Vail Valley Voices: Chicken Little needs a muzzle
We like to pretend our lives are so wildly confusing and complicated.
“There’s so much to do and so little time,” we collectively whine, whether anyone is listening or not.
“There are too many choices to make, and too many other people wanting to make similar choices, and too many people in my way to make my choice easier, and too many things can go wrong if I make the wrong choice, and I just don’t feel good about life or the direction of our country anymore, and blah, blah-blah, blah-blah-blah …”
Oh, shut up.
“But, but, Richard, you don’t understand. The liberals are taking over. Obama and his socialist cronies are hell bent on ruining this country, handing it all over to Big Government so we can be overrun by taxes and the Chinese and the Muslims and the Commies and the …”
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Again, please just shut the hell up.
Some of you do nothing but complain and whine and bitch about how bad things are and how much better they used to be and how much worse they will be, unless …
And that’s where it all ends or the excuses begin, depending on one’s perspective. Most never have the brains or the cajones (to quote Sarah Palin) to finish the sentence without making it a political party issue.
Go ahead, give it a try. I challenge you to finish that sentence without using the words liberal, conservative, socialist, Marxist, Christian, Islamic, creationist, commie, progressive, right wing, left wing, pluralist, capitalist, conformist, materialistic, centrist, reactionist, Tory-loving, or Bolshevikian idiot.
And here’s the key for those of you naive enough to actually try: It still has to make relevant sense by the end of the sentence without resorting to philosophical goody-goody, feel-good steer guano.
It can’t be done.
Listen, life is, intrinsically, really very simple.
Everyone, everywhere, has two basic choices from birth all the way to the point the heart stops and life ceases to exist. You can either A) accept things as they are, or B) work to change things into something different (hopefully better).
It is black or white, one or the other, and applies across the entire playing field to every decision we ever make for our entire life (gray areas only come into play when issues are mixed).
Whether we choose to stand up and fight over any particular issue or lie down and die is completely up to us individually. But either way, failing to do one guarantees the other’s inevitability.
The choice is yours, and yours alone, to make.
So whether you choose to fight about bike road etiquette or presidential vacation bills or who we should elect for sheriff, please quit wasting time for the rest of us unless you have real and valid arguments, along with positive methods to change things, for the better.
Otherwise all of your complaining is nothing more than pointless jabber (this column notwithstanding, of course).
Richard Carnes of Edwards writes weekly. He can be reached at poor@vail.net. Comment on http://www.vaildaily.com.
