ToT (late again!): State of the Union

I've been pretty distracted this week, mostly with good stuff. We've got some changes coming. AND my baby boy has turned ONE! His birthday was Tuesday, so I took a break. I'll be blogging about that soon . . . my thoughts and feelings keep swirling. I guess that's motherhood.

Last week, though, we were to write about the state of things today. Is the country falling apart? Going to 'hell in a handbasket?' Why?

Whew.

I could say a LOT on this, but I am going to try not to. (Don't laugh.) I think I have a few unique perspectives on this, being a social worker married to an historian--I have a front-row seat to some of the uglier sides of our culture, and a chat with my husband can help me put that in context. So a few thoughts . . .

-At any time in history, SOMETHING has been ugly. Things like war, dysentery, legalized slavery, all kinds of mess. Now, we have (ridiculous) media reporting on EVERYTHING. Danielle wrote about this--there is so much information (of questionable reliability) that we may be overinformed. Good grief, I can hardly make a decision without consulting the interwebs. I have my go-to sources for info, but there are plenty of crappy sources as well. This leaves all of us walking around, quite smugly sure that we know everything we need to know. But we don't. And I think it makes us bad listeners. Or it makes us depressed . . . there is a lot of sadness out there and I, for one, wish I could fix all of it. But I can only do my part, and then I get worried if I don't think other people are doing their parts . . . and then I am maybe worried for nothing, because what do I really know about what other people are doing? This information age is crazy-making.

-I think rugged American individualism is all well and good . . . except when it's not. In exchange, we've lost a sense of community where people look after each other. We live far away from our extended families so we can all work, work, work. Rugged individualism gone awry is just plain selfishness--I want/need this or that thing, and I will get it at all costs, regardless of how that affects anyone else. This, my friends, is not good, whether done at a corporate level through pollution, exploitation, or monopolies, or done at an individual level through manipulation, alienation, or violence. What does it say about us as a society when our own desires are more important than the common good? It makes my stomach hurt.

-I think, as a culture, we care waaaaaaaay too much about stuff. As in material things. Acquiring stuff, making stuff, hoarding stuff, comparing stuff, organizing stuff, cleaning stuff, protecting stuff, flaunting stuff, whatever. Look how we entertain ourselves: watching an electronic box filled with advertisements for stuff. (OK, I watch plenty of TV myself, and you can actually learn a lot from TV, but you get the point.) Or shopping. Other cultures view us as quite materialistic, at least in my experience. A Russian friend once commented that she has no interest in going to the US . . . "What would I do there? Shop?" This is the image we portray. Why is the economy the #1 issue in the election? Stuff. People don't want people messing with their stuff. A lot of these people cite their faith as informing their politics, yet I have heard of no religion that honors stuff over people. Our society cares a lot more about acquiring cheap crap that will eventually sit in a landfill, negatively affecting generations to come, than they do about making sure the mom down the street has the support she needs to maintain a job, feed her kids, and not fall over the edge into so stressed she keeps a crappy boyfriend or snaps and hurts someone.

I could go on, I have lots to say. I don't know if things are any worse now than they were before--as I said, I am thankful my water is (relatively) safe to drink. No dysentery here.  (Water safety is a crazy, separate topic altogether.) But I think as long as people are thinking, reflecting, paying attention to each other, we can keep working until we get it right. It's been a slow process, but I think that's what human kind has been trying to do, overall.

"The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice."

--Abolitionist Theodore Parker and/or The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, 

depending on how you source

Hell in a handbasket? Nah, I'm not buying it. But we have a lot of work to do.