National
Sensitivity
“The
sensitivity of men to small matters, and their indifference to great
ones, indicates a strange inversion.”
Blaise
Pascal
There
has been quite an uproar over the last week about a number of small
things—one being the Chick-fil-A incident. When I went to Leeds to
update my booth on August first, I had to wait five minutes to exit
the interstate. Traffic was backed up with people trying to get into
the restaurant. They had so many customers that they ran out of
chicken.
Does
it seem strange to anyone else, that we're willing to stage a
chicken-protest over gay-marriage, but we're not concerned about the
fact that the Mississippi river has almost run dry, and fish are
dying off by the thousands in Michigan lakes? Lake temperatures are
so high that there is not enough oxygen to support life.
The
twitter-sphere was lit up with complaints about Gabby Douglas'
hairstyle, but no one is having a cat-fit about young girls being
sold into the sex trade everyday. We're staging protests about birth
control pills and ignoring the fact that thousands of children are in
our foster care system because their parents would not, or could not,
care for them. We are unwilling to provide for free drug and alcohol
rehabilitation, while our prisons are so overcrowded that they
present a risk to the people that staff them? Why aren't people
protesting that our National Median IQ has dropped below 100, while
that of the Chinese is 128.
I'm
on a crusade this week, I know. It seems to me that we are hitting a
critical juncture in which we must act or things are going to spin
out of control and beyond our reach—in terms of global warming,
education, and politics. When we are more responsive to “Romney-hood”
and “Obama-loney” than we are to the total failure of the
Congress to do anything substantive, we're in trouble.
In
my opinion, we need to stop worrying about Gabby's hair, and Dan
Cathy's mouthing off, and who our gay/lesbian citizens love, and
start concerning ourselves with the big picture. We don't want to
leave our grandchildren ignorant in a ruined country, and we
certainly don't want to leave them a dead planet.
In
the spirit,
Jane
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