Opinion/Editorial
WE SHALL FEAR NO EVIL
It is now, officially, the year of our Lord 2018, or 2018 years into the current era, as anthropologists would say. The Lord’s descriptive intent in the more traditional wording is quite possibly much more applicable this year because of how the country’s foundations have been shaken to the core. Many people became convinced that the U.S. government was, and remains, this horrid, corrupt and belatedly useless organization of nasty people intent on stealing everyone’s money. That government is merely a form of gathered funds and intent; just like every religion, is a thought the mass media has cast aside. There is no way to build bridges, highways, railroads and space programs; to launch satellites or even have a national defense force without an organized collection and expenditure outfit to do the work. Politics is merely a negative word that has been slipped into the culture to describe leadership. Government is the negative word of today used to describe people trying to get together to accomplish tasks that cannot be done alone or singularly. The negatives come in when actual people hold positions, and then use them to profit themselves and not the group. That kind of behavior is always going to be present to some degree. The competition for survival out here is just too extreme. Unless the competitive situation lessens for all humanity, then theft will continue to be a huge problem. There is always a push to throw the old leadership out. It does not matter what the leadership is composed of, or where it is to be found. Whatever the current leadership believes, or whomever it is, does not matter. It isn’t the leadership that those who are not the leaders want to be in there, because they want to be in there, to profit from the new leadership directly or indirectly. That’s an anthropological constant throughout all government operations everywhere, through time all over planet earth. Some governmental leaders are better than others. You have had a year to look at the current leadership of America rather starkly and nakedly. What do you think about how things have changed? How’s it working for you so far, and how’s it likely to work out in the future?
Aside from deciding upon who is to lead the nation, or any other group of the species, where would we be as humans if we didn’t have a reason to get up in the morning? Where would we be if we lacked the ability to confront danger, fear, and terror…accept the challenge of the potential mortal danger it presents, and then go right at it? Where would we be without our self and group generated beliefs to make it all tolerable enough to rise from sleep and persevere through another waking period? We’d be small hominids, or furry covered mammals competing under the snowy forest floor with mice and voles to get what we could. It is the holiday season and maybe it’s this season alone when we might consider how it is that we self-generated the feelings that took us out from the cave darkness to face the storms of lightning and thunder crisscrossing the savannah of our existence. We did a lot of it by believing in God. We either made God up, or God pointed a Godly finger down and infused us with some indication of his overall presence. Yes, God, or merely the belief in a supreme being had, and still has a lot to do with our human ability to go at it every day and to build something out of nothing at all. Along with our belief in God, in whatever organized, or disorganized, way we came to go along or believe, we also generated a feeling that this God was on our side.
That we took, and take with us every day, the 23rd Psalm: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil…for thou art with me…” We don’t go it alone. We don’t have to go out there alone and do what it is that we must do for our own survival and that of our spawn. We also were able to figure out that going out there alone was a bad idea. So, we go out together. Auld Lang Syne says it all if you choose to interpret the words that way. We do it together. We do it with God, whether we only secretly believe in Him or not. Happy New Year, me along with you…and God. Yea, though we walk through this valley…
2018 comes with a good dose of faith, determination, and perspective. How everyone decides to fashion the year to his or her own purposes will have a lot to do with how the year is found to be either a huge success or a devastating failure. Quite possibly, it is a bit of hubris that causes human beings to approach a new year with human activity as the motive force in the universe, galaxy, solar system and right down to occurrences here on earth. Humans have changed all life on this planet, that much cannot be denied. Whether those changes are defined to be good or bad is almost strictly up to humans because, as of yet, there is no other intelligent life to be questioned or polled. Go forth into the new year and direct yourself to be smiling, moving forward and intent upon making the changes in your life good ones, no matter who is doing the viewing and judging.
Happy New Year
