September 1, 2023: No Wretch We Be (The Rant Continues)

Is life so wretched? Isn’t it rather your hands which are too small, your vision which is muddled? You are the one who must grow up. Dag Hammarskjold

Once there was a boy so meek and modest, he was awarded a Most Humble badge. The next day, it was taken away because he wore it. Here endeth the lesson. Nancy Gibbs (no relation I’m aware of)

Attempting to hone any agency we have on any plane is merely that—an attempt to hone. Tis an oft-doomed effort to do well and think one is done. Ascending to a rung on the ladder of life always begets another rung. So goes “compare, contrast, and categorize,” a potentially fine way to improve if it wasn’t for that nasty bit of “there’s always something or someone, or some other time and place, that is better.”

Grace for us all, is that the Kindergarten soap-dish we are able to fashion is acceptable if it is the best we can do. I am grateful for that. To do less is to miss the mark. But even then, I cannot imagine a God by any name, who would ever see us as a wretch. Only we do that to ourselves and to each other. That is what happens when we create God in our own image.

Still, I observe when there are ecological disasters, we come out in droves to help each other. Therefore (this is where the rant continues), and as I’ve written before, let’s declare a country-wide disaster and get to helping! In fact, when individuals make and keep making mistakes, they might consider declaring a state of individual disaster and get to helping themselves. Giving ourselves and others a break is very different than creating an excuse to continue as usual. We are capable of pitching in and helping to untwist the mess we’ve made in the pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness. It is Nutsville to call for the violence of a civil war. Closing off is a great way to open-up? Consider: Things got so crazy, we had to pass a Civil Rights Bill to include excluded folks, even though we had the preexisting Bill of Rights to cover all of us? How far afield from our founding principles had we gone to create a preschool-level soap dish, that required making a law to enforce a principle we had already voted in favor of and later fought a war over that principle that killed a half a million of us? And still the problem exists?

Without dehumanizing, let’s dump or ignore those who swear allegiance to the Constitution and then clearly ignore it. Let’s stop joining up with no better excuse to do so than anger. Crazy folks do not become leaders on their own. It’s that simple, though it requires the ability to set aside knee-jerk reactions like defaulting to anger and weapons instead of consideration for those who have some rational thought behind a proposed action. Where are those folks? Who let the shiny-object seekers gain organizational power? Oh yeah, it was us. Ergo, we can stop it.

So very, very far from whatever the enlightened may see, but nonetheless no wretch we are, though we clearly can do better without waiting for an even bigger disaster. We can make is so, as no has gone on way too long.