The Untouchables

April 5, 2020
 

We live in a tremendously beneficial country. Not only can we just go to the corner   grocery store and purchase the food we want but we are additionally offered a giant selection of different brands and types of that food. If we want to create an impression and look sharp to our peers and elders, we have millions of clothing stores that can provide outfits of every type. Style and size to suite our every mood and necessity. We have automobiles of every type and size to carry us to wherever we wish to go. We have the internet which allows us to inform ourselves and order just about every type of product imaginable to us. We are truly blessed. We can contact our friends in an instant and arrange meetings and recreational activities. We can pay bills and order food by phone. And to top it all, our medical system is one of the most advanced in the world assuring us that we will have the opportunity to stay healthy and have a long life. This is true for the majority of Americans.
 

Yes. We are truly blessed. But despite all this abundance, ease and benefit, our circumstance has created a very strong mental and emotional undercurrent coloring us in the way we view ourselves and the rest of the world. Most of us take our benefit for granted. Most of us expect to see that benefit every time the sun rises. Our consistent experience in receiving that benefit has lulled us into the expectation that it will always be there and that this is the way life is and should be. This perspective has numbed us to the fact that all our ease and benefits were built and earned by our elders through blood, sweat and tears. This country was formed through ingenuity, discipline, work and hardship. But the current generations are unaware of the difficult circumstances that produced our first struggles. They haven’t experienced it as our elders did. They don’t realize what it took to put these benefits into play let alone understand why or how. This is no longer taught in our classrooms except from the perspective of rulership, dominance and government structure. The literature that told of our struggles during those times is no longer presented in our educational system. The science of our omnipotence in overcoming nature has taken its place. Through the continued presence of our current benefits we have become mentally and emotionally insulated from the hardships that produced them. The expectation that everything should continue as it has is now the predominating perspective. This has produced an assumed and expected permanence in our daily routines bordering on entitlement.
 

But as always happens with cultures who arrive at the peak of benefit, a downturn was inevitable. The Roman Empire is the primary example. We, as they, have become, fat, lazy and complacent. Through our consistent benefit, we have found no need to apply discipline, work, endurance, or tenacity toward our efforts for survival. Nor do we instill it in our children anymore. Benefit comes too easy without apparent cost. We believe that what we need will always be there. Disease? That happens to others. Starvation? That happens to others. Poverty? That happens to others. We have convinced ourselves that we are immune to the hardships and difficulties that the rest of the undeveloped world must deal with. We believe we are, essentially, invincible and untouchable.
 

Now, there is a pestilence having risen from the east. It is not locusts or floods or earthquakes. It is a pandemic. It is silent, deadly, and extremely contagious just like the plague that left Europe in the Dark Ages in 1347. They never knew what hit them. They had no idea what they were dealing with. It wiped out one third of the European human population. History is now, as always, repeating itself. Empires rise and fall in cycles. We’ve reached the peak. The slide back down has begun.
 

Yet here we are with this insane perspective that we are invincible and that “it can’t happen to me. It will be handled by the authorities. I don’t have to worry. I’ll just keep living life and doing what I’ve always been doing. It’s not in my neighborhood. No one in my family has it. It can’t be that contagious. Stay at home? Nah! It won’t happen here.”   We have become insulated and so immune to discipline, work and caution that we ignore what the rest of the world has taken seriously and is scared to death of. We have, unfortunately, become impressed with our own delusional importance. The fallacy of invincibility in our perspective has become poignantly and terrifyingly obvious in New York and is spreading throughout the western world as we fail, if not refuse, to use common sense and precaution. The assumed “permanence” of our long-term benefit has left us with a life and death liability. Through the stupidity of our own ignorance we have become our own worst enemy. If we don’t wake up beyond our hubris, we won’t be here to remember it.