What a disgraceful world we live in!

 

 

By 

 

Gene Fredericks

 

Part of 

 

My basic philosophies and where they lead me

 

 

 

 

I am so disgusted by what I see around me in the news.  I have contempt beyond my ability to react!  I want to just pull away and either hide or regroup.  I see no path forward with the current state of affairs.

 

I am powerless in a sense if I want to change the way things are.  I am powerless if I feel that anything I do will affect the change I feel is necessary. Yet, I feel empowered to act to try to alter the way things are going, to offer an alternative to the status- quo, to provide a path to another place that can begin to fix the ills of the corrupted state of affairs and offer a beginning to a new era where a more just and equal state exists, which sadly over time will also slump into the state we are in now, but at least it will be pushed out into the future past the malaise that exists in the world I live in now.

 

So what are the basic problems?

 

The first and biggest problem, in my opinion, is our lack of empathy.  The ability to see others as we would like to be seen and treat others and their opinions the way we would like to have ours treated.  I suppose it is the do unto others… adage.  Too often, I hear “they did it” or “if they just would or …”.  I feel at some point each of us becomes someone else’s “they”.   The “us” we feel is right is only right in the confines of that “us”.  If we venture outside of our “us” community, we become the “they”.  Sadly, that leads to no meaningful dialogue, just an “us and them” tug of war, the push-me-pull-me of politics, and the give and take of freedoms.  The middle ground is wide open, with few wanting to occupy that neutral battle zone where an open mind is open for attack, perhaps from both sides.  Yet it seems to me that is the only true way to know what is right.  That is to accept both sides as right for them and to see if a common ground can be struck, a state of suspended judgment with leeway for both sides.  But that seems so far-fetched in the world that I see today, and that makes me sad.  I cannot say there is no evil in the world.  I see lots of it, but even then, I feel the evil ones have a motivation that once understood would not seem so evil, to them!  I cannot imagine any good in going into a maternity ward and slaughtering scores of innocent mothers and babies, yet there are whole groups who feel justified in committing a heinous act like that to make some bloody point.  I cannot imagine the conscience of someone who could do something like that, and I feel so lucky that I am not someone who could do something like that.  But I strongly believe acts like that will not stop until we try to see what caused that level of anger, and the lack of awareness of or care for the pain it inflicts.  Retaliating as sweet as it may be seems fruitless, and history has borne that out.  It is just a rata-tat-tat of tit for tat.  We can temporarily squelch a group and wayward ideologies, but we cannot irradiate them.  In the same way a virus can be contained but not eliminated, we need to find a vaccine against drawing sides and fighting for what is right.  There is no right!  There are just perspectives, beliefs, and feelings that seem right.  Again, there is evil, and there do need to be laws, but just having the law and pinning blame does not stop the acts nor solve the problem.  Only understanding, compassion, empathy, and wisdom can fix the problems.  We spend far too little time trying to find and understand the root causes of strife.  Our peacekeepers try, but too often those talks break off, and each side pulls further back and becomes more righteous.  The brinksmanship and jockeying for the leverage to become the “winner” and therefore who can dictate what is “right” is far more preferred than to simply ask, “Why do you think you are right?  And after asking the question, actually listen to the answer.  Not as a one-sided activity but a back-and-forth dialog, to see if common ground can be found and if not to learn how to live in a world where there is no single right and where there are many, many wrongs.