TRUST
One thing keeps coming up these days which causes me to have moments of worry. I find more and more people who are expressing doubts about our political future.
The one key word which is to be found at the root of much of the trouble we know today around the world, I think, is the term “apathy”. We no longer seem to believe firmly in basic principles by which we must live in order to get along with others for mutual survival.
We keep finding areas in which we seem to have deliberately disconnected our living from our heritage. We have worked hard in recent decades to rid ourselves of concern for basic principles.
Much of our distrust of governmental bodies and processes stems from such aberrations as Watergate, Huey Long, Joe McCarthy, Protestant TV evangelist's romance revelations, Catholic priesthood's erratic interest in youthful males, and even older organizations such as the Society of the White Camellia and the Silver Shirt troops we have all but forgotten from World War II days. We lost our trust in organizations along the way and government it was a logical victim sooner or later.
What are we doing about it all? We are still enacting advanced postage rates to slow down the distribution of information. We are making a money game by steadily increasing the cost of Internet connections for our computers.
Our common way to meet such problems ,it seems, is to concentrate all of the many information dissemination methods we have mastered and talk ...talk ...talk them to death. We drive them away by overkill. We talk about them until we are sick and tired of hearing anything more about them. We, for a time, accept such freedom as if it was a solution, and then we wonder why the problem returns worse than it was before.
Our information age living has become more tedious as it has grow more and more varied. “Google” has come to be the poor man's accepted University, Library of Congress, Smithsonian Institution, EB, Farmer's Almanac, news stand and novelty shoppe.
We are deceiving ourselves. There are people who delight in saying Thomas Jefferson did not go back far enough when urging the public having information abundantly available.
He was speaking of acquiring “knowledge.”
We need to tap our ancient heritage of “wisdom”, the deeper facets of edification, so we can learn to handle that which we have been allowed to learn.
A.L.M. December 1, 2004 [c418wds]
