Closing Thoughts
Linda and I returned this weekend from our Christmas jaunt to the Southland, where I became friends with her daughter after a long initial drought, and developed relationships with her husband and two young sons. I also met two of Linda's closest school chums and their husbands, and now have four new friends. Which got me to thinking about how important it is to know good people. There are certainly some wonderful people up here in the North State, and sprinkled here and there wherever I've been, and probably everywhere.
But I wonder why we can't have more terrific people, the kind you respect and enjoy; people who are contributing to the common weal, working honestly and productively, being generous neighbors and contributing citizens. Concomitantly, I'd like to see a decline — indeed, elimination — of the stupid, violent, brutal scum who cost us so much in emotional, intellectual, and fiscal resources. As I see it, this latter goal can be accomplished through attrition, but it will require more than bemoaning the failures that brought us here.
Consider the playing field. The in-betweens — the mass of mostly-washed to whom we refer as the middle class — are more likely to side with the best over the worst, if they understand the facts. And the cost isn't too high. Most are hanging on, but their dreams are fading. They've been paying out a lotta rope in the expectation that they would catch up — again, or for the first time — but instead they are slipping ever more deeply into the mire. That can create desperate choices.
In times of crisis, we tend to narrow our scope and make bad decisions for their short-term results. And for the past thirty-five years, overwhelmed by the immediate, we have tended to ignore the long-term altogether. It has brought us to a dangerous confluence of stultifying ignorance, social degradation, crippling malfeasance, system-wide corruption, and a pervasive sense of chaos. Is it time for another flood?
I don't believe in evil as a force, but as an absence of good. It may seem that there is a force of evil because there are so many people out there who don't understand right from wrong, which is straining the social fabric. They are the second and third generation detritus, whom we feed, clothe, and shelter, in dilapidated trailers out in the wilds, and in the wilds of the inner cities, crammed into stacked boxes of perpetuating generations of hopelessness. They are not only a problem in their needs and criminality, but especially in their continued breeding.
Where we are today — they and we — is of our own making. We have celebrated their loudly-proclaimed rights with an unhalting flow of support. We have not required adherence to appropriate standards. We have not intervened adequately to protect the young, theirs and ours. And it doesn't appear that those whom we have elected to lead us will take a new direction, away from the inevitable miasma of inaction.
We seem to live in a time of increasing human horrors, but that may be because there are more humans, not that more are behaving badly. On the other hand, too many humans, like rats in a box, tend to behave psychotically. Which would explain the feeling of things coming apart rather than together. If you share my belief that there is a larger reality, then you may also share the question if another flood will be necessary, or even a good idea. And how would it be that the black hats would sink and the white hats would float?
Maybe I'm wrong, but I think we've got a pile of compost to grow through before our underlying problems are resolved, nationally and globally. Perhaps our war on terrorism will succeed, even if we don't eliminate the reasons for terrorism. Perhaps the economy will bounce back, even if we're missing all the necessary fundamentals. Perhaps our children will thrive in the gloabl community, even if our public schools are failing. Truly, I would like to be wrong to see dark clouds over the short-term, because I ache for a healthy and productive future to start sooner rather than later.
And I believe to my core that good will triumph, if for no other reason than it wouldn't make sense for this noble exercise of humanity to end otherwise. I also believe that we are approaching a dramatic turning point in how we conduct ourselves, both individually and as a community. I think we've gone over the falls, and it's whitewater to the horizon.
And that's SetonnoteS...I'm Tony Seton.
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