Too many people have an exaggerated sense of the power of personal persuasion; particularly their own. There is this mistaken belief on the part of too many that every problem can be talked to a solution, and that every crisis can be rationally reasoned away. There is this sense that if we say something long enough and loud enough, that eventually everyone will come to see things our way and deal with them as we would deal with them and this is true of everything from the treatment of mental illness to questions of war & peace themselves.
Yet such is not the case. It has not and never will be for while times change and technology & knowledge advances, human nature at heart remains the same and by that I mean every human being has the capacity for both great love and depraved cruelty. Every human being has within them the capacity to be violent or nonviolent, and every human being has a physical & psychological breaking point; a point past which all rational thought & logic disappears and where our most primal and basic instincts takes full and complete control of our thoughts, words, and deeds.
This is true of everybody and as such it is invariably those who are most cognizant of their potential to lose control who are most capable of always maintaining it for they more than anyone else are most alert to those warning signs that personal control is in imminent danger of being lost. We must, as Senator Robert F. Kennedy said on the afternoon of April 5, 1968 learn to "abandon the vanity of our false distinctions." We must dis-enthrall ourselves of the false belief that the power of reasoned, logical thought is absolute and again come to terms with the reality that however advanced we humans may be in regards to all other living things, that we are at heart imperfect beings; forever struggling to survive and make some sense of an often irrational, violent, and depraved world.
Our time among the living is invariably short. We are all condemned to be consigned to memory far sooner than we think and in most cases even desire. So as each passing second brings us ever closer to that moment of our final departure it would seem to me that our dwindling time alive would be far better spent spending more of our remaining hours spending less time trying to make sense of the world and more time trying to make more sense of our own individual lives.
It is great and noble to try to improve the lives of others but it makes no sense to ignore ourselves in the process; to condemn ourselves to the twilight of perpetual anger and personal distress as we fret over the problems facing the world; most of which we have zero power to control or solve to our liking. Do what you feel you must do to help improve the lives of others in any way possible but remember always that it is not an exercise in selfishness to seek whatever joy & personal satisfaction for your own lives that you can; it is merely exercising basic common sense for what is the point of even being alive if one cannot find some pleasure in the very act of living?
In the final analysis we are all born alone and we will all die alone. No one else has ever experienced birth as we ourselves have experienced it and no one else ever has and ever will, experience dying as we are all destined to experience death. We are all ultimately defined not by our limitations but by what degree we have transcended them according to our natural abilities, motivations, and desires, and life ultimately being about the art of the personal, in the end it will be ourselves and ourselves alone who will make the final determination as to whether or not the life we have lived has been a success or a failure.
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