Already gone

I have to ask: Does anyone actually believe that either Trump or Clinton are honest, moral, caring people seeking office in order to help all Americans? Do we even care that they are not? It seems we long ago gave up on trying to select good, honest people for public office and instead opted to vote for the candidate who claimed to most support the individual policies we hold most dear.

But tell me this: Can a dishonest, immoral, self-serving person, even if they get those policies passed into law, be counted on to draft policies that will actually serve the common good? Or is this method of selecting our leaders only expediting our collapse as a society?

Our political class seems hell-bent on pleasing those with the most money and power to keep them in office. We already know this to be both a disaster and a necessary evil, as witnessed by the number of people who both decry money in politics and yet revere the rich people on their side who use their money to influence politics, as if simply having the right party tag endows virtue to overcome the corrupting influence of money and become an altruist who cares nothing for money while simultaneously seeking to get as much of it as they can in order to continue influencing politics. In the end they will seek after policies that keep their flow of money coming, and the devil take everyone else.

And we as a people continue to buy into the great lie that the right government can somehow save us all from ourselves. We decry all the social ills we see around us and charge the government with fixing it, all the while ignoring the fact that social ills come from personal ills. We cannot achieve a moral government that can create a moral society while clinging tightly to our own immorality. When we lose our personal selfishness enough to transform a corrupt government into a moral one that can create a moral society we won’t need the government to do it anymore. We’ll do it without them. We would need government less and less because we would draw our own lines far enough back that the government as a restrictive fence would be unnecessary.

Why should we need government agencies and dozens of people to extract taxes from us and use that money to help the person next door (after paying all the middle-bureaucrats first) when we could just walk next door and help them directly. Why would we need a government to regulate guns or drugs if we could all raise our children to respect one another, handle conflicts in loving ways, take care of our bodies, and hold life sacred? Why would we need to be concerned about “consent laws” and “rape culture” if we daughter our sons and daughters to respect themselves and each other and to take the process for creating life seriously and view it as something other than entertainment like taking in a movie or playing Monopoly?

But no, in our attempt to improve ourselves we seem to have overlooked having a common goal as to what that means. We’ve somehow adopted the objective of building a government that will take care of all the unpleasant things for us while we pursue our own self-interest to the point of self-destruction. Turning everything over to the government doesn’t make us more caring, more patient, more kind. If anything, as our social media discourse suggests, we’ve simply become self-absorbed screamers for whom no level of behavior or discourse is too low so long as it accomplishes our goals of making everyone else behave the way we want them to. In short, we’ve doubled-down on our selfishness while throwing out for ourselves all the rules we expect others to abide.

We’ve not just thrown the baby out with the bathwater, we’ve hooked up the septic system to the faucet. We’re swimming in our own filth and blaming it on everyone else while refusing to bail. We want everyone else to behave exactly as they should, but we’re unwilling to deny ourselves anything. We want to be able to engage in risky behaviors without consequence. We want to be cruel and vicious to anyone we disagree with until they change–and punish them if they are cruel and vicious to us in an effort to get us to change.

We love to spout the aphorism “Be the change you want to see in the world,” but we don’t understand it. It doesn’t mean bludgeoning everyone else into changing first. It means changing yourself first and foremost, before attempting to change anyone else, and even if no one else ever changes. That’s a tall order. I’m trying really hard and I still can’t do it. And I’m more successful than most. A great many out there would find it infuriating that others are still not changing, even though they’ve been trying for several days already! Or that others are not changing exactly how they were supposed to.

That’s because it’s not enough for us to want to change. We need to agree on what those changes should be. Left to our own devices we each press for the change we feel is best based on our own personal circumstances and desires. My idea of the ideal world is very different from that of either Clinton or Trump. My idea would probably even deviate at least some from that of the Dalai Lama. Can we as a race ever truly create the ideal society without a single, comprehensive social objective that we all acknowledge as superior? What would that even look like? How would we know if we’ve found it?

I have my ideas, of course, but it stands about as much chance of being accepted as anyone else’s–probably less even, since my source is currently out of favor in modern society.

But even without a single social objective for us all to work for we could accomplish much if we could learn to serve ourselves less and others more. If we could learn to control our desires and sacrifice at least some of our more destructive pleasures. If we could learn to live first and foremost for the benefit and betterment of mankind instead of the enrichment and aggrandizement of ourselves. If we could learn that no personal achievement could be more important than producing and preparing the next generation to be as good or better than ourselves.

That’s a lot of “ifs”. Are we up for it?