I don't think it's so much apathy toward this particular horror. I think the trouble is apathy to and profound ignorance of real life outside of the cubeland -> tv and back again pseudo reality.
Why are parents today utterly at a loss, terrified of the dirty business of loving and guiding their own kids? That's what makes them sitting ducks to any snake oil salesman who comes along.
When you take just a moment to look critically at what the industry offers, it's just ridiculous that anyone would fall for it. The basic offer makes just about as much sense as the Enquirer's Blue Dot or the sageatious advice coming out of Oprah's latest pet life coaching guru or that generous offer you just got from the wealthy Nigerian widow. And yet people fall for this crap? These people? The ones who wouldn't stand a one more tea tax, foreign controlled currency or an excise tax on Whiskey?
That is the root of the problem. And I think that, in hindsight, it's pretty easy to trace how it happened. Just around 100 years ago, most Americans lived rural lifestyles. True enough, that meant that most of them (but not all) took little interest in world affairs and only a cursory interest in classic education. But anybody knew how to live, ya' know? Survival alone in a rural economy requires some sound common sense, a good work ethic and the ability to cultivate and nurture strong social ties.
In any part of the world you may go, it's the same. City people can be compete and utter pricks for life and not suffer much for it. What does it matter? You burn one bridge, there are a thousand others. In a rural setting it doesn't work that way. You burn your neighbor, you may well go cold in winter or without needed help at harvest time.
Most of us are just not learning these life skills anymore. We don't spend time with our elders and learn our histories or the grace of living as only they can teach us. By the time we're raising kids, it's all a mystery and we've been raised ourselves to believe the obscene fallacy that there's a professional product or service for any occasion or trouble.
Now, how do we undo that?
To be an atheist requires strength of mind and goodness of heart found in not one of a thousand.
--Samuel Taylor Coleridge, English poet, critic, journalist, philosopher
_________________
fka ~ Antigen
Drug war POW
Straight, Sarasota
`80 - `82
return undef() if /coercion/i;
[ This Message was edited by: Eudora on 2006-06-29 07:58 ]