The Culture of Looking Beyond. The very worst of people prefer death and doing nothing to protecting life and solving problems. Many of their souls are irretrievably lost. We may picture them as being on toboggans. They coast downhill, often to great fanfare that speeds them on, along the broad paths to destruction. They reach exhilarating speeds.
We, who try to get nearer to God, move more slowly along a path despised for being so “straight”, and so “narrow”. Our progress is more often accompanied by jeers than cheers.
The souls gliding downhill, often forever, can be easily identified by many characteristics, one of which is the inevitable and automatic refusal to focus on problems at hand. Instead, they invariably concern themselves with remote issues that have little to do with helping anyone. When confronted with suffering neighbors, they “look beyond”, never letting themselves that the lies they tell are preceded by the living lie they have become that makes all their other lies possible.
When any possibility of helping other people make their lives better with less expensive food, medicine, or energy arises, the enlightened “look beyond” with amazing speed . “We can do nothing to help you three hundred million people because the polar bears and the ozone layer must be protected. Besides, all of you are using too much energy, anyway, and these shortages will help you cut back. And, ‘we’ (identifying themselves with some enlightened ‘we’ is an important part of what they consider ‘thinking’) all know that there should not be three hundred million people in this country, anyway. We feel there should only be sixty million people. The only way to make things better is for most of you to die, both quickly and without children.”
