P.O. Thursday

Maybe it's been the never-ending cycle of meetings at work, maybe it's fact that my sink drain burst last night, maybe it's any number of things, but regardless, I'm in (for me) what constitutes a foul mood. Now to be fair, I was thinking about writing about this before the sink implosion, but now I seem all the more willing to bang away.

That preamble aside, I was thinking about some of the bigger things that I see around me that really, really "cheese" me off. Here's a list.

The Culture of Greed
The notion that "greed is good" has become a mantra in the business world, and many of us are nearly numb to the grotesque excesses that have become part of our culture. Now it's expanded to the judiciary as well. In Wilkes-Barre you had two judges who sent kids to jail in order to get kick-backs (story here). Where is the moral basement? Seriously? If there is a Hell, these two judges will be there when they die.

The Culture of Entitlement
We have raised a generation of people who believe, in their hearts, that they are entitled to things like new cars and unlimited TV on their cellphones. Think about it: ever see someone in a store using public assistance to buy food while they talk on their cellphone?. Anyone else see the problem in that? In many ways, this is part of what lies at the heart of the current economic crisis: you had people who believed that they were entitled to large homes that they really could not afford. No one is entitled to anything in this world. You get what you work for. Is that fair? Probably not, but then again life can be very unfair, and you only need look at the Paris Hilton's of this world to see just how unfair it really is. That doesn't change my point though: the only things you really have in this world are the things you really worked for and earned yourself. Anything else really belongs to someone else (be it a bank if you bought it on credit or the government if you got it via public assistance).

The Culture of Pills
We have also raised a generation of people who believe that it's always bad to feel bad and that there is always a pill that can make it better. What's wrong with that? Shouldn''t we all want to feel good all the time? Well, feeling bad is a part of life. Being sad is a part of life. In fact, it's the feeling bad and sad parts that help you appreciate all the more the good times in life. Now do I believe that some people do suffer from medical conditions that require medication? Yes, I certainly do. But medication should never be a substitute for introspection and the therapies that can help someone discover and deal with the underlying causes of why they may feel bad and sad too often. It's like this: if your finger is infected and hurts, you can certainly take a pain pill to help you deal with the pain, but that doesn't do anything to help cure the infected finger. In fact, if all you do is to take the pain pill, it can make the situation worse by masking the severity of the infection.