Looking the Other Way

Have you ever watched the news and seen places of terrible destruction and war and for little more than a moment hurt for those people? Have you ever seen a documentary about some part of the world where children are forced to become mindless killing machines with little more than mere survival for just one more day on their minds and felt that sick feeling in the pit of your stomach that reminds you that it could just as easily have been you had you been born there? Have you ever seen a homeless person walking down the street in tattered clothing and as skinny as a rail carrying their wealth on their back in a shoddy backpack and almost...almost stopped to give him some money?

Every so often something jars me back into the reality of this world that I live so comfortably in and from deep inside of me comes the desire to DO something...anything to ease the suffering of those who live in hell. I wish that I could honestly say that this proclivity is of a completely unselfish nature but the truth is that it is as much a desire to ease the suffering humans as it is to ease my own guilt for living in such a state of peace and relative bliss while others will never know what it's like to go to the pantry and make themselves a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. This truth reminds me that I am scum everytime I get upset because I cannot go to a concert I want to go to or take off from work to do something with friends. A further truth is that while at this very moment as I find myself in this state of humility and yearning to help, by ten o'clock tonight I may very well have forgotten all about all of this and carry on in my life of privilege. I almost wish that something would force me into the place of those suffering people like the children of Uganda so that I would not be able to see it and say, "my God that is awful," and then go about my merry way. But I should be careful what I wish for.

The Dead by Sylvia Plath

I was reading some poems by Sylvia Plath this morning in between classes and this one really struck me. The irony of it is that, while I find her message unfortunate and void of any hope, I find it tragically beautiful.

Revolving in oval loops of solar speed,
Couched in cauls of clay as in holy robes,
Dead men render love and war no heed,
Lulled in the ample womb of the full-tilt globe.

No spiritual Caesars are these dead;
They want no proud paternal kingdom come;
And when at last they blunder into bed
World-wrecked, they seek only oblivion.

Rolled round with goodly loam and cradled deep,
These bone shanks will not wake immaculate
To trumpet-toppling dawn of doomstruck day :
They loll forever in colossal sleep;
Nor can God's stern, shocked angels cry them up
From their fond, final, infamous decay.

time served

Does age equal wisdom? Does the amount of time one has served on this earth indicative of how wise a person is? We always see the archetypical wise old man in movies and read about him in books but is it a fair assumption that someone who is older is necessarily wiser? Growing up we are taught to be respectful of the elderly because they are older and wiser than we are. For the most part I have always assumed that this was true. Now, I am not here to tell anyone that they do not have to respect the elderly. My question has little to do with whether we should respect those who are older and much to do with how much wiser they really are. Wisdom is defined as the power or faculty of forming a sound judgment in any matter. How does one come to acquire this power of forming sound judgments? I suppose the only logical answer is through experience. Subsequently, the more experience one accrues, the more wisdom is attained right? That only seems logical. However, it seems that there should be a little more to it than that.

Let's say that wisdom is gained through what is learned from experience. The simple truth is that people do not always learn the right lesson from a given experience. One of several things happens when people experience a hardship: a) they learn why said event happened and take reasonable steps to prevent it from happening again, b) they form a knee-jerk reaction to the adverse circumstance and grossly overcompensate for their error often putting other people at odds with them as a result, and c) they learn nothing from it and are doomed to find themselves in the same hole they started in. So, to say that age/experience equals wisdom is questionable to say the least.

I'm not really sure where I am going with this except to say that I have been thinking a lot about people. I know a lot of older people who are incredibly foolish and make irrational and unwise decisions on a regular basis. I also know some younger people who have more wisdom in their little finger than many people obtain in a lifetime. I suppose that you could argue that this observation is based on my youthful perspective and lacks wisdom. I don't really have an argument for that. I just feel that everyone should have to earn the respect that they receive and the fact that they have lived a long time without dying doesn't seem like a good enough reason to respect someone to me.