If you think about the English and the snobbery displayed by some of the upper class there, it is an example of what I'm going to illustrate taken a bit too far. I don't think the English were TRYING to be snobs, at first. I think they were just tired of dealing with louts and loutish behavior and were desperately thinking up ways to distance themselves from being in some sort of nonstop frat house environment.
Now, while frat house life can be fun, it wears on you after awhile and you yearn for a living environment that is less cluttered, definitely more clean, more quiet, and more your space. We've been through it, most of us, to some degree or another.
But if you go back to England say, 16th century or so, and the streets are all muddy and who knows what is going on at the ale house down the lane it was a fair bet that certain parts of town were not safe day or night so the people in those towns devised a way where they could stay safe without armoring themselves, or having the king's lancers at the ready, and that was they developed a code of ethics, sort of like a club, to which they invited you to join.
It didn't cost any money to be in the club, but money was preferable. This is probably the way it was at first, the money part came later. Anyway, back to my story....
No, not yet. Let's go further back. When Moses came down from Mt. Sinai carrying the tablets upon which were written The Ten Commandments, that was God's way of trying to instill a rudimentary code of ethics into the people. It was a start. But it took a loooong time for people to more or less get it by the time we get to England in the 1600's.
As societies grew, and travel became more prevalent, strangers started regularly coming to town, which was new. Gypsies stayed on the outskirts but here these travelers were coming right into town, and you didn't know them and that held true for just about everybody else. So a fear factor was introduced. How could you tell if this person was friend or foe? Ethics! He had no weapons, mainly he was by himself, perhaps he had an entourage, but in order to enter your environs to do his business he had to demonstrate goodwill towards his new fellowmen and so......
....the way to bridge this uncomfortable gap was to demonstrate ethical behavior by saying "Please" "Thank You" and "You're Welcome" which is shorthand for
(May I come in? I'll leave my troops outside the wall)
(Yes, that would be nice. Thank you for doing that)
(You're welcome)
and so on and so on.
Beware El Borracho!
Photo- Larry Costales- Unsplash.com
But- trickery and subterfuge was always suspected or could actually be in the works so you never could tell and so more complicated rules of conduct, rules of behavior, were established, bit by bit, and in these ways strangers could get along, people not of your tribe. Even now this holds true. We are strangers to each other using such rules, many unwritten, in order to get along smoothly in social interactions. Ethics and morals are our guidelines. Or they USED to be, because when we suddenly fast forward again to present times we find ourselves in a time where we are witnessing something akin to All Star Wrestling taking place within our government.
In this strange world, some of the audience (the base) takes delight in watching their champion(s) BREAK THE RULES as much as possible and get away with it. How many times can he or she do it? How many times can the other side do it? Is the referee looking? Did the ref see something and let it slide? On and on the match goes until one of the rule breakers exhausts the other and a 'winner' is declared. But is that person really the winner? For now! There is always a rematch, scheduled for next week, or next month, and that has the audience frothing in anticipation (hee hee) because in the next match they're probably gonna pull out ALL the stops.
Right now it's the Democrats and the Republicans in the All Star Wrestling ring, and man, those Republicans have been nasty. They've been blindsiding the Democrats, hitting them over the head with ringside chairs, tag teaming them, haystacking them, oh, it's ugly.
Their audience loves this. Look at all of the rules they're breaking! The Democrats are so dazed that they're wandering around, scratching their bruised heads, and don't see that they're going to get jumped upon by some gorilla that has climbed up onto the ropes and is going to do a flying body slam on them.
This is how far we've devolved. We The People are now the audience in an All Star Wrestling World Federation match.
Sad.
It's in this ring where 'the rules of the game' now play out, but in this ring, there AREN'T any rules. How did we GET here?
We were dragged here by a steady decline in civility. But, we can climb out of the pit. We The People, which make up a nation, can refuse to participate in a game played with no rules and, without an audience, there can be no match. To achieve this we demand accountability. We demand logic. We demand factual statements. We can stand our ground until the other side caves, and they will, for without us, there will be no opponent left to bash. Without an opponent acting as the foil, there stands only nakedness, holding its unreasonable and untenable positions. Wrestlers NEED a foe. Without one, they are bereft of accolades, stripped of standing, and nobody is left in the seats to hear them boast into the microphone about how they're going to take their opponent down.
These are pitiful souls who are desperate for an audience, any audience that will listen to their bizarre opinions; they are desperate for power and will take whatever they can get while trying to support their power grabs by the flimsiest of reasons (hoping that nobody with a lick of sense is looking) and geez...... it's 2018. Bamboozled? Flummoxed? Befuddled? That's what happens when you dose yourself with All Star Wrestling. To counteract its effect turn off all All Star Wrestling programming on your TVs and radios and put your thinking caps on- for godsakes. Stop reacting to blows that are landing on propagandized issues and caricatures of people. Choose to evolve, not devolve, for by blindly agreeing to this sort of nonsense you choose to place power in hands that can hardly be trusted to play by the rules when it concerns YOU.