Meandering Thoughts and Brutal Reality

Because of the time and place and circumstances of my birth, I have spent my life with one foot each in two diametric camps. Due to the social upheaval of the 60’s and having been born and fundamentally raised prior to that decade, I experienced and was tutored in the age prior to moral relativism.

My parents were Depression Era children that faced the incomprehensible brutality of World War II as well and all the aspects of being one society, of one mind and one focus with need, want, fear, hurt, lack and confusion for all.

As a result, I was raised with a lot of absolutes in moral and social terms. Then the 60’s overwhelmed the society; followed by the 70’s and so on. The early 80’s were a wake up call and divisional separation for many in our country. The consequences of what had been embraced throughout the 60’s and 70’s were starting to come home.

The sheer determination and will of the late 80’s through 2007 had falsely given a sense of invulnerability and lack of concern for anything but our individual and personal will and desires for many among us.

The calloused greed was noted and advanced and embraced in one movie character from the onset of the last 20+ years or so. Michael Douglas’s character pronounced “Greed is good”. Many embraced it and used it as the center piece for their sumptuous psychological buffet and the rationalization and justification for absolutely everything they did. The character, Gordon Gecco was our newest form of hero based in raw reality, desire and gratification. The brutal truths and cold blooded execution advanced became many people’s mandate.

I can only assume that in many minds the new battle cry was “Damn the consequences”!

Now, we have come to the reverse of that coin and find that the consequences have damned us!

People are reaching out in mortal fear and hurt, attempting to find someone to embrace and salve and nurture while in reality simply seeking that nurturing and socio-psychological balm for themselves. We deeply fear that perhaps it will end “not with a bang; but a whimper”. Almost instantaneously, our fellow man has become paramount in our minds, psychology and social responsibility. So, now the human herd has been turned and stampedes in a new direction or at least a portion of the herd.

Another portion among us embraces their individuality and staunch determination to go it alone. Unwilling to compromise or recant the positions they took originally, due to revulsion at the thought of being evaluated insincere or hypocritical.