"The Great Goodness Within Us!"
from - The Parallax Prophecies -
By Ron Ewart, President
National Association of Rural Landowners
and nationally recognized author on freedom and property rights issues.
We are helping to spread freedom and liberty around the globe.
© Copyright Thursday, December 22, 2011 - All Rights Reserved
"In spite of all of our individual and collective faults, there is a 'great good' that exists in a very large number of us. That good is personified in a wide range of human traits and behavior including private and public achievements, sacrifice, industry, creativity, empathy, generosity, spontaneous volunteerism and spirit, either as individuals or as a society. Unfortunately, due to the 'distorted window' through which we view our information, that 'great good' in us seems to be eclipsed by an over-zealous emphasis on that which appears to be 'bad' within us." Ron Ewart
Most everyone knows that the American holiday known as Christmas, however it is celebrated and for whatever reason, is a time of giving, love and peace, even though it doesn't always work out that way. It is a time when the goodness in man is manifested by random acts of charity, caring and good will. It is a time for children, fun, happiness and good cheer. It is a positive way to end a long year with uplifting moments to offset some of the bad events that have occurred in the past 11 months.
Our previous articles have focused on what is wrong with us as a people and as a government and what we can do about it. However, in a sharp departure from that weekly focus and in the spirit of the season, we are going to emphasize the great goodness that lies within most of us. In a chapter entitled, "What is Good About Us" for a new book we are writing, we expose the truly good things about America and Americans and why we will eventually succeed in using that goodness as a means to solve many of the problems we face. Excerpts from this chapter follow. We hope that it brings some pleasant and reverent thoughts during this relatively peaceful time of year, but at a time in America's history that appears to be rather bleak. Perhaps maybe, in retrospect, this time is not so bleak after all, but just another mountain to cross and Americans are great at crossing mountains and fording rivers, or even going to the stars. Join with us as we explore ......
"What Is Good About Us!"
By Ron Ewart
It is very easy to criticize or find fault with anything and everything and it seems to be a negative human trait. Most of the time our verbal or written criticism is offered, without a request, for ego-driven purposes, to make ourselves look bigger, better or more perfect than the thing or the person or group we are criticizing. I'd like to reverse the trend and reflect first off on those things that are great and good in us, either as individuals or as a collection of individuals.
To me nothing epitomizes what we are capable of as individuals and as a society more than the sight of a large commercial jet liner (say a Boeing 747) lifting off from a long airport runway with a roar of immense power and speed, defying the force of gravity and arcing, bullet like, towards an unknown destination in but a relative instant of time. The sight of that same airliner brings a sense of awe, as it almost hovers in a gentle glide to the safety of the ribbon of concrete that greets its awaiting wheels with a screech and a puff of blue smoke, holding aloft its great weight of metal, plastic, fuel and human flesh until the last second of flight.
How can that graceful, cigar-shaped cylinder with its sweptback wings and roaring engines glide on an unseen ocean of air? It seems almost impossible but we accept it as an everyday reality without even giving this seeming miracle of flight the slightest thought. What a fantastic achievement and what a monumentous contribution to the mobility of our people. Only the vision, perseverance, skill and guts of a large number of individuals could have wrought such a successful venture.
Just a mere 150 years ago, a blink of time in the life of our planet, we were crossing the new land with wagons, horses, mules or oxen. It is hard to imagine the spirit, will and guts that it took for those frail people to cross the wilderness with unspeakable injuries, illness and suffering awaiting them. What took the pioneers three to five months or more to do, we now traverse in 3 to 5 hours. From the days of Wilbur and Orville Wright at the infamous Kitty Hawk, we have pole-vaulted the technology of flight to unimaginable speeds and heights. What a great land we live in.
Yes. We are a people full of flaws and yes, we tend to get in our own way from time to time like we are now. But look at what we have done.
Look at the cars of today with their aerodynamic design, their beautiful, bright colors and advanced instrumentation. Do you remember when tires only lasted 20,000 miles? Now they last 50,000 or more. Do you remember when an engine was burned out at 50,000 or 60,000 miles? When I wrote this I was driving a Lincoln Town Car that had over 200,000 miles on the original engine and transmission. It still purred like it used to and it still had the same snap. Now that's progress.
