Today was one of those days that I spent too much time reading the newspapers, slowly but steadily allowing myself to be depressed by the declining state of the human species. One graphic story related to the rape and eventual murder last weekend of two young Melbourne women by the convicted rapist who had been allowed to move in next door. Another story centred on a local woman allegedly killing her husband and leaving him in the family garage for 4 days while she hosted a New Years Eve party in the house (incidentally, we knew the victim). Other pages dealt with the high level corruption involving Australian wheat contracts with Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Yet more pages revealed that the very company I work for has just been successfully prosecuted, and fined a record amount, for abuse of market power - a conviction that they spent 10 years, and $10,000,000 belligerently fighting. Even our local paper leads with a story of how one of our local councillors has just been charged on summons for falsifying documents and obtaining property by deception - all so that he could have a $3,600 personal expense paid for by the taxpayer. There were dozens of stories like this in just today's paper, but I don't wish to list them all. On one level everybody KNOWS how selfish, greedy, deceitful, malicious, violent, incompetent, weak, dishonest, opportunistic, evasive and cruel "people" can be, but some days you become more achingly aware of that fact than others. And it's often difficult to accept.
One of the small comforts I find, when I get to this point, is the knowledge that this isn't an entirely new phenomenon. While I sometimes tend toward thinking that evil, cowardice and corruption have never been more widespread (and I could be right about that), it's helpful to remember that previous generations have endured many of the same evils (though in different forms), and have somehow forged through them. C.S. Lewis has a great pespective on this issue, which he discussed in a 1948 paper entitled "On Living in The Atomic Age". While he was talking specifically about the Atomic Bomb, I think the message is still very relevant when talking about our increasingly-isolated, increasingly-fragmented, increasingly-corrupted & increasingly-cruel "society":
"In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. 'How are we to live in an atomic age?' I am tempted to reply: 'Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.' In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation."
And he goes on...
"Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways. It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty."
And I particularly like the next bit...
"...the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things - praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts - not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs."
So I'll go back to not reading the paper quite so much, and instead get stuck into doing those other things. Darts or a pint, anyone?
Matt
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