A jeremiad

Subject: FW: A jeremiad

 

 

Have I become a 'jeremiad', a teller of woe, bitterly lamenting the state of society, it's morals and ethics, always in a serious tone of sustained invective, an angry harangue, a  rhetoric of decline.
Is life so serious that one can feel the need to go on about it in blog after blog, raising the spectre of so much that is wrong when one could just as soon write about the things that are right. It's a good question, this weighing right from wrong and spending time highlighting one or the other. Does a wrong cancel out a right, is there a balance sheet, a debit or credit where we, as individuals stand before the quartermaster and explain our deficiency. 

The religions of the world would have us believe yes and the whole emphasis of religion is this concept of living the good righteous life to gain admittance to heaven. But of what is right and what is wrong depends it seems on interpretation. Although we do have pointers set down in religious books, the individual in us would have us make excuses for our particular transgression or make a hierarchy of evils and claim his or hers was way down at the bottom of the list. 

"The evil that man do lives after them, the good is interned with their bones", seems far from prosaic, it gets to the kernel of the matter, that the bad things outweigh the good simply because they live in our minds, longer than the good. 

If true we have to comment on the bad and bring our combined attention to the bad in the hope that good will come from unearthing it, since it is also presumed that man has no way of recognising the bad he does unless it is pointed out to him or to her.

Even the worst offenders are within the boundaries of their mindset and it has been argued that even the worst have been able to justify their actions by manufacturing some sort of dilemma in their personal life which stunted the understanding necessary to feel another's pain. The sadist for instance has the fall back of neurological mis-wiring and it could be argued that 'their wrong' is a right thrust on them by nature. 

The wrongs I feel need airing are not the individual wrongs of a pathological killer but the collective wrongs done to society by a collective who cannot of themselves claim some sort of neurological defect other than the one induced by breeding. If we are bred to not see or are so far removed from other people's lives that we can't comprehend the pain we inflict and we issue instructions to the Benefit Office to say that payments will stop until we have investigated a particular anomaly or that the payment of a Benefit will be, from now on be paid monthly and not every week, and therefor the recipient will have to wait three weeks before receiving their allowance, forcing them to turn to loan sharks and a never ending spiral into interest on interest payments, which grow and never end.  If these enactments of judicial oversight, on lives already blighted by poor education and virulent unemployment then I need to jeremiad as loud and as long as we can because, in their case the bad will be interred with their bones and nothing will be said or done, still less understood.