A hiatus in essays. I decided that I would wait until something good came along before writing again. Things in the world are so screwed up that topics that conjure anger or disgust or despair are easy to find, but the good bits are not so easy. I try not to be trivial in my comments (although it may not seem so to everyone). I thought about another food posting, or a story from the past, or a tale of moral import but none seemed right. So what to do? There are many individual efforts of goodness in the world that no one sees or hears about, but what do they tell us? That not everything is crappy? That the world is not going to “hell in a hand basket” as my dear old Mom would say? That the sun will come up in the morning on a new, kinder, gentler world? No, they tell us that the vast majority of humans are just trying to get along in life and live in some kind of peace.I ask myself: “Why is it so hard to focus on these, the majority of the population?”
I think the answer is in the proximity of the various disasters, the variety of the problems and the very number of them. In the past, way past, disasters of one kind or another happened all the time, but we didn’t know about them all at once, if ever. It seems to me that the sheer mass of problems facing the world, and I include local and national issues here, drown out the goodness. It’s there, but lost in the storm of troubles. That overused “Perfect Storm” tag (that always is cast in threes) is probably a good metaphor, but not in threes. The list of disasters is long: political paralysis; genocide; starvation; trade in children; fires; droughts; war; mud slides; tsunamis; gigantic storms; banking failures; greed; murder. The list goes on and on.
These are not new to the world. What is new is that we know about the all at once. And the danger I see in that is the possibility that people of good faith and good intent will get inured to the dangers and turn away from the challenges they present.
That, I believe, would be the final disaster.
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1 comment:
You hit the nail right on the head there Woody. I sway from looking at the grandiose tale of disaster to thinking about most of the individual people I know and therefore swing from despair to hope. I have almost no control over this so it is good of you to speak up.
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