If it's up to us, we might as well recognize that reality. That's what "getting real" really means. We're not going to do that, however. We're going to retreat into the safety of our delusions and bemoan that fact that nobody is doing anything to help, that it's someone else's responsibility not ours, that we've been left all alone.
Please forgive me if I don't get all choked up about this. I didn't make the rules, but I have always found it amazing that so many people are willing to say one thing and act differently. There is long-standing tradition in humanity to blame those below you (real or imagined), for it relieves you of having to admit you yourself are the problem. You're the problem. I'm the problem. We're the problem.
Why? Because we only believe what we want to believe. Truth doesn't mean a whole lot to us. Facts don't carry much weight. What is reasonable and makes sense is too easily discarded and replaced by visions of how we would like things to be. We like to think of ourselves as members of an educated, objective, advanced, serious society and culture. We are not. We're every bit as timid, fearful and superstitious as our forebears who we'd rather ignore and forget. After all, we're not like them at all. But we are.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not talking of things political or economic or anything like that. I'm talking about our most fundamental attitude towards life in general and our own lives in particular. I'm talking about basics ... the very fundamentals that allow things to be a particular way. This isn't a new theme, as many of you know. I've talked about it more times than I care to remember (or reference).
We're a strange species. Just because we have the gift of language, we tend to think if we can put a name on something, we understand it. Obviously this breaks down every time we go to the doctor's and s/he tells us what we have in terms that we can only hope s/he understands: Yes, you have a cardiovascular thrombotic resistance to nonvegetative triesters of glycerol enhanced by hyperutilization of hydrolyzable ionic compounds. Gee, why didn't I think of that? Giving something a name doesn't do any more for us than give us a way to refer to something. We most likely don't understand it, but we're pretty sure it's a "something". Isn't that comforting? Not really.
We like to think that we're sophisticated, advanced, developed, intelligent and stable. We're not. Swap out nuclear devices for fireballs launched by catapults and the only real difference is the number of other human beings that can be killed in one shot. The underlying principle is the same. It's only a difference of magnitude. What applies to war applies to every other aspect of life. Watch a film about the bushmen of the Kalahari foraging for food, then stop by your local mega-supermarket between 2:00 and 4:00 am. There's really not a whole lot of difference, and since we're moderns, we simply don't have to walk as far.
Nah, I doubt we'll be getting real anytime soon. We're far too enamored with deceiving ourselves, of thinking we know things when we don't and thereby perhaps missing the real point of it all.
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