We live in a wild time. I’m beginning to think we’ve always lived in a wild time: the wild, wild west, Chicago during Prohibition, all the wars throughout time, today’s mass shootings and terrorist attacks.
We are a hateful people as a race. We are selfish, coveting, mean-spirited. Man, by nature, is selfish and greedy.
In Philosophy 101, the simplest, most basic philosophy course, they teach that we are supposed to temper such behaviors with our rationality. Of course we don’t.
So here we are. 2025 is about to turn to 2026. The Bible, regardless of what form of it one beleives in, has been chucked out the window by many of us. Others pervert its content to mean what they choose it to mean. Yet others, suffering from their own arrogance, wage war on those who do not beleive as they do. And still others, suffering not only from their own arrogance but from hubris as well, have scuttled the most fundamental principles of logic, history and research to present the rest of us with dishonestly created would-be facts to support premises they know from inception are untrue and unsupportable.
Is there hope? I don’t know. But if there is hope, it lies in charity, in the belief that if we all do good, good will happen. Hope for us also resides in simple memory and honestly-drwan contexts.
My father was a prisoner of war (a POW) in Nazi Germany for three and one-half years during WWII. Those who call our President a Nazi, have no idea what a real Nazi is, or if they do, they choose to define Nazi to fit their own selfish interests.
Some of those of us fortunate enough to have been born in the USA, perhaps the greatest county of all time, have forgotten why America is the greatest of all countries, or if they haven’t forgotten why, their own personal dishonesty and self-interests cause them to represent the USA as no different from the totalitarian countires and forces that would terminate its very existence and force its people into subjugation.
As one year ends, marking now a quarter of the century gone by, and a new year begins, let us think of doing good, of being charitable, of being honest and believing in univeral truths greater than our personal self interests. Such simple thoughts and actions will lead us to what constitutes hope for all of us.
