WHY??

I lost my wife of nearly 28 years just over seven months ago. I have spent the time since trying to find purpose in a suddenly meaningless existence. I do not write this to garner sympathy for myself because--boo hoo--I'm having an existential crisis. I am quite capable of feeling sorry for myself without any outside help. My issue is this: I want to live in a world that I can live with. (Don't we all?) But as I look at the world around me, I find it less and less like the world I always thought it was. Or at least as it was meant to be (more on that in a moment). Where once I held hope and optimism, I now see only ugliness in the form of pettiness, hatred and tragedy. Everywhere I look, there is an undercurrent of conflict and divisiveness. No one appears to care about Truth, Beauty, Compassion or Justice. I want to live, to continue living, even though my primary reason for doing so has been taken from me. But I find that I don't want to live in the world as it is now. The world has made it very difficult for me to want to go on living.

There are flaws in my world view. And there is more than a single source for these flaws. There are quite a few, in fact. Some come from within, others are strictly external. Let me try to break it down.

Obviously, a serious argument can be made that the reason I feel the way that I do is that I am still reeling from grief, a powerful source of emotion. I feel wronged by the cosmos in a very intimate way. I have been "wronged" before and have always come back; I have  prided myself on my resilience. I've taken a lot of hits in the past. Maybe, because I'm "old" now, I just took one too many, maybe I finally just broke. In the past, I always had the inner belief that things would get better. I'm not so sure this time around. Maybe this loss has cut me deep in ways I have never encountered before. But I should still have hope, shouldn't I?

This brings me to the second internal "flaw". Perhaps I was (as I like to call it) stupidly optimistic in times before. Maybe my world and the world around me has always sucked. History and my own experience has ample evidence that this is true. There have always been wars and disease and disasters. Murders and brutality and deceit. Read the news, read a book. Look at me. But there is beauty and intelligence and charity out there. I've seen those as well. So the "world" isn't "perfect", but it has Good to balance the Evil, Light to chase away the Darkness, Life to combat Death, Love to conquer All. Karma and Justice happen. Or at least statistically they will whether or not someone makes them happen. And statistically, Justice fails, Karma gets deferred. Balance. But someone has their thumb on the scales, don't they? Don't worry, it will all even out over time. Tell that to the wrongly convicted, the falsely accused, the mercilessly tortured and executed. Where is their Justice? How will Karma serve them? Down the road in another life? What about Now?

The here and now is all we have. And it's my Now that I'm having trouble with. I see the world now as it is presented to me through the television and the internet. And once upon a time through newspapers and history books. (History books? Yes, the present is firmly and unbreakably rooted in the past. So I gathered insight into the Now by looking at the Then.) But there is an inherent problem with acquiring knowledge in this way: the knowledge is filtered through the subtext of whomever presents it, and it is left to me to interpret the truth using my own filter of my own subtext. It is the two-edged sword of Truth. George Bernard Shaw said, “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” Or at least it is said that he said that, or something like it. The problem is that for true communication to take place, the message that is intended must be received as it was intended. Failure for this to occur led to the creation of the word   "misunderstanding". This, of course, can lead to horrible, sometimes catastrophic consequences.

But things go deeper than that. Because the intent might be to deceive or "misrepresent". When I go to a news website, I go with the intent to learn what is new in the world. Not everyone does. Some people go to find out what other people think about what is new in the world. In this way they might be able to gather a more insight. Or they might be able to reinforce what they already believe. There is a danger in this. My news sources may themselves may have the facts wrong or be outright lying. What am I to believe? This is an instance where "democracy" fails. Just because there might more people who believe an untruth than people who don't, doesn't suddenly elevate the untruth to Truth. We now stand upon the mountain-nay, the mountain range--that has been dubbed "Ulam's Dilemma". Paraphrased by Reuben Hersh, it states: "If the number of theorems is larger than one can possibly survey, who can be trusted to judge what is 'important?'" In other words (paraphrasing a paraphrase further; am I diluting the truth?), with so much "information" out there, it is virtually impossible to know what to believe. Solomon in the book of Eccesiates wrote, "And further, by these, my son, be admonished: of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh." (Chapter 12, verse 12) Extend the meaning of books to include websites, et al. and that's a whole lot of reading. The information "out there" is what we have, right? What else do we have? Our own potentially flawed inner compass? Short of trusting our own judgment, we can only do what we call "best effort" at work. And hope for the best. (pesky Hope again...)

Best effort is a simple two word construct that beautifully describes "all we can do". Best effort requires two ingredients which are laid out for us in the very term. First, we must do the best we can to discern the truth. We should not simply accept at face value the first thing or anything we read. We should read about other opinions. Form our own opinions with a wide variety of sources. Get a feel for the "type" of people that hold these opinions. Are they credible? Did they do any research themselves" Or are they just spouting off things they've heard, or things they already believe and have done just enough research to support their position while ignoring those whose whose opinions support the opposite? Are they shutting off their ears and brains simply to join the crowd? Do they mock the opposition and engage in confrontation instead of welcoming rational debate and being open to other ideas? The second element is effort, some of which I have already detailed above. Do the work. Do the research. Don't let someone else "speak" for you, or worse think for you. Form your own opinions.

