Good Morning.
I planted some flowers at my husband's grave over the weekend but decided not to include one of those little flags in the arrangement even though he was a Navy veteran who served three years in Vietnam. Last year the flag was stolen over Memorial Day and when I replaced it for the Fourth of July, it was stolen again. I don't think it was kids who usually get blamed for incidents of that sort; it was an adult, a term I use loosely here, who didn't have a flag for the grave he or she was tending and grabbed someone else's. One assumes that people will behave more respectfully in a cemetery, but such is not the case in today's world.
When my husband was teaching on-line business and marketing courses, he had to deal with plagiarism almost on a daily basis, thanks to the current mentality that the truth is whatever you can get away with and when you don't, the whistle blower is the bad guy. Too many of his students, ranging in age from eighteen to fifty, weren't concerned in the slightest about stealing someone else's work and went ballistic when he confronted them. The women tended to scream sexism and the men expected the crotchety old prof to join them in some sort of male protective alliance, and when he didn't back down, the language that flew through cyberspace was unreal. One guy declared rather colorfully that it wasn't his fault the term paper he turned in was lifted straight from an outlet on the Internet because his wife had written the paper.
We live in a culture where lying in business, politics, and even religion is the order of the day. It's arrogance gone haywire, ruthlessness on steroids, or at the very least, a quieter but just as insidious indifference. A kid is damaged for life by a parish priest, an elderly widow is scammed by a so-called financial planner, and veritable mountains are moved to make sure that nobody finds out about it. People unwittingly purchase a home that's a potential fire hazard because the wiring, carefully concealed behind the dry wall, was done so shoddily. Every Sunday night on 60 Minutes, there's another story about a company that is manufacturing a dangerous product, raking in billions, and assuming that it won't get caught.
Sadly, a whole slug of people don't get upset about all of this dreadfulness until they're the ones being personally affected. If it's a family in Cleveland who had the house fire or someone in Fresno who was injured by a faulty air bag, it's no big deal. If it's the candidate of one's choice who is lying through his or her teeth, it's perfectly okay. We blow off the pharmaceutical companies that price drugs out of the reach of patients who desperately need them - until the person who has cancer is a mother or a grandfather. We dig in our heels and refuse to admit that something really needs to be done about the guns that are purchased as easily as a head of lettuce by people intent on mowing other people - until the person who is shot is a six-year-old son or a daughter in high school. We've been mired down in the Middle East for a couple of decades because of the fabrications about weapons of mass destruction that were supposed to convince Congress and the public to go to war and so we did, but we have gone on with our lives, oblivious to the terrible toll that war always takes - until the person who is killed is a husband or a brother. The truth is that we look the other way at all manner of human suffering caused by everything but the truth until it hits us right where we live.
Best regards,
Elisabeth
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