Our personal history and the importance of places, people and deeds is offset by our impotence to alter much of
what we do because of the cultural and environmental stain which contributes so much of who we are.
It's hardly fair that society holds us in such a conventional straight jacket when the genetic makeup and the
influences we experience is so varied. The relevancy of who we are is trounced by who we are supposed to be.
Our parents who hold the key to our up-bringing are themselves slave to their own up- bringing. The norms in place
at the time of
their and subsequently our childhood, the conventions, the attitude of
peers and elders all contributed to who we are today. We are an amalgam of conflicting stories from which we were expected
to sift and
form our character and as the tide turned, not wishing to be left high
and dry we shuffled around for new clothes to cover our nakedness. We
reinvented our stories with ones the new people
would understand or at least feel they could accommodate but in reality, it's all a sham.
Like the chameleon we try to fit in by altering our true colour and shape, we camouflage our intentions to fit the
current norms and we fight many internal battles in our attempt to justify who and why we are, who we are.
The
speed of change, of change for changes sake seems to an older person
pointless. The certitude of our beliefs are now always countered and
changed in
a way that older societies would never condone. The experience of experience is no longer valued at all and one is in an echo chamber of one if we try to explain the values of the past.
Because
today's values are fostered on us by forces outside our sphere,
swallowed undigested without a moments thought, they are disconnected from our own
homespun values which have stood the test of time, passed down from parent
and grandparent. Today's values seem more a corporate response to the
fear of litigation than a value judgement. We see them
as an overlay on what we would call 'common sense', of rules and procedure brought in as a
diktat, by an executives response to the lawyers.
And
so as our history loses relevance and we become estranged from our
sense of right and wrong, we drift into a no man's land of Orwellian
proportions
where, isolated, we have no strength to stand up to and oppose the
powers
of darkness, which if you haven't guessed,
is anything you don't understand.
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