Do we know whither thou goest? How about whether thou goest? The late great Mel Allen would reassure us: "Oh yes, we indubitably, every last one of us are: 'goingest, goingest, gonest!'" Honest! Maybe a ghost goeth before a fall (as well as pride) or likelier appears after one. Think of the various shades, noble and ignoble, of jolly old England (or thanks to recent paranormal themed t.v. programs incessantly informing us, just about anywhere else), who make their presences known after a violent cessation of human life.
A "pride of lions"…this term of venery, an image of regal power, but also that of a collection of gaping maws exuding atrociously bad breath and attached to beasts of vicious mood swings accompanied by very strong inclinations to crush bones, rip sinews and muscle and to lap up warm blood, all help us to more easily understand pride's less than noble side. Mussolini's morality, encapsulated by his pet Darwinian slogan "better to live one day as a lion than one hundred years as a lamb" is most instructive here. The "might makes right" crowd have never gone out of fashion in most parts of the globe. Why is freedom so hated, regardless of any nation's advertised political philosophy? Read the constitution of the old Soviet Union. It's an admirable piece of literature…on a par in many ways with that of the U.S. Still, gulags and the purges of Stalin are the only realities that speak volumes. Read the laws of our land and common sense, reason and concern for public safety inform most of the statutes. Still, we slaughter, whether by the unintended but inevitable consequences of constantly (collectively) negotiating tons of sheet metal at more than a mile a minute (on our highways) or riskily along congested urban thoroughfares... or by design (actually codified since 1973) with the murder of human life in the womb. Cautionary tales and long sustained safety campaigns aimed at the motoring public in order to save lives succeeds only marginally and in cold, statistical fashion and is curiously not in the mix when advising women in a family way. Too discomforting to perhaps err on the side of caution and determine an embryo as anything more than a blob of protoplasm…decency and the preciousness of life too inconvenient: the small voice of conscience, if ignored long enough, may no longer be heard, like the nuisance of someone's car alarm that we can, if determined enough, shut out from our brain and manage to, despite its insistent and plaintive beseeching, go back to sleep.
Why do we disparage liberty? Hell, why do we spit on it? Do we not really remember what it is? License it's not. Repeating what others tell us, unquestioningly, it's not. Filling our bellies or checking not our libidos it's not. Taking no time to listen to or imagine: a dying man's words, or the scribblings of an aging blogger like myself, the silent scream of an unborn baby, the story of a shut-in, the cries of a neglected and/or hungry child, the intelligence and experience of a person whose advanced years may have slowed down his or her sharp and swift articulation but not the ability to deliberately speak his/her peace and to impart wisdom and a mature viewpoint: well, dismissing these marginalized members of society is a perilous habit at best. The strength of our land is only as great as the psychic health of our weakest members, i.e. how well we act and how nurturing we are toward them. I do NOT mean the organizing of this good will along the lines as envisioned by the secularists and "big government" sociopaths that have enslaved half of the electorate with their utopian excretions of control and mind-numbing nonsense. Our traditional institutions, local communities and religious institutions need reinvigorating and the old "let it begin with me (peace)" is not a bad starting point to consider if we can disabuse ourselves of the "shame'' of decency and self-examination that the Culture of Death keeps trying to promote while shutting our minds to service and old fashioned volunteerism. An end to enticing everyone through mass and pop culture to consume, fornicate and to greedily multi-task with all of the gadgetry of our cyber age is also needed now, right now.
And what of the intellectuals in our midst? The late Patrick Moynihan wrote about it at length more than forty years ago. In his "Anti-Intellectualism in America" he noted in depth the roots of pragmatism and a fevered American pysyche that was not comfortable with self-reflection and philosophy or mentation and analyses that could not tame a continent or harvest an ever increasing cornucopia of material wealth. Speak of existential angst, peruse a road map, tell of one's artistic endeavor or literary project and the interrogatives fly, all predictably along these lines and respectively: "Oh, did you take an aspirin (is it maybe all in your head)?; going on a trip?; are you making any money with that stuff?" Folks in the good ol' U.S.A want to know "does it work?", "will it help me to get rich?" and "will any of that book knowledge have any practical applications?" Scholarship is respected, but more in the sense of an awareness that mysterious communications, like opaque rites and incantations at a secret society's meeting, are impressive but inaccessible and quickly unable to interest or stimulate. The phrases "teacher's pet", "brown nose" and "nerd" all in fine fiddle as actively used pejorative terms, tells us much about how high, or rather how low a level of esteem scholarly and reflective strivers are held.
How about the news reports from Syria and from Sudan? Do we become inured to atrocities? Is one country's hell less hellish than another's? Does geography impact lethargy? Sure, it's harder to focus attention on a tsunami in the South China sea than it is on your next door neighbor's blazing house. But what about the man-made miseries? Watching that diminutive Chinese guy in Beijing more than twenty years ago as he stood in front of one of the Communist regime's tanks and repeatedly blocked its path in whatever direction the tank's driver sought to re-route his path around the protester, we remember the thrill and natural rooting interest in this Davey vs. Goliath drama. But where did our attentions go? Where did they drift toward as the news became bleaker and the cries for liberty became fading sounds with unhappy endings no longer a channel we wanted to stay tuned to. Our little "remote control" of life, came to the rescue, as always, as our senses demanded new sensations and yesterday's news was just that in most of our reckonings. What became of that guy? How many folks care?
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