Isn't there plenty of cause for people to lose their moorings right now? If you need a cause to blame, you can certainly blame the pollution -- in our air, in our water, in the ground. I just learned yesterday that our soils are damaged, which will affect the growth of our crops. Aside from that, we have an exploding population in several places in our world. Population pressures make people crazy. Lack of adequate resources to provide for our needs make people crazy. The loss of our faith in a guiding Great Spirit (losing our religions) can make us become desperate and afraid--and crazy. Increasing hopelessness (because we are losing our usefulness in a world where the factories are disappearing, and the remaining sources of production are all becoming automated--so they don't need us anymore--can make us go crazy.
The answers to all of these terrible dilemmas are not many, but some are worth adopting...
1) We can, for God's sake, stop reproducing like bugs and rabbits, and accept that -- since we're living longer -- we don't need to reproduce ourselves until our numbers push us thru the rafters.
2) We can gather in coalitions in our communities to form small business collectives where we can earn a decent living from what we make, sell, and repair -- and in the process, stop polluting our lands and our waters with all the useless trash we keep building up because of our excessive consumption of the garbage that the big factories keep selling us.
3) We can turn our back on the notion that there is no God, and find our way back to a more faith-based philosophy of life. After all, none of us would be here at all if there were no some causation--something in the universe, and certainly something in our world that makes "us" possible.
4) Recognize the truth that our world is not just a mud ball in space -- life proliferates within our world everywhere for a reason. If for no other reason that the planet is a living being (if we can believe in God, and ghosts, and Father Christmas, why can we not believe our world is a living being).
5) We can turn off our GD televisions and go outside to see and feel our world. A great many of us spend all or most of our waking hours glued to a virtual world reality on TV that is, at best, only temporarily entertaining, and much of the time, it's boring or terrifying. Just watching the daily news is terrifying sometimes.
6) We can read books that teach us good lessons, or tell us good stories, or inspire us to develop talents he haven't bothered to explore. Inspiring books are a great way to learn things that can help us recover our grasp on sanity.
7) We can work on improving our relations with one another -- particularly our relations with members of the opposite gender. Even people who are old, or disabled, or less than gorgeous can go to gathering places where we can meet other people -- churches are emptying out--but they are potentially great places to meet people and make friends. Living alone and friendless drives us crazy.
Living without a mate in loneliness when most of us want a mate, or friends, is stupid and unnecessary.
Human beings are a gregarious and social species. We function best in tribal societies--we wither and die, or go crazy in isolation. Hope rises on the wings of a smile -- Isolation is bad for your health, bad for your heart, and bad for your mind.
