What I'm Looking for in These Ugly Times

There is this from Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland,”

Mad Hatter: “Why is a raven like a writing-desk?”

(There is a long pause.)
“Have you guessed the riddle yet?” the Hatter said, turning to Alice again.
“No, I give up,” Alice replied: “What’s the answer?”
“I haven’t the slightest idea,” said the Hatter.

And so, there you have it. My dilemma. I’m trying to figure out what happened to us as a nation. It’s a riddle I can’t answer. I haven’t the slightest idea.

There are possible answers, I suppose. We got too big. We overachieved. We mixed religion with politics and politics took over religion. We became insanely selfish. We forgot our neighbors. We learned to hate more than we learned to love. We confined ourselves to our own kind and decided “others” were our enemies. We stopped thinking. We stopped caring. We stopped growing.

The list is pretty much endless.

So here we are. A nation in crisis. We’re surrounded by the greatest gadgets and devices and playthings imaginable. We text but we don’t talk. We stare into a screen and we miss the gorgeous world moving by us. We instant message but we’ve forgotten how to sincerely communicate.

We have lost what mystic Joseph Campbell called “the rapture of being alive.”

Alienated from our conscience we operate out of primitive urges. We have stopped morally evolving. We’re back to the Garden of Eden ignoring the wisdom that warned there are limits we must honor. And if we don’t there will be consequences.

We are now living those consequences.

“Don’t hate your enemy,” the ancient rabbis wrote, “or you become like him.” We dismissed that caution long ago. Now we are what we hate.

Outside our damaged nation are strewn other nations broken and disheartened. We were once a model of hope for them. We were once an example of how ingenuity, skill, education, hard work, and values could produce unimaginable wonders.

The wonders remain, but the intelligent drive and the natural gifts that created them have diminished. Today we are motivated by forces that seem sinister, predatory, and heartless.

When your power is fueled by those things it is no wonder then we have no idea what to do about the injustices we live with. And why no one seems to have a clue what to do about Syria and ISIS and guns and school shooters and home-grown terrorists in America.

Buddhism teaches that the craving desire to act for self-interest binds us to suffering. And so it does. How clear that truth now is all around us. Our torment is self-created and self-perpetuating.

What will save us, Alice? She doesn’t know. Neither does the Mad Hatter. Nor does seemingly anyone else.

Dostoevsky, though, had an idea. “Beauty,” he wrote, “will save the world.”

That’s what I’m looking for in these ugly times.

© 2018 Timothy Moody