”I have great faith in fools — self-confidence my friends call it.” Edgar Allen Poe
The reason I’m not a Democrat: Everyone has rights but only a few have responsibilities.
The reason I’m not a Republican: Everyone has responsibilities and everyone has rights but a few have more rights than others. The reason I’m not a Libertarian: Everyone has the right to do just about anything they want and their only responsibility lies with themselves. The reason I’m not a Socialist: Everyone has the right to what you have and you have the responsibility to accept that cheerfully. The reason I’m not a Communist: No one has any rights or responsibilities. The reason I’m not an Anarchist: Everybody has the right to do any damn thing they want and to hell with the responsibility. The reason I’m not a Fascist: Everyone’s rights and responsibilities are dictated by the needs and whims of those in charge and I’m pretty sure they won’t let me be in charge.
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Over the last generation, we have come to demand rights but recoil from responsibility, to value our humanness beyond reason. The childish belief that we have somehow overcome our human baseness and bodily urges; those primal thoughts that we push to the back of our brains in civil discourse but that surface in our actions and sins to generate short term pleasure and success at the expense of our value to ourselves and those around us. That if we speak well and shout our morality and empathy to the world, we are somehow noble creatures. And all the while failing to acknowledge a power greater than our own.
We’re just living to sin. God told us that from the beginning. We’re always looking for another way to sin. Nowadays, we just can’t face all those grand ideas and thoughts of the folks before us – folks who learned lessons from hardship and struggles and with the disposition to ponder them. As a result, all we can do is turn faith into religion, education into indoctrination, strength into guilt – just to have more excuses to sin. We don’t have the wherewithal anymore to think about much – souls as deep as a pinprick – hearts as weak as water- encapsulating our world into 280 characters and jiggling asses on a tv screen. All our great minds do now is seek to find ways to free our time so we can sin a little bit more. We’re about as weak now as we’ve ever been in human history. It ain’t gonna end well. Social media has brought it all to a head, making it all too easy to tell a lie, believe a lie and share a lie. We just skating across the surface of truth like a water bug… too damn scared to look below the surface – scared of what we might find lurking beneath the waters. Our leaders recognize this and revel in it; encasing their lies in half-truths that they know we want to believe; leading us to stand in the streets donned with vagina hats or childishly storm the halls of government; separating us by our lightly held ideologies to prevent reform that would end their power. Corporations - too cowardly and irresponsible to stand on principle; blurring the lines between business and politics. Charity has become a marketing tool instead of a virtue. Instead of making a good product at a fair price, we’re supposed to buy their junk because they are kind, noble and tolerant. All the while telling us that our lives will be diminished unless we take their pill, eat their food, drive their car or publicly acknowledge that women poop. Religious leaders who have turned from faith and worship the mighty dollar, social acceptance and a perverted concept of love of our fellow man. We’ve corrupted our language so that we don’t have to deal with the truth; celebrities and pseudo-intellectuals telling us that truth is in the eye of the beholder, that for some black is white, good is bad and science is the new God until its truths conflict with their agenda. All patronizing their base with soundbites full of half-truths, false empathy or masked hatred. A grand design to ensure that we can’t clearly see reality beyond the pile of manure accumulating on our doorsteps. Ralph Waldo Emerson said that the end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization. He might be right. He had asked about her husband, the first one. "Was he a good man?"
She was silent for a moment and he feared that he had crossed a line in their friendship. She looked across the table, adjusted her glasses and responded: "How a man’s remembered ain’t got much to do with what he done. The world ‘ll take care of that. If they like what he did, then they’ll hold em up to the light and let him glow. If’n they don’t, they’ll forget him or make him a devil until the world changes again and just flipflops him into another thing he never was. He was good to me. I guess that's all that matters." |
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September 2024
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