A person can think to themself: boy, the rise and fall of
the United States happened quick in relative terms to human history; or why do
so many people hate God; or why is there so much hatred in our country; or why
is it so difficult for our leaders to use common sense; or why are people so
obsessed with the end of the world, (in case you haven’t noticed the blood moon
last night didn’t end the world no matter what anyone said): or why do we have
such a beautiful planet, yet we treat it like trash? Or whatever ails you for
the day?
And yet I see so much good in people all the time. I spend
hours thinking to myself how does this dichotomy exist? On a day to day level
most people treat each other well, respect each other, help each other, yet
when you step it up one level just to managing a community, things start
falling apart fast. And the larger the group or entity the faster and worse the
abuse of the group or entity happens.
How do we turn the good between friends or even perfect
strangers at the individual level into something positive at much larger
levels? And you know it can be done because there are many successful operations
of organizations, governments, etc…., but are these the exception to the rule
or is what seems to be more prevalent the exception to the rule? Is good the
rule or is humanity’s self-destructive tendencies the rule? Even though it
might appear there is a middle, I do not think so.
There is a middle in politics, in economic classes, in a
room, in the planet, yet no middle in the good vs bad. You may disagree and say
there is a middle because there is ground for some good and some bad. Again, I
do not think so.
Good and evil push against each other and there are extremes
to each side, but there is no middle. So, the effort is to always bring people
to the good side. (that sounds a bit trifle), you do not go through a middle
though, you cross over a line that determines what happens. Could a person get
close to the line and not cross over in either direction? I don’t know. And I
don’t know how you would be able to determine that answer.
So, if I have backed myself into a corner philosophically
with these two absolutes, how do you get into something positive. Could evil be
positive, and yes, the answer is no to the rhetorical question. If you can only
be one or the other, what moves a needle for everything else on planet earth.
A person goes crazy trying to move the needle because it
cannot be moved. One may say metaphorically you have shades of good and shades
of evil. Do you though? The real answer is you have a good person that does bad
things. That person is still good, unfortunately though by starting to do bad
things they can be drawn to cross the line. They do not go through middle
ground. They were good, now they are bad. An evil person may do something good
for another evil person, who knows you could have two despicable criminals and
one gets in a jam and the other makes a sacrifice to help them. Once you start sacrificing
for another you start reaching into the good side. Could that person then cross
over to the good side, just as a good person could be bad? The answer is yes,
but unfortunately it seems harder to cross from bad to good than good to bad.
And yet it is with sacrifice, which can be said to be one of
the strongest elements of being good if not the strongest, where you find
positive. The struggle then is how much sacrifice must be given to turn something
good or positive. The answer should be none (and if you are Christian, you
believe the only sacrifice needed has already been done) yet we put ourselves
into a position where it turns out huge sacrifices must be made just to turn
the simplest things around. Humans are pretty frail so the demands of making
large sacrifices seem to scare us away from doing what should be easy. The sacrifices
are needed because we allow events to deteriorate so bad before we decide we
need to do something, hence the need for large sacrifices. History is so full
of examples it is hard to quantify them.
So maybe it is easier to find a simple example. A local government
has to clean up a river for their drinking water, but the company that polluted
the water for many years was the largest employer for the community. Who should
make the sacrifice? Realistically the company should be held accountable, but
they went out of business due to a changing world. So now the community is
stuck with needing new sources of employment and a high cost of clean-up, plus
the need to find new drinking water. So, the entire community has to sacrifice
and sacrifice hard. The costs of attracting new industry to build a tax base to
acquire the funds for the clean- up and the search for new water rips the
community up and instead of the problem being solved, people leave. If the
company had done the right thing in the first place and taken a bit less profit
over the years to manage their waste properly (a small sacrifice) then the
entire community would not have needed to sacrifice greatly. And this small sacrifice
should be what drives people, but it doesn’t. And so, we get people making huge
sacrifices instead based on a huge need and sometimes a very ugly huge need,
such as World War II and the horrors of Nazism.
There is always going to be a need for some sacrifice. We
have to live together. (Shoot just having to put up with a neighbor, co-worker,
church member, family member or whoever who talks incessantly is enough of a sacrifice).
Okay we need to learn to realize that no one person has a right above another
and be accommodating. This should not be a sacrifice, however, we sure as heck
make it one somehow.
To find the positive or better to make the positive then it
can boil down to making simple sacrifices upfront. If, somehow, we learn to differentiate
what we can do now for each other, then we acquire more later on for more
people. Sounds simple, yet for some reason we cannot turn in this direction.
And going back to my other question about crossing a line,
does sacrifice require pulling everyone across the line from bad to good? Can enough
good people make enough small sacrifices for the whole? I asked why does everyone
hate God? Is it God or themselves? We are not talking about religion here;
sometimes a completely different animal. Even if you do not believe in God,
what has been taught should make sense to all. Just respect all and serve one
another. And serve does not mean servitude. You are on the evil side of the line
when you expect others to serve you. Service by respect and receiving service
with respect leads to the simple sacrifices that leads to something positive. Sounds
so simple doesn’t it, yet we make it so damn hard for some strange reason.
Drives me crazy. I know I am not perfect (can’t think of one
sacrifice I made this week) and on a daily basis fail yet pulling from the good
side of the line keeps me moving forward and hopefully can help this planet
find something positive. Otherwise the alternative is to completely fail, cross
the line and help to tear apart this wonderful planet.
And the above madness is brought to you by the extreme heat
here in North Texas and staying inside doing mindless chores (something still stinks
in the frig no matter how much I ignore it) and your brain takes too many side
trips outside of reality.
Have a great day all
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