Fear About-face
I smoke, instead of breathing. We war, instead of loving. And so on. Cynics and "realists" glimpse this state of things and use it as fodder for their fondly wrought nay-saying. Might we not also us such a glimpse of our lack of wisdom to glean a bit of that previous stuff? Passing College Park Cemetery at night recently, it occurred to me, is it possibly that our fear of cemeteries is yet another example of our misdirected hardheadedness? What if cemeteries are among the places which we should be least fearful of, mainly because they are almost completely free of living human sojourn and activity? From that bit of reverse reasoning it was only a tiny leap to the thought
that, faced with the real, painful, terrifying possibilities of this world, perhaps we
have it in our jungle-based "realism" exactly backwards, and death is, so to
speak, that last thing we need be afraid of. Because we fear it so much, we should fear it
least.
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If we do a bit of reverse engineering on human wisdom,
we come to a strange conclusion. Given the persistence of human folly--individual and
collective--over the ages, it's difficult to avoid the reality that when it comes to
things that really count, we are repeatedly and unaccountably foolish if not just plain
stupid.