When the Going Gets Tough

When times are stressful, we see the weaknesses of our communities spring leaks, and so it’s not surprising, to see reports daily now, of people going off the deep end -- doing something unfathomable to everybody else. That is the result of unrelenting distress finally breaking out in the most vulnerable in every community -- the weakest links. And that is why every society sees the necessity to create safety nets so that these walking time bombs among us, don’t explode when we happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. There's no defense for catastrophes like that -- no matter how many liberals one gets to stand on a pin head chanting, “No more bad.”

We’re lucky in the USA that we know those as the worst of times -- and that they are relatively extraordinary times that we have to get through, and build up that infrastructure to get us through such difficulties. When people are desperate, they will do desperate things -- even if it is the thinking that they can go to prison for a lifetime and have society take care of them -- when things get bad enough.

Reasonable people don’t think that way, but people out of their minds do -- especially when one lives in a society of misguided liberalism, inspired by the desire not to offend, or to even understand.

Then it seems like life becomes one endless torment of random acts of every kind, with a greater outrage of insensibility each day. Problems are not addressed and solved at their most basic and fundamental levels, but for rationalizations and justifications that become more meaningless until one no longer even wants to hear about them. There is just this hopelessness and weariness of being ground down a little bit more each day.

And that’s why we do all the good things we do -- in times before we really need those habits and skills, to bring us through at that base level. Those who are prepared for the worst, never experience it because they are fully prepared for those eventualities and possibilities and it is within the reflexive responses to deal with them.

Those leaning the wrong way, get clobbered. It was fine to provide for a fine shelter for oneself, but needn’t get greedy and monopolize that market -- only now to be left holding the bag of goods nobody wants. At such times, everything we’ve known to be valuable, becomes nearly worthless, and a lifetime of liabilities that squeeze all the life out of us.

Nobody rings a bell when those times change so dramatically -- and that is why, the ability to adapt to a wide range of possibilities and changes, has great survival value, even when it seems, nothing will ever change -- because it is already paradise.