Setting an Example

Nobody asked but …

When we ask why a nation behaves the way it does, the first question we should ask is: “how have children been treated there?”

— Robin Grille

In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.

— Albert Camus

My parents gave me the gift of deciding many critical issues on my own.  They told me there were religions, and it was my responsibility to either choose one or reject all or to cherry pick among several.  They never asked me to select a political bent, although they were both dyed in the wool Democrats, but my Dad was a dixiecrat, prejudiced, and fiscally conservative, while my Mom was a Bostonian liberal, who broke the color line on Chattanooga city buses.  I was watching them.

Thinking back, I don’t believe that either would have set the best example for me.  So there is more than letting your kids be free range.  You have to set a good example.  My mother would have trusted the doctors and the liberals during this Coronavirus scourge, but my father would have discounted the medicos and cursed the politicos (who were not dixiecrats).  I was somehow left suspecting that all doctors are not the same,  nor are public servants.  I was further suspicious that there were huge numbers who didn’t give a damn what I suspected.

It is almost humorous watching people explain their doctrinal takes on Coronavirus.  They appeal to the past (when there has been no pandemic like this), they appeal to the present (when nobody knows anything for sure), and they appeal to the future (which hasn’t happened yet).

The blind are being led by the blind.  In the society of the blind, the one-eyed person, inappropriately, wears the crown.  The untested becomes the exemplar.

Await the instruction of time.

— Kilgore Forelle

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