My View Of The World
I don’t know about you, but I just can’t seem to simply sit down in front of my computer monitor and come up with ideas for posts here at RJsCorner. In the cold weather months I post daily here, so where do all the ideas come from? That is the topic of this post.
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I am a dreamer to my core; it is just who I am.
That is simultaneously a curse and a blessing.
I recognize how things are but imagine them to be better.
There is no place better to do that than Mesa Verde
My first visit there seemed almost spiritual.
I could almost see my ancestors living their daily lives.
How they got there no one really knows.
Why they left is pretty much the same.
The stone and adobe walls they built are still there.
I touched them and dreamed I was among them.
In their isolation they lived in peaceful harmony with nature.
But that is kinda the Native American way, isn't it?
I would go back several more times and it always felt the same.
I absorbed their world into mine if only for a few minutes.
God willing, I will go back again before I leave this earth.
My idealism and dreams needs a refill from time to time.
For me there is no place in the world quite like it.
A place where I can escape the dreadfulness of our times.
Where I can immerse myself in an imagined Utopian world.
We all need a place like that and Mesa Verde is that place for me.
There just seems to be one bad thing after another happening in America today. It is hard to stay optimistic about our future. Our current Oval Office occupant is inciting hatred and ignorance among his “followers” so now they are trying to kill the people he does not like. Some seem to have gulped down the cool-aid he is serving by the gallon! It just seems to get worse and worse as each day passes. I am a very strong advocate of Thomas Jefferson’s quote “Hope is sweeter than despair” so I look for hope especially during these trying times. I know basic change, even when it appears rather suddenly, will take time to overcome especially when the wackos seem to control everything. But I have latched onto a reason for hope. To understand that read the excerpts below, and I would encourage you to read the whole source if you have the time:
Source: Does America Have a Future? – Eudaimonia and Co
Unfortunately, I have pretty much lost all personal contact with the younger generations. I am without children and grandchildren so I can’t just call, or text one for their opinions even if they cared to respond. I have to take what I hear in the social realm as evidence and that evidence continues to tell me that the Millennials will eventually invoke change much like we baby-boomers did in the 1960s and 70s.
Since I was born in 1946 I was at the head of the baby-boomers so I was in college during the 1960s when we started protesting the Vietnam war. We were tired of being told to go die for our country for what we saw as not being worth it. It was a stupid war caused by the proud egos of those in power. We had the courage to rise up and do something about it and I fully believe that the current generation is about to do the same.
There just seem to be a lot more haters in the world today.
I will come out and say it, I think that many of those who voted for this guy are just lazy losers. They don’t want to take the time to understand the issues that are confronting us as a nation or even on a personal level. I think they know that he is incompetent and only thinks of himself but they simply don’t care. But, that is enough politics for now. On to other areas…
Were they always like that? Almost all of us as four-year-olds questioned everything. “Why” was probably the most often used word in our limited vocabulary. Some of us maintained the “Question Everyone” attitude throughout our lives. Since it is a major theme of this blog I like to think I am one of them. But there are others who had it beat out of them early on. They were told to keep quiet and do what you are told.
I know I quote Thomas Jefferson frequently here at RJsCorner, especially the quote about how a democracy depends on an informed electorate, but that fact seems to be forgotten by so many so I will bring it up again and again. To get back to the quote above, everyone has dreams about something but like the “Why” thing for too many of us, the dreams are squashed early on. As a result, they just don’t have the fire in their belly to begin to make them happen. If you are one of those people think about why you hate so much and do everything you can to strip it from your lives before it consumes you.
I don’t know why I seem to be so fixated on sounds lately let alone poultry stuff. My daily and weekly posts here are RJsCorner are now named after sounds (cackle and squawk) that chickens make. I need to get to the underlying reason for this. 🙂 I lost my hearing thirty years ago, and since then my brain has forgotten what many sounds sound like. Sadly one of those areas is musical instruments. I used to play the guitar, not terribly well but to my own satisfaction, and I really enjoyed that pleasure. Now when I see a musical instrument being played, I struggle unsuccessfully to remember the sounds they make.
