Saturday, September 18, 2004
Wednesday, September 15, 2004
Infrequent brooding post by Jason
I used two toothpaste brand names in this blog without referring to toothpaste.
Do I agree that people are basically good? Nope. But whereas I definitely don’t dig the “are” part of the standard question, the “basically” part makes me positively gleam. Here are my thoughts; get ‘em while they’re mild.
All people want to be good. Very few are actually good. It is in human nature that we all want to make sense of things and apply understanding to out actions. We want to do what’s right, but that, sometimes if not usually, requires more resource than what we have. Therefore, it’s kinda hard to be good, and that’s the problem.
Most of us (about a Dove soap’s percentage, if not greater) are not very good at being alive. Oh, sure, some of our showiest participants can breath continually and eat every once in a while, but…well, come to think of it, we’ve created pitfalls in those two very basic areas of being alive, haven’t we? Just think about the two for 3.7 seconds and you will find a familiar way of doing each that combats our approach of staying alive. So yeah, we mostly try to stay somewhere above the death curve while we wedge fleeting thoughts of changing the world into paradise between the omnipresent consciousnesses of our inadequacies.
Dennis Miller, back before he accidentally lobotomized himself with too many funny-proof, obscure and unlinked references, said about then president Clinton that (and I’m paraphrasing here because I can’t find the quote) Clinton was basically a good man, but a man whose aspirations went beyond his abilities. Well, that, in a kernel carcass, is our cross to bear as humans. We all want to do good things, but we don’t always know how.
It brings me to think about how intelligent man is and where he fits in the evolution of our species. I think that we are at a point in human history where the tide is in. This is the trough waiting for the crest. We are in a corrective mode. Right now we are incontinent in our philosophical goals in that we are smart enough to know what to do, but too dumb to either motivate ourselves or figure out how to do it. So in the mean time we will just go play racquetball…or smoke some grass, or make a puppet, or sneeze, or whatever takes up enough time to allow our brains to move past its quest for greatness and truth and onto a quest for a taco.
By the way, I also remember when Dennis Miller would graciously and honestly say, “But that’s just my opinion, I could be wrong”. I should save some animosity for when that topic comes up on the blog page.
My point is that everybody, and I mean everybody, wants to be the best person in the world, admired and loved by everyone else. It is our collective and individual dream to find the solutions for which mankind has been searching so that we can build better humans. It is our daily work that mimics the unseen and unrecognized passion that lies, dormant in most, deep within our core being. We are here as part of the human set, priced too high but bought on sale, and our brains know that.
We desire the good because it makes sense to us, and we quickly abandon its pursuit because we can stretch our thinking only so far in a day before it come caroming back to us, hitting us in the eye. For me, I want to take out the little perfect part of my brain and show it to the world in hopes of advancing us all to a point beyond pain and insecurity and ignorance, but I can’t because I’m not smart enough to figure out how to do it.
Do I agree that people are basically good? Nope. But whereas I definitely don’t dig the “are” part of the standard question, the “basically” part makes me positively gleam. Here are my thoughts; get ‘em while they’re mild.
All people want to be good. Very few are actually good. It is in human nature that we all want to make sense of things and apply understanding to out actions. We want to do what’s right, but that, sometimes if not usually, requires more resource than what we have. Therefore, it’s kinda hard to be good, and that’s the problem.
Most of us (about a Dove soap’s percentage, if not greater) are not very good at being alive. Oh, sure, some of our showiest participants can breath continually and eat every once in a while, but…well, come to think of it, we’ve created pitfalls in those two very basic areas of being alive, haven’t we? Just think about the two for 3.7 seconds and you will find a familiar way of doing each that combats our approach of staying alive. So yeah, we mostly try to stay somewhere above the death curve while we wedge fleeting thoughts of changing the world into paradise between the omnipresent consciousnesses of our inadequacies.
Dennis Miller, back before he accidentally lobotomized himself with too many funny-proof, obscure and unlinked references, said about then president Clinton that (and I’m paraphrasing here because I can’t find the quote) Clinton was basically a good man, but a man whose aspirations went beyond his abilities. Well, that, in a kernel carcass, is our cross to bear as humans. We all want to do good things, but we don’t always know how.
It brings me to think about how intelligent man is and where he fits in the evolution of our species. I think that we are at a point in human history where the tide is in. This is the trough waiting for the crest. We are in a corrective mode. Right now we are incontinent in our philosophical goals in that we are smart enough to know what to do, but too dumb to either motivate ourselves or figure out how to do it. So in the mean time we will just go play racquetball…or smoke some grass, or make a puppet, or sneeze, or whatever takes up enough time to allow our brains to move past its quest for greatness and truth and onto a quest for a taco.
By the way, I also remember when Dennis Miller would graciously and honestly say, “But that’s just my opinion, I could be wrong”. I should save some animosity for when that topic comes up on the blog page.
My point is that everybody, and I mean everybody, wants to be the best person in the world, admired and loved by everyone else. It is our collective and individual dream to find the solutions for which mankind has been searching so that we can build better humans. It is our daily work that mimics the unseen and unrecognized passion that lies, dormant in most, deep within our core being. We are here as part of the human set, priced too high but bought on sale, and our brains know that.
We desire the good because it makes sense to us, and we quickly abandon its pursuit because we can stretch our thinking only so far in a day before it come caroming back to us, hitting us in the eye. For me, I want to take out the little perfect part of my brain and show it to the world in hopes of advancing us all to a point beyond pain and insecurity and ignorance, but I can’t because I’m not smart enough to figure out how to do it.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)