We may be on the eve of destruction. Things aren't getting better, that's for sure. We are living in critical times, and that is also for sure, as is the fact that change is coming whether we like it or not. This is scaring a lot of people and whenever and wherever anyone is frightened, there are tons of media types just waiting to make sure that fear is spread. As the saying goes, "if it bleeds, it leads", or as I like to say, "if it's scummy, we'll make money". OK, it's not exactly the same, but close enough."
So what's a poor, simple person to do? Well, conservatives, I have to say, make a dash for the past. They get all fired up about turning back the clock to the "good old days", when life made sense, when things were manageable. They've lost the plot for the simple reason that the good old days were bad, for anyone living in those times life made as little sense as it does today (we only think the past makes sense because we have the knowledge and experience of everything that happened in-between to color our judgement), and I can assure you, my parents were as much at a loss for what was the best things to do in their lives and for their children as I am with my own kids. We have to come to terms with what we have, not with what we would like to think we might have had if things has been somehow different.
Liberals, I have to add, are no better. They're looking at life through a rear-view mirror (thank you, Marshall McLuhan) as well. They foolishly believe there was a time when politics mattered, when debate was virulent, when the best argument won, when morals could be legislated. But, alas, that time never existed either. They think it did. They think their dreams were institutionalized, but the teeny, tiny steps of progress that were made, were just that: teeny, tiny. We really haven't come very far.
This is our modern, most common, form of schizophrenia: thinking that the past holds solutions for the future. We love to look backwards, to times that never really existed except in our own rose-colored-glasses tinted memories. Gen. Glubb's critique didn't just miraculously appear. He was analyzing at a time when we these days believe things were halfway OK. No, dear reader, the world's been going to hell in a handbasket for some time now. The only change from then to now is the rate of acceleration.
All the wailing and gnashing of teeth we're hearing these days isn't going to change a thing. What we're wailing about, for the most part, is for how things used to be. To my American friends, all I can say is, get over your holy Constitution. It is nothing all that special, it has not changed the world for the better, it's one of the most misquoted and misused, if not abused, documents ever to have been written, and, worst of all, it was formulated in a mindset and a way of viewing the world that hasn't existed for two centuries. It's time to simply let it go and look for some common sense relevant to today. To my non-American friends (i.e., everyone else), all I can say is, you've got nothing up on the Americans, you haven't managed to go right where you think they went wrong, you also don't have a now-relevant solution to the problem either.
Why? Because you're all, we're all, looking in the wrong direction for a solution. Glubb, believe it or not, provides us with a reasonable starting point for thinking about all of this, but he doesn't have the "answer" or the "solution" either. We, you & I, have to figure out what needs to be done, but he, like many other reasonable authors, provides us with a starting point for maybe thinking about things in a slightly different way. What this might be, we'll look at next time.
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