Dear Friends,
It seems to me, one undeniable, horrible and inescapable fact of life is… the easy way is always the hard way, in the end. It is the little problem we overlook that grows out of control. The ancient Chinese philosopher, Mo Ti, lamented that people will not do the easy thing, but are happy to do the hard thing. He was speaking about being human hearted and not engaging in war. Because how much harder is it to lose a brother, son or father, than to shake someone’s hand? In our case, we could engage with our representatives, senators, governors, judges and media leaders. Instead of opting for stocking up on weapons. This truism applies to our personal lives, social lives as well as political lives. By avoiding the thing we don’t want to do, taking the easy way, eventually forces us to do the hard thing.
Little dragons always grow to be big dragons, especially when they are kept in a closet and fed a well rounded diet of denial. That is how we dealt with the public schools for decades. We pretended the open political indoctrination the public schools were engaged in wasn’t that bad. So what, that the brain washing of our kids was to an ideology that despises our constitution, our culture and us. We thought it would be too hard to go to a school board meeting and speak our minds, or better yet, run for it. We would have missed Dancing with the Stars, Survivor and Masked Singer, to do that. Now that little dragon has grown into a man eater. Critical Race Theory is openly taught in the government school system… and there is little we can do to stop it. Speaking up now is dangerous.
Mo Ti had difficulty with the fact people will say it is too hard to do right, then willingly pay dearly for the results of their bad decisions. He lived during the Warring States Period of China’s history. He saw the loss of life, destruction of infrastructure as well as the cost of war itself, and couldn’t help but think, there must be a better use of those lives, infrastructure and money. One of his famous arguments was, if someone is shown a black dot on a white paper, not one person out of a hundred will call it white, but when shown a white paper covered with black dots, most will call it white. I think it was Stalin who said, a single death is a tragedy, a million are a statistic. When an individual does a bad thing, it is called bad, but when government does a multitude of bad things, they are called good.
The thing is, we all know this is true, yet for whatever human reason, we don’t put it into practice. Perhaps it is a flaw in human nature, a cultural thing or a mixture of the two. Nevertheless, this capacity of ours, to ignore a problem when it is manageable, until we have to struggle with titanic forces to wrest the world back from the brink, cannot be denied. As in the 80 year cyclical crisis theory. Where civilization faces an existential crisis every 80 years or so. Probably due to our solving whatever crisis, then relaxing on our laurels, until the new problems we are ignoring grow out of control. About 80 years. Then that generation must save the day, ala the Greatest Generation. We are at that point today, the hero generation will either be heroes or villains. They will have to face the dragon we nurtured.
There is no question that if we could slay our dragons when they are little, and actually do it, not only would our lives get demonstrably better by every metric, the lot of Mankind would improve as well. Maybe the 80 year cycle could be stopped? One way to toss a wrench into the gears of that machine, would be to teach our kids to deal with small problems, when they are small. Teach them bad is bad… no matter who does it. Inculcate the lessons of WWII, that psychopathic affair, run by psychopaths, for psychopaths to empower psychopaths. The only world leader who wasn’t openly psychotic was Churchill, and he was ejected from power the second he was of no use to the psychopaths. Remember… Churchill wanted to deal with the Nazis before they became a dragon.
Sincerely,
John Pepin
