Fai Ling: The Grump-Miester Speaks

Dear Readers:

Madame is off for some well-deserved R&R.  Which leaves you with Mr. Grumpus!  (That would be yours truly).  What makes me a bit of a grouch lately?  Because--

I am failing.

You are failing.

We are failing.

As a people, as a culture, as a nation, as those trying (not very hard) to avoid repeating self-destructive history.

We momentarily seem to focus on real threats to our civilization, and then fail as we let ourselves be diverted by some spectacle or spectacles, some diversion, some red herring, some misprioritization.  Then we often make it worse by choosing ignorance or denial.

A reminder of something might help shake us from our lotus-trance:

There are no Romans around anymore.  They failed.   They were effectively self-wiped, with only modest outside “help” in the wiping. As a people and a nation, this once noble people, who thought themselves chosen by Heaven, thought that because they were ROMANS it would all somehow work out regardless of what they did or didn’t do, found out that they had no immunity to the forces of adverse change.  They who were the standard bearers of civilization both chose unwisely and failed to choose at all.  And so, although elements of their culture would go on, they didn’t. 

In this infinity of mirrors, the irony is that our arrogance, our invincible ignorance, and our delusional belief in unchanging “specialness,” are together leading us down the same path of self-disintegration.  And with our failing to lead (to write the understatement of the new century) on preservation of the environment, it may be even worse than that.