Human history has been a long bloody march to get to precisely this moment. This moment where we not so much choose the future, but reject that past.
Life, on every level is about one thing, choice. The choices we make as individuals, the choice we make as societies and the choice we make as a human race.
We are at a moment of choice right now. And we are, by and large, making the right ones. Or I should say, they are making the right ones. They being the young people of today. They are choosing tolerance, peace and what amounts to love, on the societal level. They are choosing to leave the bloody history of the past behind and are embracing the paradigms set forth by Christ and the hippies and rejecting the paradigm of hate and fear.
They are not doing this, which is a good thing, out of the spiiritual information of Christ or the starry eyed idealism of the hippies but for a much more solid and lasting reason.
It works.
It is the most practical approach. Peace and love are pragmatic. They are cheaper than fear and hate. They are less complicated. They are easier. And they work.
As we watch the republicans wallow around in their mud trying to find a way to get people to join them in the fifth of hate, they are getting no takers. Not because people have stopped having the capacity for hate or that they are not affected by fear, but because the young people of today are coming to realize that other than emotional satisfaction, it has nothing to offer.
Hate doesn’t put food on the table or clothe your children. Taking something away from another doesn’t make you significantly better off, because it just forces them to try to take it back from you, and who needs the headache.
It is better to try to make sure that we share our resources. It is better to have a little less, if that means you don’t have to fear and defend against someone trying to take it from you.
The bankers tried to take wealth from the homeowners, and now they have to fear them. You get more and better information from being “kind” and reasonable towards your captured enemies than by torturing them. “Letting” gay people marry is much less trouble than repressing them. Talking to your enemies is cheaper than trying to destroy them. You don’t want anyone to mess with your choices, so why the hell should you mess with theirs, just because you don’t agree with them.
Living in fear is not as much fun as living in ‘love.’ Or at least tolerance.
It is quicker, easier, and cheaper to shrug your shoulders and tolerate our human differences than to spend the time and effort to control others. Or kill them.
We are at the dawn of the Progressive Era not because the ideology of it is somehow philosophically superior to Conservative ideology. We are at the dawn of the Progressive Era because it works better and is easier.
