My friends, we are on the way to becoming a two-tiered society composed of a few winners and a larger group of Americans left behind, whose anger and disillusionment are easily manipulated. Once unbottled, mass resentment can poison the very fabric of society — the moral integrity of society — replacing ambition with envy, replacing tolerance with hate. Today the targets of that rage are immigrants and welfare mothers and government officials and gays, and an ill-defined counterculture. But as the middle class continues to erode, who will be the targets tomorrow?
-- Robert Reich, 1994
Heading towards 30 years later now, have things gotten any better?
Well if this headline is any indication...not much (perhaps worse, due to today's actors):
Trump pledges to turn away those who don’t like ‘our religion’
We know what this means, don't we (if we can't tell by now, we may never recognize things for what they are)? Such dynamics are built on a cultivated appetite for the threatening and sensational. If it isn't sensational (or threatening), we are now just too bored to care very much. Make me care...we say (inadvertently). Except there is a logical limit to that kind of demand, and it appears we are now fully up against it. Worry is its own kind of fuel and we are sucking in its fumes with our mouths wide open.
I was out walking last evening and a bit overwhelmed by a little different — the range and extent of the beauty of the Fall season now in full bloom all around us. A thought wandered across my path:
Don't impoverish yourself with worry.
...and this corollary piped up:
...there is too much beauty around us, that we had nothing to do with.
I suspect there is something profound embedded in these hints that we can get from looking away from the populist raging that so dominates our attention.
What we notice is often a function of what we are looking at. We are the ones who will have to decide what we're going to keep focusing on (obviously, those selling us things that change our appetites don't really care about what's truly good for us). They just want us to keep buying and ratcheting up the things we end up thinking we need protection from because of their hysterics.
The real sensations from my walk reminded me that it is often the ordinary that deserves our attention (see Sarah Bessey's reflections on this here ) and that a more realistic rhythm with the naturalness of life is a beautiful wisdom.
...one that, quite possibly, could off-set some of the vagaries of our times' poisons, if each of us is willing to adjust our appetites.
