Published 11/25/09

 

The crack of doom? Or merely a popgun?

 

When I hear and read people angrily or fearfully decrying, as I once did, the events occurring in America and around the world, I am reminded of observations made by two of the many great thinkers of mankind.

 

In his speech titled “The American Scholar,” Ralph Waldo Emerson observed: “The world of any moment is the merest appearance. Some great decorum, some fetish of a government, some ephemeral trade, or war, or man, is cried up by half mankind and cried down by the other half, as if all depended on this particular up or down. The odds are that the whole question is not worth the poorest thought which the scholar has lost in listening to the controversy. Let him not quit his belief that a popgun is a popgun, though the ancient and honorable of the earth affirm it to be the crack of doom.”

 

This observation was significant for me once I realized that everything that is happening today has happened before – many times over. As Marcus Aurelius observed (2000 years ago): “Look back over the past, with its changing empires that rose and fell, and you can foresee the future too. Its pattern will be the same, down to the last detail; for it cannot break step with the steady march of creation. To view the lives of men for forty years or forty thousand is therefore all one; for what more will there be for you to see?”

 

We are on this earth for a very short time. Would we not be of far greater service both to ourselves as well as the world around us if, instead of complaining ever more loudly about what we perceive as the faults of humanity, we focused instead on those same faults that exist within ourselves?