Society is Fucked. Fix Your Own Lives.

I awoke this morning feeling philosophical (and somewhat hung over) and came to a conclusion… Society is fucked.

It’s not the Left’s fault. It’s not the Right’s fault. It’s everyone’s fault.

When I view my Facebook news feed these days, it’s literally:

Fuck Trump.
Fuck snowflakes.
Fuck Trump.
Fuck snowflakes.
Fuck Trump.

Literally. One on top of the other like a never-ending fractal.

Society cannot be fixed by elections. It cannot be fixed with more money. It cannot be fixed with adjustments to public education. It can’t be fixed with border walls.

Society can only be fixed when people pull the proverbial plank out of their own eye…

Look around. We have obese people who give opinions for society on health and wellbeing; thieves who give opinions on charity; degenerates and losers who give opinions on morality; bums and hoarders living in chaos and disorder who have opinions on the standards by which others should live.

When discussing politics offline I am often asked why I didn’t vote in the 2016 presidential election. The reason – besides the obvious fact that I didn’t like the candidates running for office – is that I am trying to build a foundation in my own life. Who am I – with all of my own flaws – to dictate how another should live? And the same goes for everyone else.

For my contextually challenged friends, I’m not saying, “don’t vote.” What I am saying is simply this: If you feel so strongly that what is happening negatively in our society is wholly the fault of others, a result of anything other than you and the people and groups who share your views, then you are exactly the person I am talking about right now.

Pull out the mirror and start reciting all your own flaws and shortcomings. And then try to work on them to the best of your ability and forget about what is happening outside of your control.

Let’s all do this. Let’s fix your own lives. And then we’ll see where society goes when people start taking personal responsibility.

Author: John Smith

“If you could kick the person in the pants responsible for most of your trouble, you wouldn’t sit for a month.”

~ Theodore Roosevelt

2 thoughts on “Society is Fucked. Fix Your Own Lives.”

Hey! That was good! (If I am allowed to add a quality of judgment to what another does). Do we play for feedback? Maybe that’s part of it? And maybe…it is the inescapable part. And must be? It’s almost like a trap, there’s no escape from it. A set up. If we approve our own thoughts to the point of applause…it appears inexorable…that we speak. And/or write. The “right” thing, indicated to us by that applause of self approval…is demanded into (as though an irresistible sucking) from the vacuum of “out there”. In our seeking to make order of the chaos within…(and, if believing we are)…we inevitably speak into the chaos we believe we see also…into the all that constitutes the else.
You seem to have come to the place where you are less trusting of the once thunderous applause within. Maybe the self of us is discovered to have a previously unseen delight in playing with the volume control, there. And perhaps the trap is laid closer to home than we once knew.
How to escape that, huh? If the trap is on the inside, and I have fallen into it…what do I offer by words or work that is not then a ready invite that others fall into it…this trap ensnaring me…from which I speak, and act? And if that be so…(and I am found truly not desiring further carnage) is there escape? Can there be? Or is a man condemned to holler from the hole…only to find such expression of “call” to others…appeal to others, outreach…to others…does no more than cause their own likewise stumbling into it?
If I am on fire, how close dare I call flammable others to me? Maybe better to be silent. Especially if we discover “that fire” has no regard in respect to loved ones or stranger’s ignite-ability. All are fit kindling to it.
How then can a man live? Can he? Once he has seen, and takes it just one small step farther than Cynthia Cone has in her essay “We Are Violence” to “I am the violence”? Just one small step past the place of spreading the blame…to accepting it…all?
Can a man find…desire to do no harm, is ever made able to outstrip desire “to do”?
What might an extinguisher of self…and own will to do…look like?
Primum non nocere.
He’d look like the perfect physician.

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