In my experience, most people who have negative opinions (and that is a very "diplomatic" expression with reference to some of the things I have read) about groups of people--chose and insert your favorite demographic here--have never even met, let alone talked or had any other kind of interaction with anyone associated with the group. How in the world can you form an opinion about an entire group of people based upon the words and deeds of a few of the people from that group, whose own members might be disagreeing with? It's possible that 99.999% of that group agrees with you on almost everything (except your hatred of them as a group), and you don't even know it. Why? Because you never hear anything about them. You never hear anything from them. And, most telling, you don't know any of them. They are living in their little world just like you are. They are quiet. You don't even notice them, unless something about them (their color, their speech, their funny clothes) brings them to your attention. Oh, they're one of "them". No, they're not. Not necessarily. They might be, but you don't know. How can you? You've never spoken to them.

I'm told that America is broken and divided and torn up. That things are terrible right now and we need to fix or there won't be an America. That might be true. But when has it ever been any different here? It has always been broken and divided and torn up for someone. Anytime we look back at history and say, "Yeah, things were much better then", we aren't looking at the ones from the same period who didn't have it better. And while the groups that have had it worse have changed from one period to the next, the story has not. There has always been a group--most times more than one--that has been on the outside of the alright. And even the ones who were alright have always been divided. And guess what? The whole world is in the same mess and has been from the beginning. You read and hear about it every freakin' day. Everywhere. Since the beginning. This is nothing new. It only seems worse now because we are in the middle of it. I grew up during the Cold War's greatest hits. And Viet Nam was the only reality show on the TV. At home we all lived under the constant threat of nukes blasting us out of existence, while on the other side of the world we were very accurately keeping and reporting of the body count of our Armed Forces who were battling someone because someone else higher up told them to while being protested at home. Please tell me again that things are worse now. I'm listening. Dial it back a few years and we had World War II. Was that the better time? The Great Depression? World War I? How about the Civil War? (Something, something, slavery, Lincoln) Or the American Revolution? Our country couldn't come up with a workable Constitution until 13 years after the Declaration of Independence because they couldn't agree on it. Of course the decision to separate from England was a hard-fought battle of words in the first place. Should I even mention what followed after Columbus made the trip? One of the favorite games we played was Cowboys and Indians (Cops and Robbers, and Army were the other two), and guess who had to be the losers every time? Well it had to be that way because, Movies.

I mentioned these events from history, because those are the ones I learned about in school. All horrible things in America's past. But what about the times between the wars? Surely all was good then. Um, nope. A lot of things in the history books didn't mention all. And that list is a whole longer than the one I gave above. Things I can't even believe could, let alone did, happen in the Land of the Free. And that's just American History. Pull the camera back and shit has been going on all over the world since there has been a world. We are simply continuing the cycle. Can it be stopped? Slowed down? Reversed? I don't know. I only know what I read and hear.

So where does that leave me? (And by that I mean "Us".) As I survey my own small part of the "World", one thing does become clear. I am surrounded by an enormous group of people made up of family, friends, associates, and acquaintances that have vast amounts of empathy and compassion in their being, right next to their intelligence, humor, honesty, courage and fairness. It is to the point, at least in some cases, that the lines between family and friends, friends and associates becomes more than a little blurred. What I don't see is a bunch of people screaming at each other because of some "difference", be it political, religious, economic or social. In my day to day interactions, most of the time, I am not aware of their belief system or country of origin or their preferences. I like a lot of people, many of whom might very well not like each other. I like a few people who are frankly quite unlikable. I don't have to believe the same thing they do or come from where they do or like the same things they do or look like them or act like them or even talk like them. But here's what I think is important about this. We don't shoot each other or try to burn each others houses down or throw rocks at each other. We don't even raise our voices at each other unless we were personally hurt by them. We get along. We tolerate each other's quirks. We might get annoyed with one another and we try to work it out. We don't call each other names (unless we're real close and have both decided it's okay to do so and it's all in fun). Husbands and boyfriends out there, really, be honest, how many arguments have you won with your wife or girlfriend by calling them a bitch and really meaning it? Did it help the situation any? Even a little?

So about this world as I see it. Yeah, it's messed up out there. But I don't think the problem is as big or as two-sided as everyone is being lead to believe. We're told we are "polarized". But are we? It's easy to put things in terms of Us and Them, especially when we don't actually know Them. I look around and all I see is Us. One big Us. And it's up to Us to find a way. So in spite of everything else, I still have hope and stupid optimism. Because of the people I know. I don't think most of the people in America, or even the World, are that different from one another. Sure there are extremes and extremists, but not most of us. And we are the ones who are going to have to find our voices and take action to let everyone else know the world is still worth living in. And I can live with that. And that is why.