Let's Really Talk

A new friend told me that tourism has taken a real blow this year, not simply due to the weird weather fiasco clearly caused by global warming, or even due to the gas price gouging resulting in high prices, but due to the conciousness of the people finally collectively waking up to the fact we are in trouble. Americans are not respected anymore, and in fact, are ridiculed, and rightfully so in most cases. Our courageous young men and women are dying, and in a few cases, becoming corrupted themselves by the lack of morality, the lack of accepting responsibility, the lack of support from those for whom they are putting their lives on the line for, both back home and on the battle fronts. And still we, as Americans, play name games, the blame games.

It's the liberals fault; no, it's the conservatives fault. It's the Republicans; no, it's the Democrats. It's the religious fanatics; no it's the religious right. It's the government; no, it's the silent majority. It's the warmongers; no, it's the hippie peace freaks. Truth is, it is all of us, you and me. If we just got off our self righteousness and stopped hiding behind labels, maybe we could work together. We, the people of the United States of America, have ceased to work together for a common good. Hell, we can't even define what a common good is anymore. Maybe we never could. But we sure are living in a fractured society.

We each think we hold the ultimate truth and if only everyone else was so enlightened, we'd be just fine. When did we stop thinking we could learn something valuable from each other? Why do we run around with our very narrow little views and try to convince everyone that we are right and they are wrong? Typical behavior for human beings who think they are truly on top when it comes to intelligence. We are greedy creatures. We have used our intelligence to create lots of toys to keep us amused, and guess what, we are self destructing. We are finding it more difficult to be amused. It's getting harder everyday, isn't it? It isn't hard at all to see instead of dealing with our problems we are letting anger take over--hence the increasing number of categories for rage--road rage, black rage, mailroom rage, Mac
Donald's rage, Bush rage, hetrosexual rage, ad nauseum.

We have used our intelligence to trap ourselves with the very categories we have created. We have new words, new "insider" vocabularies for each category or area within each category, a phenomena used to separate us rather than to understand each other. We create them to strengthen the walls that separate we the "insiders" from them "the outsiders." Funny thing, there are so many walls now there isn't a person left who isn't an insider to something and and outsiderer to a whole lot more. We have widen the gaps and created such a maze of words we no longer have a common language that doesn't contain multi-hidden meanings, hidden agendas, and emotional buttons to push and keep us from ever communicating without getting lost in the pitfalls we created.

My parents always told me--never be afraid of any creature other than the two legged kind. As a child I never wanted to believe that. I've learned otherwise. We two-legged animals have created a real mess for ourselves on every level. No wonder tourism may be waning. Collectively we may be waking up to see that the answers to our problems as a nation, as a human race, will take something more than hiding behind our preferred labels we've generated to protect ourselves. Those kinds of behaviors have outlived their effectiveness and need to stop if we are ever going to work together to survive as a species. Seems to me the first thing to do is to accept responsibility for our actions. Now isn't that a novel thought?