LOGICAL PROGRESSION

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.