Today I'll Write About....

probably nothing again :/ writing everyday is hard!

I did just read an interesting article on the decay of ethics and morals in America that was interesting. Earl Shorris compares it to the decay in the human body when dying because he had a close call with death.

Read the article here:
http://harpers.org/archive/2011/12/american-vespers/5/

He had some pretty interesting quotes:

Each of us, in reveries, comes to see his own life as a grand and revealing metaphor of the world: a breath becomes a decade, a cough replicates a war, a birth betokens the invention of language, and illness explains the fall of nations. But the metaphor fails. Death is only a spur to life, not life in a different guise. In the months of recovery, I reconsidered the value of my life. While I was among the missing, the world did not come to an end, the loss of me was unremarked.

Modern scientists tell us how somewhere near the bottom of the order of living things, immortality reigns. It exists in cells of malign intent and perhaps in the hydra, that strange early-metazoan beast seen under the microscope by generations of high school biology classes. With this in mind, I now conceded to nature that the essential engines—heart and mind—are inefficient. We are condemned to entropy, losing our heat like cups of tea left too long while a poem is read or the Mets give up two in the sixth. Call it decay.

(After talking about the presidency of Ronald Reagan): Perhaps I had missed a clue. It could have been this: Reagan’s “kitchen cabinet” assured me during the convention that their man did “not read books. He reads reports.”

Without ethics, politics has no limits. America broke the rules of living systems, and lost its balance. All the oxygen flowed to a smaller and smaller section of the body politic. The history is brief and unquestionable: close to toppling, the society momentarily pulled itself upright, and then became even less ethical, less balanced, more endangered than ever as a lawless financial system came back from death, and like a foolish patient after a heart bypass operation, continued in its old ways. With no ethical component to national politics, President Obama could deliver his 2011 State of the Union speech without ever mentioning the word “poverty,” although one in every five American children lived in poverty. Without a commitment to Hutcheson’s idea of the greatest good, which is at the core of the original American philosophy in Jefferson’s drafting of the Declaration of Independence, this may no longer be the brilliant experiment. If happiness is for the few and it produces unemployment approaching that of the Great Depression, then the shadow of evening is here.

Jessie again: Pretty interesting! I am tired but maybe I'll give more commentary later.