There are days and weeks - like this week, it seems - where I go through a sort of general sense of hopelessness about the future. It just feels as if things are not getting better and have no chance at all of getting better, at least in my lifetime.
It has been said before by others more eloquent than I, but I cannot remember a time where the vitriol of one to another has ever been so high. It is if we have abandoned even the pretense of trying to get along and have become embroiled in a one act monologue where the only subject covered are the idiocies and the meanness of the other side.
It has reached the point where it seems we are not just trying to fray the bounds that bind us together as a society but we are actively tearing them apart as fast as we are able in hopes of....
In hopes of what? That is perhaps the most troubling part of the equation. To anyone who has built a culture, be it business or religious or non-profit or even a club or role-playing group, it is understood how difficult it is to do such a thing. Culture is something that has to be carefully nourished and protected to grow and flourish and then (once existing) has to be weeded and pruned and watered as carefully as any garden. Forget any of these and the cultures begins to die and once dying, is usually very hard to bring back to life.
So I suppose their hopes are to destroy things to the point that something new, something "better" can be built? Utopianism at its finest I suppose - but a simple study of history will demonstrate the perils and usual outcomes of such a thing (check out Nazi Germany Soviet Russia or The Killing Fields of Cambodia or Communist China in its Great Leap Forward or Cultural Revolutions Phases [or even now, really]) for a sense of what "new cultures built on the ruins of the old" actually looks like. It is a bloody, destructive affair that leaves a wake of death and destruction behind it.
The saddest part to me is that I am watching this happening, observer of a slow motion train wreck that is coming down the tracks at me - and all I can do is watch in horrified anticipation as it seems to gain sped.
Sadly, that is all any of us can do.
ReplyDeleteGod bless.
I am smack dab in the middle of that culture war, TB. My family are elderly prog liberals, as are most of the peers in my age group. Pretty much everyone has been divorced, some a couple of times, the kids are all marginal moral and emotional train wrecks and our families are in shambles. To protect our sanity, my wife and I became Christians and we go to a local small chapel with the most wonderful people. It is a bittersweet thing, to be accepted into a community by healthy, functional loving families - and then look back at the wreckage of your own.
ReplyDeleteIt takes two to make peace - but only one to make war. Guys like you and I may not want war - but there are those among us that most certainly do. From what I am seeing, a lot of these rising, politically correct sub-cultures are actually steeped in hatred and appeal to seriously flawed, marginal and unhappy people. When you pander to people like that you sink to their level - which is why our collective politics and morals and ethics are starting to go down the crapper. There's a lot of people headed down that crapper and they will take as many with them as they can.
All you can do is try and keep the doors open and stay square with your Maker if possible.
It took a long time for man to realize that forest fires are necessary for the health of the forest.
ReplyDelete...I don't see a path to victory here either, TB. Thankfully, God does...
All that people like us can do at this point is to work for peace, but prepare for war...
In the larger picture, you are right Linda. We can only watch and pray.
ReplyDeleteGlen, you have hit the nail on the head (as you often do). There is a rise of subcultures which are steeped primarily in "against-ness" (call it antipathy or hatred) and few in "togetherness". The difficulty, as you point out, is that when these groups achieve their "goals" they suddenly do not change their modus operandi. That "against-ness" will manifest itself onto the next group that raises their ire.
ReplyDeleteI wish people would read more about the Cultural Revolution. I really wish they would.
Pete, I had never thought of it that way, but it really is true. My Great Aunt, who recently passed at 93, remembers father telling her that the when the Maidu did controlled burns, the acorns never had worms. It was only when they burns stopped that the worms appeared.
ReplyDeleteAnd God does see the path, Pete, I suppose this speaks more to my lack of faith than anything else.
But yes, a sense of getting ready for something is becoming more and more in my thoughts.