Dear Friends,
It seems to me, we take for granted that which we have, but the moment it is taken away… we go to pieces. Which shows we are often the means to our own destruction. Getting a thing, anything, is more difficult than maintaining it. Take a chunk of flint and work it into an ax. The work to make the stone into an ax is laborious, dangerous, requires craftsmanship and quality flint. Keeping it sharp and effective is as easy as not using it to chop stone, or the ground, but once someone has that ax for awhile, they start taking it for granted and abuse it. Eventually we are in the position of having to find a quality chunk of flint… This holds true for our personal relationships, jobs, society, culture and nation. It is much easier to lose a good thing than to get it back or replace it.
Taking things for granted is a natural way of thinking for people. Our natural predilection has become magnified today with Capitalism. The free enterprise system inculcates to everyone, that there will always be more, because it has always created more. More wealth, more luxury, more stuff and more diversions. Not just for the rich but for everyone. A poor man can spend every dime on a luxury car if he wants, or fancy shoes if she wants. The point of capitalism is, we expect more. Other cultures, cultures that haven’t had the capitalist system, generating such absurd wealth the poor are fat, have a different mindset. Instead of a more, more, more attitude, they try desperately to hold onto the little which they have. Nevertheless, even the poorest sometime take things for granted.
We strive so hard to get more. A bigger house, more income, better health, greater status in whatever hierarchy, a corner office, or maybe a little kingdom within some corporation or bureaucracy. While these are goals that most would want, they fall short of life improving goals. A life improving goal would be a better relationship with your family, spiritual understanding, self acceptance, taking on the responsibility to help make society better, being a good citizen so the nation can thrive, or trying as best you can to only tell the truth. These are life improving and elevating goals. They are not got by striving for more, but being satisfied with what you have, not taking things and people for granted as well as being a means to the improvement in the lot of Mankind.
I am not saying we should strive for less. I am saying we should focus a bit more than we do now on the present, what we have, the people in our lives and how we can make things better. Not be a conduit for change, but make things better, because change is not necessarily good, but better is, well… better. Striving for more is why we have heated seats in our cars and running water in our homes. We should not turn away from it, but look to maintain what we have, while we make the world better. Because what good is heated seats if the car doesn’t run or running water if it is toxic? Put sixty percent of our focus on more, and forty percent on not taking things, the nation and people for granted. After all, isn’t wanting more… why people risk life and limb to get to the US?
Which brings us to why we must not take our culture, society and the US for granted. We know what happens when we lose our spouse, how much more chaotic to lose one’s nation, culture and civil society? In both scenarios your family is put at risk, the first the risk is primarily emotional and financial, the second it is existential. In revolutions, whole swaths of the population die, famine, plague and oppression usually nip at the heels of civil war, the survivor’s reward. Taking one’s society for granted in the pursuit of an extra night out to eat, is the height of foolishness. Yet that is exactly what we as a society, culture and people are doing. We have the normalcy bias. We sit idle while idiots chop stone with our flint ax, imagine our dismay should it shatter… We have taken it for granted for so long.
Sincerely,
John Pepin
