First let’s look at how he describes life for mankind, his first notion was solitary. Many people today would argue that we are more connected and able to communicate than ever with each other. To a certain degree that is true, after all I am reaching out to hundreds of thousands of people right now through a laptop in my living room. Yet does solitary mean we do not communicate or does it mean we do not have relationships, real understand and cooperative relationships with one another? Most Americans can barely tell you who their neighbors are and interact with the world through electronics not face to face. This bears out the idea of a solitary existence. In fact the real question we should honestly ask ourselves is do we really care what is happening in the lives of anyone outside our selves and if so what do we do to act on that?
The second word choice is poore, spelled today as poor which has so many connotations it holds a myriad of understanding in those four letters. Poor can mean wealth, well today more people are on food stamps and unemployed than ever before, a condition the current administration promotes. Poor can mean that we are uneducated, have you seen the graduation statistics of most American cities today? Poor can mean we are unsophisticated and I would give you Rosanne Barr’s current joke about Bill Cosby. The reality is we are much less sophisticated then we were as a nation just one hundred years ago and the problem is growing worse not better. I would argue poor is a state of mind that a group of people take on when they put their trust in others instead of their own abilities, then show the world hatred for the way they are treated by others, poor is a very good way to describe this nation at this moment.
Nasty is the next choice word and if you have seen most movies and television, listened to morning radio or current rap music there is very little room to disagree. We inundate ourselves with poor role models that beat their spouses or condone bad behavior and then we are surprised our youth behave in this nasty fashion. I am a school teacher and it is a daily occurrence for me working in an inner city school for someone to talk back or call me names or to threaten me in various ways. We have become or gone back to a very nasty way of living and it is not forward thinking and it is not healthy for us as a nation but it is true at the moment.
How about brutish? Well I give you Ferguson Mo. Or thugs on parade as I like to call it. this nation has become one of violence and we have forgotten that violence only begets more of the same. We sing about it, make movies about it and today people believe it is the normal way to act. Well America this action or belief in violence as a proper social medium will end with our freedoms a distant memory. Gandhi once said “an eye for an eye will leave the world blind” he was right and today we are blind, blind not only to others actions but to our own actions in compared to our beliefs.
And lastly we have Short, our lives today seem to be longer but I would argue that Mr. Hobbes was correct here also, as violence picks up most lives will be short and those that survive into later stages suffer from memory diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Dementia. Our breathing goes on longer but our quality of life drops dramatically, as our culture pulls away from taking care of the aged and starts death panels for those with disease and our young no longer feel a need to help their own family members. Our lives, that time we really live, is growing short and our suffering is growing longer. Retirement for many is no longer an option so there are those who work until death today.
It is clear that President Obama did not cause all of this but it is also clear he is doing nothing to change any of it either. Our society is falling quickly into failure as we deny God and Faith and destroy each other in the pursuit of whatever we want right now. If this nation or even the world is going to survive on any level with our past we must choose our leaders wisely, they must have faith and good moral codes, we must choose our role models much better and we need to hold ourselves accountable for our own actions before we hold others accountable for what we disagree with. This nation needs to do what is right, not what is right, right now.
This Holiday season as it begins today I wish the world peace and understanding, I wish you personally the very best and I hope that each person who reads this will take a moment and try to change their world for the better, just a little bit, and each day we may get closer to what this world should be instead of what it is.