Mean People Still Suck
Once when I had been brought up short by lurid graffiti freshly scratched on a new bathhouse on Cape Hatteras, an old, sand-blasted woman came up behind me, looked for a minute, shook her head and sighed, “How kin people be so mean?”
As Congress cut food stamps and debated extending unemployment insurance, I found myself shaking my head, repeating that mantra.
Did every last one of those heartless, shrugging, ditto-fountainheads read Ayn Rand? Did no one read Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree to them as children? Is it too much to hope that a less mean book might become the formative meta-text for the next generation’s ideology?
I admit I have never read a smidgen of the Harry Potter books. I would have been a hopeless Muggle in the Hogwarts School. But the Potter oeuvre must have more heart than any Paul-Ryan-Ayn-Rand-Paul combo.
Other than the Bible, which has been covered, what books would you suggest to would-be politicos for a more compassionate ideology?
February 18, 2014 @ 8:08 pm
Ethics for the New Millennium by Dalai Lama
February 19, 2014 @ 11:18 am
Go back to our early roots of Ralph Waldo Emmerson:
“To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.”.
March 10, 2014 @ 10:27 pm
The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success by D. Chopra.
Not too long ago, I heard that someone introduced leg.
that would require all public school children to read Atlas
Shrugged. Can’t remember what state this was in. Suggesting to children that the wealthiest among us are heroic victims while the working-class are greedy, lazy takers seems a little over-the-top.
My favorite thing about Ayn Rand was that she signed up for Medicare & started cashing Social Security checks when
she hit her 60’s. Oh, the irony.
p.s. If Paul Ryan is an intellectual, then I’m Joan of Arc.
May 14, 2014 @ 1:33 am
The golden rule. Simple and to the point.