It’s been a bit rough watching the news lately. It’s been rough watching it the last 100 years or so to be honest, but it’s just that I find that mankind is being particularly brutal and obtuse of late. It’s more than just a feeling…..it’s a very palpable feeling of dismay and loss and hopelessness that is just beyond our grips at the moment, but is slowly tumbling further and further from our graps at being able to gain control of it all.
I a=have been a factoid person all my life. I gather knowledge much like a squirrel, gathering pertinent nuts of information here and there, trying to figure out which particular nut ir worthy of keeping and storing, and which ones should be discarded. This started, as near as I can tell, when I was 3-1/2, during the Centennial of Canada, when I went ot the air base with my dad and we saw a museum display about how we came to be 100 as a nation. I was fascinated with all this ‘stuff’, by what it meant to me. Of course, as time progressed, and I became more informed, I searched for sources that would give a more all-encompassing view of what I was reading.
And therein lies the rub. You can look and see and hear every side to a story or event, and it just makes it more confusing, more personal, more enraging….as a humanist, I find that the depths that we are dragging ourselves down to as a race heartbreaking. Two teeny nations bombing each other continuously. Someone reaching out seemingly anonomously and bltting an aircraft from the sky, snuffing 298 innocent people’s lives and affecting countless others, people not involved in the skirmish that killed them, never knowing how or why they were targeted. Two grandparents and a 5-year-old murdered and still unfound. Politicians of all stripes getting caught with their hands in the cookie jar, not acting contrite until all avenues of escape from culpability have been exhausted.
Come on….really? It would appear that mankind has not learnt at all how to control itself. You would think that after the atrocities of the two world wars in the 20th century, where tens of millions perished, and quite literally everyone alive was affected, that we could get our collective shit together and start using this precious gift of life we’ve been given to steer our ships in one direction instead of ramming each other blindly. The world has become more myopic still with the advent of the information age, showing us just enough of the worst that we are now aware that we are fucking ourselves silly, that depite our local and singular and even plural attempts to make our world a better place, big business and big government and big religion wields an axe simply too large for us to protect ourselves.
And so, we internalise. We hold our children and our homesteads a little tighter, a little closer, we batten down the hatches of our existence to try and weather the storm. And being a factoid fan, I realize this isn’t a storm. It’s reality. It doesn’t have to be, but it is. The reality is that mankind is too dense yet fractured to take care of the common good. We are all just greedy enough to worry about ourselves instead of others AND ourselves.
Which is why I am even more thankful for my wife Anne than I have ever been. Through all this darkness and perversity and lawlessness, she remains a beacon of light and inspiration to my kids and I. She performs daily acts of kindness for others, from one-on-one hands on in-the-trenches work with individuals struggling to get by, to providing positive energy through readings and Reiki and crystal bowl energy, to listening to someone and not judging, to loving and nurturing and providing for her family. All the while dealing with her own Autism and navigating a more and more confusing social landscape.
It is people like Anne and so many others out there that keep hope alive. May we bless and nurture these people, for they are key to preventing us from sliding into the abiss awaiting us should we lack the wit to prevent it. I choose to turn off the bad, turn off the light, and let them guide us through the dark like beacons.
Where there is light, the is always hope.
Bill's Musings 