I was never around chickens that much, but they did make a big impression on me when I first visited my grandfather’s farm as a small kid. I loved the fresh eggs that grandpa had but didn’t appreciate being chased by the rooster when I went to feed them. So, why this sudden infatuation with poultry sounds?
Maybe it is all Freudian? Sigmund was pretty famous a hundred years ago during my hero Will Rogers’ time but has gone out of favor since then. Freud was a big believer that the unconscious (dreams) was where the mind put things we can’t openly deal with. Maybe I am in a second mourning period for my loss of hearing?
When it comes down to it, I guess I really don’t care that much, but it is interesting none the less. 🙂
This is going to be one of those philosophical posts so hang on to your hat. I have always been a dreamer. For the most part I didn’t imagine that my lofty dreams would ever come true and for the most part, they didn’t. 🙂
When I was young my dreams were often a result of the many fictional books I read. My favorite authors during those years were John Steinbeck and Jack London. These two guys took me to places I never knew existed and to people very different from me. When I got a little older I started dreaming about what I might become when I grew up. My first infatuation was with astronomy. I read everything understandable for a young teenager about the topic. A friend of mine gave me his old copies of “Scientific American” and I devoured them. I also read autobiographies of people like Einstein, Jefferson, and Edison. They inspired me but I never dreamed that I could be like them. My self-esteem was just to low for those lofty goals.
The point I want to make with this post is that when we are young and have limited experiences we usually dream other people’s dreams. As we get older we try to make up dreams of our own. It is at that point that too many of us fail ourselves. We sometimes dream too small. Unfortunately, that tragic beginning is also often the end for too many of us.
Too few of us think of ourselves as being the person who finally discovers the root cause of cancer. Too few of us dream of solving the potentially tragic results of global warming. And maybe as a country, it is tragic that too few of us dream of becoming representative of the people. Those jobs are now to be avoided or left to those power seekers among us.
Dreaming too small, or tragically not dreaming at all is often the fault of parents who don’t challenge their kids to greatness. Sometimes just the right teacher comes along to take replace the parent’s responsibility but too often they are not there.
Thomas Jefferson is my favorite writer of all time. He was not a good public speaker but he sure knew how to put pen to paper. He was also a very prolific writer. His archive spans thousands of letters and treatises about a wide variety of topics. He loved studying history as his library showed but more so he loved dreaming of the future.
I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past. So good night! I will dream on.
Thomas Jefferson to John Adams August 1, 1816
Anyone who has been around RJsCorner know that I proudly share several of the traits above with Jefferson. Because of my Aspergers traits I am not a good speaker. It just doesn’t come naturally to me. But I am constantly thinking and writing about what is on my mine. I kind of let a milestone go by here in that I wrote my 3,000th post here a few months ago. I never dreamed I would occupy RJsCorner as long as I have! All my life, or at least since Mr. Shuler, my high school history teacher, got me hooked I have studied American history. Up until a few years ago the ten foot wide bookshelf here in my study was filled with history books, now I have many in e-book form on my Kindle reader.
But most of all I am a dreamer of the future. For that reason I refuse to believe that our current dark times are here to stay. Like so often in the past the sun will eventually come up again in America. We have many good days ahead of us. But to make that happen all of us not on the fringes of society need to take back our government processes via the vote. We can no longer allow the fringes, neither left nor right, to elect our leaders who will decide the direction we take. As being proved now, that is just too dangerous a scheme.
Most of the problems we face today including healthcare for all, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, full employment are very solvable problems once we break the gridlock that is preventing us for implementing the solutions. All we have to do is to get over our stubbornness of thinking we have to invent everything and then to look for shining examples from the rest of the world to see a path forward in these areas.
The future is bright indeed if only we take the steps necessary to make it happen.
