The Art of Decency (con’t.)

Albert Camus in his novel, The Plague, wrote of an epidemic in a fictionalized large city.  The main character is a doctor working very hard to save as many of its citizens as he can at great risk to his own life under horrible circumstances. The present world-wide pandemic has called to my mind Camus’ great work. The doctor there was asked why?  Why do you do this when so many are dying? Camus has the doctor tell that the only way to truly face a plague is with decency. To the doctor decency requires of him to work at a furious pace to save as many as he can.  The doctor realized that even when the dying is finished for a time and people believe their trouble is over and things can return to normal the cause of the plague he is facing is not going to be defeated at all, but will return with further fury to bring more unwanted disaster to the door of all who choose not decency. That is the point. You see, the doctor did not just realize I am a doctor…he realized I am a human being and nothing else matters. 

In that sense, we, all of us alive on Earth at this time, are given a rare and wonderful opportunity by the COVID-19 virus that has brought us to a standstill. I heard a storyteller name it a beautiful thing when seen with another set of eyes. It has to be beautiful because it is reality, he said simply. We may see it as horrible and unfair and evil but… those who make a serious and profound change will see it as a blessing of enormous value to them. For from now on they will see with new eyes everything. They will sober up. 

Let’s take a brief look at our history. To these shores came some truly drunken Europeans who could care less what are  going to be the consequences of behaving indecently. You know how the story goes. Indians were annihilated. The Mexican citizens living here after the War with Mexico ended were treated indecently.  Rich men who never rode a horse brought cattle in very large numbers to feed a ravenous demand for beef back East and fill the needs of a military force who would be ordered to make all Indians dead because the settlers who were promised free land for a new start were so very certain that all red people were savages. To Hell with the changes to be wrought to the land and climate. And railroads were hurriedly constructed by the sellers of a dream nobody wanted in the first place but the masses were enticed aboard an imaginary bandwagon going west with progress the drug and all the while it was really thievery tied to Washington D.C. and newspapers. All of it most foul.

The eventual society created is one that is willing to be fooled every part of every day into thinking they want every new thing commerce can build and sell with no concern for the real cost for themselves and the generations that have followed and no thought to the quality of that merchandise. Just prior to the virus that brought us to a lockdown the world was busy as beavers who build dams of wood creating a robotic driven society which robots will eventually tell all persons what is to be considered to be decent and what is not…so can it not be seen that this world we live in is a clear and simple consequence of indecency?  So indecent it led to a November Day in Dallas when a President was murdered in broad daylight and no one can understand and tell the children what went wrong and what decent thing we did to address it. It is left by silence as “oh, well, in this world nothing bad can be prevented”. And what else can we call ourselves except drunkards? 

Are we not those trees?  Have you ever really seen a tree? Beheld one with your brain still and completely aware? Until the day you do you will not be ready to begin a life of decency. Once you see it as it is you will then and forever after know yourself to be decent naturally and so behave as nature intends, a free person responsible for making his own contribution to life. Ignorance of our own identity is the source of all our troubles: past, present and future.  We are like a drunk king riding a drunken elephant each without a care where they will go. Just along for the ride. Then the big, drunk elephant stumbles. At that moment we need only a glimpse of what in us is human to know the jig is up. Our time has come and this is the greatest opportunity for us humans so far.