When will our sanity return?

Aug 30, 2014 Letters

DEAR EDITOR
I was lying in bed the other night, thinking about the day’s news from around the world. I thought about the recent incident in the USA, where a child, nine years old, was learning how to use an Uzi, a sub-machine gun, a weapon of war, a real one, not the kind that children usually play with. The child couldn’t handle the weapon well, and this resulted in the death of the instructor.
I am trying to understand why anyone would want their nine year old to learn to use such a weapon. I understand the parents were recording the exercise at the time. No reasonable explanation came to my mind. I subsequently saw another parent who was allowing his child, of similar age, to learn to use a semi-automatic weapon; not a weapon as big as the Uzi but big, nevertheless. I gathered from that parent’s comments that he feels safer knowing that his child would be able to ‘defend himself’.
Life gives us lessons, until we get it; although, some of us never learn the lessons. I wonder how we can justify making money by creating all kinds of wants and ‘needs’ in people, no matter how bizarre; appealing to people’s egos and thirst for power, status, and safety etc. It’s called marketing, and is used to reel children in too, when marketers are looking for other market segments to target, even when a product or service is not appropriate for the intended user.
While I lay there, I wondered about capitalism in general and the relentless search for profits. The capitalist approach to development is a useful one, but like all approaches, it has its limitations, and can be abused by the greedy to reach the unsuspecting vulnerable person. Things can get out of hand.
I am convinced that we have lost it, our marbles, that is. We are truly living in perilous times, when reason takes a collective back seat. We allow other people’s greed to fan our own greed, and we make choices that are not in any nation’s best interest.
I thought of how nature is socking it to us with the unusual and extreme weather patterns that are being experienced. I thought about how excuses are made for these occurrences in order to continue to exploit natural resources to the maximum, increasing and intensifying mudslides, tornadoes, rainfall, and the like, without proper regard for the environment which sustains us. Even though we see these occurrences, we refuse to learn. More lessons will come.
We fill our pockets at our own peril. We think that that peril won’t come in our lifetime. Of course this means that we are not overly concerned about future generations and sustainable development. We don’t care too much about leaving the earth in a manner that would benefit those generations. We’ll be gone. Why bother!! We keep marching on to some strange mad tune called ‘money, money, money’, oblivious of self-destruction. Way to live!!!
Rosemarie Terborg Davis

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