CURRENT CONDITION>UNDERLYING
CAUSATION>CORRECTION:
A basic rule
of the universe since the beginning is the rule of “cause and effect”. There is always a reaction for every action
that is enacted. One of my favorite go-to books is As a Man Thinketh written by James Allen. His book proposes that we are what we think,
just another example of cause and effect.
If we take that a little bit further, our society is a result of a mass
of thought. It is up to each of us as
individuals to understand what result our individual belief systems will
contribute to society.
Our
individual responsibility is to be the gatekeeper of what comes into our
minds. The process of “garbage in
garbage out” pertains to our minds just as much as to computer
programming, and there is plenty of garbage to go around. We all have our favorite sources of thought
food, often without even understanding the truth that went into our minds
diet. Mankind is basically a social
animal and as such tends to have a herd mentality and as the old adage states,
birds of a feather flock together and will follow the flock into any abyss.
Societies
are bombarded from every side with propaganda from news media, politicians,
product promotion and educators. The
effect on adults is monumental but even more horrendous is the effect on future
members, our children. Those future members
of our society are sponges to what is being fed into their minds. They are taught what to think, what to
believe, how to act or react to those they come in contact with. They are not equipped with veracity filters
that would allow them to discard false knowledge. They are primed and ready for indoctrination.
The crime of
our society is that we are being programmed to distrust our neighbor and to
deny them the right of discussion. We no
longer base our decisions on fact but instead, we look to our feelings, which
most often are a result of propaganda and indoctrination, in lieu of the facts. Honesty is a good thing. It is based on our beliefs and it allows a
true vision of what we believe to other folks of what we think is true. The problem is determining the truth of what
we think. We should look at the
resulting facts of what we believe to be true.
Is what we think reality or not?
In most cases, what we believe is just partially true and we need to
sift out the garbage part of our beliefs if that is going to be our personal
description. Mankind is flawed, we are susceptible to partial truth, we make
mistakes, but we are seldom all one way.
We are a conglomerate of our experience, good or bad, true or false, and
according to the teachings of the bible, we believe lies. The apple may have tasted good but the result
was not what the serpent alleged it to be.
As a
species, mankind has been a work in progress, as it moved from family-clan-township-etc.,
into the number of cities towns and nations of today. Over the course of centuries, groups have progressed
from rule by physical power to rule by economic and weaponry control. We have witnessed social control moving from
belief systems through a multitude of cultural progressions.
Here we are
today, warts and all. The blame game is
in full play throughout the world and particularly in our country. We have allowed our society the freedom to be
manipulated time and time again until truth is almost impossible to find as a
complete package. In almost every part
of our society, there are faults that need correction. Hopefully, those corrections will be made through
reasonable, honest, and truthful fact-finding. We are not born racist, hateful,
separatists. We have been taught those
fallacies. We are all part of the same
family, human, dysfunctional as it may appear today. Like it or not a majority of our dysfunction
and animosity would disappear by basing our actions on the precepts of Judeo-Christian
beliefs. The Ten Commandments of the
Jewish/Christian Bible and New Testament give us a great social structure.
If we love
our neighbor as ourselves, racism would disappear. For example, the issue of “systemic
racism” in our country has occupied our streets, our schools, our politics and
our families. Mistakenly looked at as one-sided, it exists in almost every race, color and creed throughout our species
and in most parts of our planet. It is a
product of fear brought about as a lack of knowledge regarding other people's
backgrounds and history. That knowledge cannot
be gained through the rewriting or erasure of the history we need to learn
from. We need to research history,
the causes of such things as slavery. It
is a fact that our society condoned slavery. It is also a fact that we fought
to eliminate the practice. Hopefully, we
will continue to progress, but it will not happen as long as we act and react
from feelings rather than from fact.
As you
thinketh… part of the solution or part of the problem… truthfully. God Bless our country, our people our first
responders.
