, you stab someone because he supports a different football team, and you drown your neighbor because you hate his face. Humans are the only reason why the world is going to end, and no other reasons. 

So, in a way, we are our own autoimmune disease. We are the only ones that is going to cause this giant living thing to die, to be destroyed. Though, when we are gone, the world is still going to exist somehow. When the nuclear bombs have all been dropped and life is wiped out, the planet is still going to be here, and it is still going to be floating in space. It will repair itself, it will come back to life again in millions and million of years. However, we won't be around, and the planet would have evolved into an organism that wouldn't need us any longer. Just mountains and oceans, just grass and trees. We are just smarted chimpanzees, if you think about it, the whole creationism versus evolution debate aside. We act in the very same way, the way that we might dig out each others' eyeballs and eat their testicles. Hannibal Lector isn't a fictional character, he was probably adapted from various real-life homicidal maniacs. We humans are all capable of atrocious acts of murder to each other for various reasons, we all have a hand in bringing the world as we know it to an end. 

Therefore, as we continue living in our world and society, we continue to ask ourselves why certain things are the way that they are, and why certain things are not the way that they are. You sometimes wonder why would a country bomb another for something as simple as oil, and why would a mother put her baby into a microwave machine. You sometimes wonder why would someone kill a cashier at 7-11 for a piece of gum, or discriminate and enslave others because of the difference in their skin color. At the end of the day, I suppose, it is only human nature to do these things, somehow. We have been programmed to do these things, it's just that some of us haven't been activated. One day, however, we are all going to murder each other because you can never run away from death. In fact, the main reason why life expectancy of any country is capped at a certain number is because the things that we eat. We eat ourselves to death, or else we could live till 190 years old, theoretically. If the world is to end, the diagnosis would be autoimmunity, and no one is going to be around to laugh at us at the very end.