Okay, I imagine myself a fairly intelligent person. I can spell words over five letters, though I always wondered why 'vomiting' has only one 't' and, get this: bean, wean, Sean. English language, right? One of the toughest, and that's for natives too! While I can't figure out all the complexities of our language, there's something bigger I can't figure out: politics.
Politics is just a giant ball of who-are-we-pleasing-today-and-for-how-much-money. I can't stand it and I don't get it. The two coincide. I do, however, get morality. I feel I've got a good sense of right and wrong. Helping others to get clean water is good. Killing innocent human beings is wrong. Enter politics. Now how many people do we 'save' when we take over their land to 'help' them? And what exactly classifies as a human being? "Look! I'm being good!" said the snake while he brought food to the little child, also while he silently choked its mother. Something's not right with that picture.
If we have a funny feeling about something, like did-I-leave-the-oven-on type feeling, then we should probably listen to it and check things out. Worry is a self-preservation mechanism and, when in check of course, helps us to survive. Instinct is how we lived this long in history. Lack of it is perhaps why many other creatures are extinct (aside other outside forces.) But I digress...
I wonder sometimes if we've lost that instinct. We were mostly raised to be respectful from generation to generation. We were taught through the centuries that hard work usually paid off. We were shown lesson after of lesson that douche-bag leaders don't benefit the general population in the end. Speaking in human-kind terms, what happened to our sense of awareness, our sense of where-the-heck-is-this-leading? We've lost the desire for family and community values and replaced it with 'me' values. We've lost the hard-work-pays-off method and traded it for gimme-it-now-for-free. We buy into things I don't think our ancestors would have accepted and we flip the channel when we're sick of arguing, as though it will go away.
Our country went from a free nation of people looking out for themselves and their families and communities, to a nation where we're afraid to speak out and offend someone... a nation where we're not allowed to express our beliefs for fear of a lawsuit... a nation where defending the innocent means being labeled anti-women's rights... a nation where we may not be allowed to defend ourselves from physical danger and we can hardly defend our children from moral danger. I could go on, but it's late and I'm not feeling that eloquent tonight.
Yes, it's a rant but a short one (for me) and here's the question: do we still have those instincts? Are they intact? Is the red light going off? For many of my friends, it is, God love them. For the nation, I'm sorry but I feel like it's more this: "Hey, there's an annoying red light going off! Damn that red light! Let's complain about it! Arghh..." What we do about it is yet to be seen.
