Date:                           November 6, 2009

Location:                    Daytona Beach, FL

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            Previously I expounded on the pleasures of being a retired old duffer and the pleasure that can be found in the simplest of chores even cooking dinner.  The result of our endeavor was, indeed, all that great and worth remembering.  It was also the path to the presentation of the gourmet meal that will complete the memory in our minds.  Having the time and inclination to make the dinner meal a chance to become a memory is even a greater pleasure.  Being retired allows me to slow down enough to find these moments to enjoy.

            It is this slowed down aspect of life that was to lead me to my daily excursion into my blog world.  Having nothing important to do can cause a person to think and sometimes it can make a person think too much.  My thoughts were meandering into the realm of daily news or what ever that thing they present of TV as news really is.  It was not the specific story that was being presented, but rather the questions these events might ask of society and the health of society that caused me to ruminate a bit.

            Yesterday, the story that fueled my interest was about the house of murder in Ohio.  It was not a question, in my mind, of how a human can be that sick. For we all know that happens all too often.  It was, also, not a question of right or wrong.  There is never a right when one sick human takes the life of another and then repeats that horrific act.  The question that arose in my mind was how society can allow this to happen.

            How does a man entice multiple victims into a killing field located in the center of a large American city?  How does this happen and go unnoticed or not investigated.  I think this yells about the ills of society much more than it speaks of the ills one mind.  One mind was obviously sick and crying for help and yet society ignored the travesty that was being preformed right in front of its collective eyes.  We, as a society, seem destined to not become involved with our neighbors.  We seldom even know who our neighbors are or what they are doing.

            I was going to expound deeply and profoundly on this ill of society until I happened onto the news of the day yesterday.  An Army officer walked into a processing building on a very large Army post and killed 12 people and wounded over 30 others.  This act of terror happened on a secure United States military post.  The terrorist was allowed to infiltrate a large gathering of soldiers fully armed and bent on causing great havoc and destruction.  He seemed to do this in broad day light, dressed in full uniform and with little effort.  And yet my question is not about the total lack of security.

            My question, again, is about the status of society.  How do we allow an eighty year old feeble woman to be hand searched and embarrassed at a public airport?  We accept that we all must remove shoes in order for us board an airplane, yet we somehow allow a man to walk on to a military post armed and dangerous with little obvious thought.  It would seem, I my mind, a bit more dangerous to wave a “trained killer” through the security screening on a sensitive military installation than a it would be to allow a family to comfortably board a public transportation facility.

            I will not pontificate on my views.  I think there are many questions we should be asking ourselves.  But, they are questions that we should be asking ourselves and not fussing over how someone else might phrase the inquiries  We need to think about finding the root causes of the many ills our society is exhibiting.  I truly feel that none of these questions, much less the answers, are being postulated by anyone in the modern media or existing government.  Society needs to collectively and individually be a lot more reflective on more than the face of the problems and search for the causes of the societal manifestation of failures.

            There is a scene in “Patch Adams” that takes place in a mental health hospital where Patch Adams is asked to count the fingers on a fellow patient.  Patch answers 4, of course and the patient goes ballistic because the answer is so wrong.  He tells Patch to look beyond the problem to the answer.  Sometime have a person hold up his hand and you count his fingers.  Look beyond the “problem” or his hand and look for the root cause problem, or beyond his hand.  You will find your eyes blurring a bit and soon 8 fingers will appear.  I feel we, as society, need to look beyond the problem and find a few solutions.  But then I have always looked outside of the box.  I am afraid that I feel right now there are few solutions contained in our societal “box.”  Maybe we need to follow the advice of the mental patient in Patch Adams and not continue looking for our problems and concentrate more on searching for a few solutions.

24 DAYS to EMBARKATION

Wfdo2@wfdo2.com