Entertainment

In a nation where most people believe their first order of business is to be entertained, to have a good time, and to take life unseriously, truth seems dour. It's odd in a way, because truth can be empowering and uplifting and full of hope -- you are part, you are life, you have potentials you haven't even begun to tap -- and yet so many see nothing but work for themselves or suffering. We mustn't pay too many taxes, we need that money for our gas costs; we mustn't criticize the things we have questions about, no one wants to field awkward conversation or look straight at what is to be seen. Blindered we advance and blindered we erode the very thing that keeps us up. If through my personal life time I can maintain the belief in whatever I choose to believe and it makes my own brain satisfied and my own emotions soothed, what more can be asked of me? Tell that to the cattle and the hogs and the chickens and the insects and weeds of the midwest and the rivers of the far West, and the children condemned to the isolated ghetto and the marginalized around the world. Tell them your philosophy and see what sort of understanding they can find for you. Tell them that you need your SUV and global climate change inducing energy supplies and biodiversity destroying agriculture. Tell them that it would be too much for your pampered disposition to have to suffer in any way. Explain to them why you are to be more privileged and provided with more material, even if it came from their back yard. Explain why you must be overweight while their children starve and suffer, their people die brutal deaths with your tax monies (that you are willing to pay). Explain why injustice is not an idea you extend to their lives. Why you must come first in every instance and never have to give a thought to the other lives around you, watch them understand your plight and feel a pity for the risk that you may have to give up some small part of your over-consumptive life-style if they keep asking for justice. Justice will hurt your privilege; explain to them, you will have none of their foolishness.

Inequity in nature besets entire communities who pull their pieces together and hold tight to a kind of imbalanced equilibrium. Not stasis, mind you, but changing stability. Life persists. Modern isolation has left us ignorant of these deep rhythms, severed our present from the deep past of human habitation and knowledge of place. In our air-conditioned movie theatres we bombard our senses with the sights and sounds -- but none of the consequences -- of violence and aggression and narrow escapes. Carrying those ideals into our air-conditioned automobiles and our air-conditioned houses and why are we so intolerant and inhumane and miserable with our station? Why do we turn from the truth as if some unwelcome neighbor at our exclusive party? What are you really afraid of?