We Americans, as a whole, are a fairly adaptive lot. While there is much that makes us hot under the collar, we tend to take the wide-angled view and note that things are rarely so bad as to warrant anything more than the occasional rant. When confronted with news of the latest scandal or crisis and the implicit or explicit message that we’ve again been robbed of our wealth or our liberty, we commonly observe “We’ve been screwed again”, ingest antacids, and carry on with lives less fair, less full. What is it that allows us to suffer the manifold indignities and the diminishment of life and self at the exacting of agents of injustice? Is it that we are sufficiently comfortable, satisfied, and thus, disinclined to stir the pot lest we become scalded through our righteous agitation? Are we too contented to face systems of seemingly impenetrable, laminar complexity to right what are obvious and profound wrongs? My suspicion is that the searing, tensing affronts and injustices wrought by the immorality of our spiritually barren, feckless "leaders" and the "movers and shakers" who retain them–these perfidies that we have come to expect and to which we have become inured, that we assimilate and adapt to–are indeed counteracted by comforts, pleasures, and trappings that are balm in the lives of “ordinary Americans”. We will continue to endure the bursting of bubbles, the scandals, the crises, the inequities, iniquities, and mendacities symptomatic of our condition–the condition of an America on the gurney–as long as there is the soothing and the balance. Is there a breaking point at which we say (and mean) enough is enough? Most probably, but the noted agents of injustice have become remarkably skilled in their art, ever refining, ever testing and stretching the limits of our adaptability, and, it is hoped, ever regardful of our modulus of elasticity and that which constitutes the delicate balance.
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| Thomas Jefferson's Original Gravestone – Lessons Lost? Courtesy of Jenni Feathers |