As I dictated this section, I was speeding along at 70 miles an hour, east bound on Interstate 90 on my way to Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. A trip I made several times a month. Fifty years ago this trip would have taken much longer, would have been driven over difficult, curving roads and the reliability of the car would have been more in doubt.
Think of the dams and the great power generating plants that we have built to provide power for our cities and towns. Think of the buildings we have built to house our people, our businesses and our factories and to continue one of the most awesome commercial and economic engines that ever occurred on the face of the earth.
Just think of the wide range of scientific research going on right now in the areas of energy. Yes, there is wind and solar power, but other sources being researched now will deliver many factors of energy more than the current alternative sources.
Think of the research in genetics to unravel the mysteries of inherited diseases and other conditions and what part that research will have in finding the root causes of these conditions and their respective cures.
Think of the research in food types and production to increase our food supplies. How about the research in and use of fiber optics, or the research in rubber, plastics, rare metals and new materials and fabrics? This research is fueled by the fires of commercial enterprise and in some cases, from the moneys that are collected by our government for taxes, as in the NASA space program that has taken us well above our atmosphere and beyond.
Look at the progress we have made in the world of medicine, even with all of its problems of costs, malpractice and hospital-transmitted diseases, staff infections and the bickering and fighting that goes on between boards of hospitals, nurses, doctors ..... and yes, the government. But look what we take for granted for medical care in this country. We provide medical services in the United States that can only be gotten here.
Look at the machinery that has been developed for the world of medicine. Magnetic Imaging Machines, breathing machines, heart-lung machines, blood monitoring machines, CAT scanners, X-ray machines and more. I don't know all of them because I am not in the world of medicine. All I know is that if something goes wrong you have a place to go where people care for the most part to see that your problem is resolved the best way they can, complete with flaws. No, it's not perfect but it works better than it did 100 years ago when the life expectancy was 47 years old and is now 77 years.
Let's take a little closer look at technology over the last 10 or 20 years and what the computer has done in providing a continuous flow of information so that people can learn more and do things quicker. Some of you may remember the old mechanical Underwood typewriters or the IBM Selectric. We've come a long way baby!
Watch how fascinated a child is as he makes keystrokes on a keyboard of a computer and sees the response on the computer screen. They absorb it like a giant sponge and love every minute of it. Think of what the Internet has done to not only the distribution of information, but the exponential expansion of communications between individuals and groups.
The Internet and search engines have become a boon to writers and authors. Before the age of the Internet, when we wanted to research something, we either had to buy a book or got the library and read almost the entire book to find the information we wanted. Now, with a click of a button on your computer you open up a search engine on the Internet and do your reserach right from your own desk ..... in minutes.
There is no crisis here. There are just problems to solve and challenges to meet. Challenges are met by enterprising individuals working together with other individuals towards a common purpose.
Folks. We are going to the stars one day and nothing anybody says or does will stop that. No amount of fear of the unknown, or nay saying about financing will stop our advance into the Cosmos. We will find the technology and the money. Ever since man first burned himself with fire and realized he could use it to his advantage, or transported some object by rolling a log and converted that idea to the wheel, he has been forever driven towards more knowledge, more understanding and a wider, larger, broader world in which he can explore. In this quest he has been driven to go faster and faster, as his mind reaches farther and farther into the known Universe.
From my own perspective, if somebody walked up to me right now and said, "Ron, would you join us on the next space ship to explore the solar system", I wouldn't even hesitate. I would be on the ship as fast is it could be made ready and never look back. I would go to the "stars" if I could.
The doomsayers will tell us that we are going to run out of power. We are going to run out of oil. We are going to pollute the environment with our cars and our industry. Our automobiles are going to quit running and our airplanes will quit flying and our ships will no longer ply the open seas. Sorry folks, it will never happen. With all the gnashing of teeth and the arguing over methods or cost, we will venture into the vastness of deep space ..... in this century.
Some day in the not to distant future, we are going to develop power sources that will literally boggle the mind. My vision is that each home, each office, each business or building will have its own centralized power unit. And in that power unit will have the source of power to purify our drinking water, destroy our raw sewage and gray water, heat and cool our homes and offices and provide the electrical power for our lights and appliances. One small unit in our homes, office buildings, or factories will provide all these uses.
