The World Is Burning–So What?

The first post of the year 2015 is something I actually started awhile back and forgot about. Lately I’ve been pondering how people deal with life’s challenges along with how much behavior is influenced by external pressures. Stress fractures in society are increasing in size and quantity while people seem less equipped to deal with them. That’s the backdrop for what I began writing last year and updated for this post…

Russia slowly undermines and takes away chunks of Ukraine, China bullies its neighbors and lays claim to vast swathes of sea, Islamists are wreaking havoc in France and Africa, illegal alien minors including gang members are flooding over the border with Mexico, Iraq lost territory to terrorists and Iran sent troops in, and the United States has the most corrupt and incompetent leadership in its history. Yep, it is business as usual -- if you are a student of history. Unfortunately, most people are not.

Combining that ignorance with decades of spoiled brat prosperity in the West has resulted in stunned confusion, dismay, and growing fear for quite a few people. The relative peace of the past sixty years is mistakenly thought of as normal, which it is is not. Normalcy is returning to the planet for an unpleasant nostalgia trip.

I suggest that people simply deal with it for life is not supposed to be easy. Weakness has never been considered a virtue before the current time, so a rather severe corrective lesson is needed. This kind of thing happens when cultural empires fall, which is a pattern never deviated from throughout recorded history. From the the Greek city states, to ancient Rome, to the Holy Roman Empire, to the Ottoman Empire, to the Soviet Union the song remains the same: what goes up must come down.

Decadence and declining civic morality are harbingers of these inevitable crashes of polity. Rather than being external symptoms of rot, they are the disease itself at the root of decline. The moment moral relativism shows up, the countdown to ruin begins. Amazingly, the lesson is never learned and humanity repeats the same mistakes over and over again.

What to do, what to do?

Something I’ve learned over the years is that an individual’s power to sway large events is miniscule, dependent on large numbers of similar thinking people, and facilitated by immense luck rather than hard work. Where most people are lovingly ignorant of the big picture, noticing it only when something affects them personally, there are those of us who are devoted to watching events unfold on the big stage. Ours is the opposite dilemma of the uninformed for we are too informed with little to no ability to influence what’s going on depending on the situation.

That leads to frustration, which leads to worrying over everything, which leads to becoming the crank ranting at the trees in the back yard after the kids in the neighborhood have learned to avoid you. I can report that trees don’t scare as easily and aren’t nearly as much fun to terrify as small children.

Learning to appreciate the little things in life might be considered a trite sentiment, but hey, when they are all you’ve got, might as well enjoy them. After all, there is always something bad happening somewhere and those moments when it isn’t happening to you are worth noting.

Sometimes I think those four legged eternal optimists called cats are on to something. As Robert Heinlein noticed, they always think the next door opened is the door to summer no matter how cold it is. While there is no way I’m getting that delusional, being a little more myopic in my focus can’t be anything other than stress reducing.

Cycles go on despite our best efforts to control things so spring will eventually replace winter with brighter colors, then summer will arrive. Of course autumn will be waiting in the wings to dull the colors of life as an introduction to bleak winter draining them completely.

That applies to cycles in lives, cultures, and countries, not just nature. If you keep on moving, the scenery will change. If you stay still, the scenery will change. Change is our reliable constant so one might as well make friends with it.

Stop sweating the big, uncontrollable things so you can focus on what you can influence for the better is what I’m telling myself these days. Now to actually practice it, there’s the challenge.