Days End
I rose ahead of the sun this morning. The old creature of habit that I am, I do not enjoy breaking the 6AM start to my day. I’ve never lived on a farm, and have not acquired the mental toughness achieved by the obligation to care for animals at first light. My grandfather would have considered a 5 AM work day, nothing special. There must be a benefit of moral grounding inscribed into the labor of earning one’s sustenance from the soil. My grandfather was a man of remarkable moral rectitude. As a senior citizen, in the final months of life, he encountered the severest of crisis, a family matter. He did not waver, and did not allow dark circumstances to provoke him to return evil for evil.
I was in Park Ridge this morning. Park Ridge is a old, settled community, one that is exquisitely maintained by it’s affluence. Hillary Clinton grew up there. It appears to be a place that is family and child friendly, a good place to raise a kids. I took note of the pleasant environment, and enjoyed the agreeable conversation with customers as transactions were concluded. For a few hours it was as if I was in Narnia, a place that appeared magical on the surface. I could not forget this was a rare exception–that much of the world was closer to Mordor. Mordor, a land emanating from the pen of J.R.R. Tolken, was a place mono-manically dedicated to preparing for war. It’s inhabitants were adapted to the toxic degraded environment and were incapable of questioning anything.
My mind drifted off and on to what I could possibly say to a friend who is convinced that the entire Moslem world is preparing to overrun the West. Certainly he is obsessing, over thinking the grim, desperate content that he is finding in electronic media. I think that we need to think less—-open our eyes. More observation, less thinking. The entire world of Islam is not coming for us. They have their own local problems as do we. What fools we become when we allow a individual to wrap himself in illusion and persuade us to hate our neighbor. We have plenty of personal and local problems, due to mistakes that we have made. Could we not use the help that others might offer?
Finally there is the continual worry over the marginally literate individual that we have chosen to lead us. The existential threat to our comity as countrymen has first dibs upon our obligation to self preservation.
3 thoughts on “Days End”
We humans have a propensity to be (as you mentioned) creatures of habit. Habits are comforting and give us structure. The familiar also lends itself to a sense of communal experience, such as a daily sojourn to Beans & Leaves. We are also creatures of purpose. Some have attached themselves to purposes that others might find disturbing, such as what our friend has done. He has come to define himself through his hatred of a large segment of the world’s population and no argument, no rational discussion will dissuade him from that purpose. Without it he would be lost, so every fiber of his being will continue to believe and find cause for his purpose. Only by self-examination can we separate ourselves from this self-destructive behavior and the vast majority of people are not willing to look in the mirror. And so he will continue, regardless.
May I also add that the behavior of our friend is not unlike the behavior of a very small but nonetheless visible and highly destructive segment of the culture he so adamantly rails against. The hatred emanating from the so-called Islamic State (a tiny, tiny portion of Islam) is rooted in what they believe to be a justified Jihadist cause, brought about by delusional belief in what they see as an inherently evil enemy and hence they attach themselves to a definitive purpose. The bottom line is that no one culture is at fault and no one culture is free of guilt. It is what we do with this that will set our future path towards salvation and civil discourse or self-inflicted mutual destruction.
I like the edge that Nietzsche puts to your point: