London

[Occhidiangela]

And if you honestly think that will actually happen you are either one of those annoying optimists or you are a fool. No offense.

I do not share your optimism for the American people as a whole. Individuals are redeemable. As a collective though, I will let history speak for it self. I have faced the collective stupidity and ignorance of the American culture. It is a crushing oppressive force. It has only grown worse since I did battle with it.

Then again, I am old, I am tired, and I have done my part. I seem to recall a point in my life where I was young and foolish. I did not think such things were impossible. I sought to change that which I couldn't even begin to understand. And now that I understand it, I fear that I have become a part of it.

That is where our hope shall lie? With the young? The ones that become involved and make change simply because they are not wise enough to realise that they can't possibly make a difference?

I don't put much hope in that either. I have seen the current generations. They need a lot of cheese to go with their whine. They want everything handed to them and they want it now... This second.

No, I don't see a lot of hope here. But I sincerely hope that I am wrong.

By all means continue in your optimism. The horses of this world need that carrot dangling in front of their nose. It keeps them working. And work is good. It shows some results.

People will argue all day if the glass is half full or half empty. I take neither side. I am beyond all that. I am one of the few that realise that it is a dirty glass that somebody left sitting out, probably with out a coaster underneath it. And if left to their own devices, those people would talk themselves to death over said dirty glass and how full or how empty it was. It is, in all reality, a glass I must pick up and wash because no one else will.

The other outside point of view on this is of course the engineer, who will realise the glass is currently twice the size that it needs to be to hold it's contents and will mobilise the means to correct it.

But I don't hold much hope for them either.
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Doc, sorry you hold so little hope. There are a lot of negative vibes in the air. People have been working very hard to undo the essence of the Civil Rights movement, which is to focus on what we have in common rather than what makes us different from one another.

That is the cultural source of division. The Me is overcoming the We. That hurts a marriage, it can't help a nation. I made a crass comment last year about American becoming the nation of the Darma Queen and the Attention Whore. (Applies to both genders, by the way, I am at least a third level attention whore myself.) Maybe the balance between the whole and the part is slightly out of whack.

Occhi