We have heard it said that “the best defense is a good offense.” Perhaps this can put in some perspective the increasing offensive social climate that exists throughout our modern, impersonal society. With less personal contact with others, whether professionally or with other family members, an atmosphere of insensitivity is filling the void.
Old-fashioned store clerks have been replaced with cashiers only; former service centers with self-serve, doctor offices and other healthcare facilities recognize only the insurance card you carry and the most detrimental of all alienation is the absence of seniors within households. Children from birth through teenage, are those things you have to get our each morning before going to work and senior citizens are who you visit in retirement homes when you have the time.
For entertainment (no time for relaxation) we turn on the TV although no two people within the household want to watch the same thing – thus the division and alienation continue to mount, breeding defensive living. As the best defense is offense, offensive living accelerates, fanned by the frivolous manipulative effects of prime time television shows that people-program you when to laugh, when to cry, who to respect or disrespect, to love, hate or fear while your brain is in neutral. It’s called thermometer existence, perpetually registering whatever the existing social climate is around you. This awkward and humiliating state of existence results in generations of compounded egotism that force us to live defensively from individual to international levels. This results from our physical, scientific, and technological maturity and spiritual infancy from spiritual malnutrition. The physical infant can thrive on nothing but milk for the first several weeks of its life. But if it continues that diet throughout life it would grow progressively weaker until arriving at a state of death.
Mankind likewise in infancy was able to survive on a spiritual diet peculiar to its time which, left unchanged as mankind matures, is now producing a sick, deformed society approaching a state of spiritual death. This prolonged state is fast reaping a harvest of social, religious, political and scientific robots with near perfect mechanical minds and bodies but no heart, soul or conscience.
As actions and attitudes are so highly contagious, we must dare to be different enough to become thermostats on some scale and start setting that social, moral and spiritual climate within our homes, workplaces and communities instead of remaining just another thermometer registering, mimicking or simply acquiescing to the societal climate about us. Along with rallying to injustices, dare to take a positive stand for remedying the situations that perpetuate such actions and attitudes.
At best it is this, we read in the Baha’i Holy Writing: Some do not know, they must be taught to love their fellowman and encouraged in the acquisition of virtues. Some are ailing; their moral condition is unhealthy. They must be treated until their morals are purified. But the sick are not to be hated because they are sick, the child must not be shunned because he is a child; the ignorant should not be despised because they lack knowledge. They must all be treated, educated and assisted in love.
Investigate!
