Building a better world is not about having a plan. It's about having a REACTION.

[Poll_Blind]

As I grow older I become more and more convinced that the problem with our society, politics, culture, etc. can be boiled down to the indifference or inaction of people when confronted with little atrocities they regularly come across and that indifference, collectively, rots the whole world.

See your drunk brother smack his wife when he thinks nobody's looking?

Walk in on your friend with his hand down his niece's pants?

The $20 bill on gramma's dresser disappears and you know who took it?

What do you do? You let it slide? Going to cause a bigger problem if you get involved, right? Maybe better to let somebody else deal with it. Maybe it wasn't what you thought or, you know, maybe "It's just this once."

Uh-huh.

IMO, we got too many people in this country, maybe the world, that turn the other way. Maybe they say something. You know, discreetly. Who wants to make a scene?

I can't say if a single smack, a pervy copped feel or petty theft are end of the world, but it's the beginning of the end of the world, IMO. If you don't have a reaction to these things, when worse stuff comes around, how can you say you won't let that slide either?

I read news all the time and I bet you do too. Both of us spend a lot of time shaking our heads at how wicked the world is and wondering how to make it a better place. Maybe we let too much slide and this is the world we get when that happens.

Maybe we don't need a plan to make the world a better place. Maybe we just need better reactions.

Nothing particular caused me to post this. Just one of those things.

PB

[Eleanors38]

1. Interesting take on the hated word "reaction."

An article in the March-April issue of Adbusters describes the "impotence" of people who have not resolved (if anyone has) how to use & communicate on the internet as former institutions lose relevence. I could not find a copy on the Inet. The edition is entitled "The Mental Collapse of a Nation."

My take:

People react on the basis of an attack on their cultural/moral values. Those values are scrambled for many, resulting in a malaise where your contemplated reactions may not be accepted or even understood, possibly due to the lack, or even acceptance of, legitimizing community values.