Think of it. Those in your twenties watch how our planet will shrink in your lifetime. In ten or twenty years there will be airplanes that will leave the United States, sail up to the stratosphere or higher, glide at two to five times the speed of sound and land in Russia in a couple of hours. At 3,000 MPH we can go halfway around the world in 4 hours. In stark contrast, it took over two months to cross the Atlantic Ocean in a sailing ship when freedom was born.
Personalized transportation will change dramatically. There will be air corridors for small, personal air units whether they use the principals of helicopters and small aircraft, or some new strange power yet to be discovered. Maybe we will find a way to offset or neutralize gravity.
CONSCIOUS, SPONTANEOUS VOLUNTEERISM
One of the most commendable of all human traits is the desire by some to give of themselves in service to others, either as a conscious effort, such as those people who donate their time to hospitals, churches, associations, charities and other causes in the name of helping those less fortunate than themselves, or as an unconscious and spontaneous reaching out at times of natural disasters or emergencies, small scale or large. It is my understanding that volunteerism in America, as a percentage of its population, is higher than in all of the other countries in the world.
If you were to remove this one activity from society, it would collapse in very short order. No matter what government, churches or other institutions accomplish in aiding the plight of disadvantaged peoples, none of it would be possible without the self-sacrifice of these individual volunteers.
One could write volumes on volunteerism and I am sure that many have. I only mention it here to further emphasize another aspect of the great good within us.
IN CONCLUSION
Most everyone knows that this is not a fair world. I have a theory. You spend twenty years with your family, with all that that means, and the rest of your life getting over it. If your family is wealthy, you may not have a broad enough "point of reference" to put your feet solidly on the ground and you will spend the rest of your life looking for your own "point of reference", that is if you care. If you were born in a family of poverty, you again will not have the "point of reference" to allow you to understand the true realities of the world. You may also spend the rest of your life searching for your "point of reference", whether you do it consciously or subconsciously. If you are not aware of, or desire to know your "point of reference", you will wander helplessly as dust on the wind, at the wind's total mercy.
The problem in this country and every other country for that matter and every person that exists on this earth is not poverty. It is not the disparity between poverty and wealth. It is not pestilence or flood, famine, earthquake or any of these things. What it is, is pandemic ignorance and too many people lacking the knowledge needed to make intelligent decisions in life. For those who are willing to seek, the knowledge is truly there, especially now in the Internet World.
What we need is a way to get more people motivated to seek out their own "point of reference" and the solid basis of why their particular "point of reference" is relative to them.
There are some real basics here and the hard cold truth of the matter is, each individual, no matter what the mechanism for getting here, comes into this world absolutely alone. No other person can live inside your body. No one else can be part of your soul. You are here unequivocally, irreversibly alone. You must face all the trials and the joys and the sickness and the sorrow and death absolutely alone. Nobody will die with you and although we won't say it out loud, most of us know it instinctively. All they can do is to hold your hand as you transcend life on Earth, but they can't make the journey with you.
The answer to any of our problems is in the depth of our "point of reference". A broader knowledge increases your "point of reference". The answer is to always seek the truth and always leave your mind open to new information that might alter your perception of the truth.
In the end, we also must never lose sight of the fact that, the reason we as Americans are productive, creative, ingenuous, imaginative, reasonably happy and oh so generous, is because we are FREE. That freedom opens the door to our goodness. And the reason we are FREE is because we have laid down a system of government where individuals have un-alienable, natural and God-given rights and where the government swears on solemn oath to preserve, protect and defend those rights under a strongly defended Constitution. But it is the people's duty to hold the government to their oath so that freedom never flies away in the night, on the wings of apathy and indifference.
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Ladies and gentlemen, it is love, goodness, courage and the "Joy of Wonder", that is the driving force of a free society. "The Parallax Prophecies" predicts that man's love, goodness, courage and that "Joy of Wonder" will be, in the end, the savior of his freedom.
Merry Christmas or Happy Hanukkah to each and every one of you and your loved ones whether you celebrate this holiday season religiously, or secularly. May the happiness, the joy and the smile on your young children's or grandchildren's faces, erase the anxiety from your soul and ease the pain in your heart, at least for a little while.
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Ron Ewart, President
NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF RURAL LANDOWNERS
P. O. Box 1031, Issaquah, WA 98027
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