Moderation and balance spells hope.

 

Moderation and balance spells hope.

When I was a child in Israel, I hated summer. I was happy about time off from school, but the suffocating heat was oppressive and anything not watered was dry. We moved to Canada, and it was turned upside down. Here the flowers bloomed in the summer and all was dead in the winter. Luckily, there is winter beauty in most of Canada that can’t be ignored. Now I am an old Canadian who cherishes the short couple of months when all is green.

I remember good and bad years, yet none like the present. I know the stories from the great depression were horrible, but we will not remember 2021 as a good time either. We started the year with a raging pandemic and things went from bad to worst. By mid summer desperation was setting in.

Most of the country wanted to get us over the hump, but we found ourselves fighting against friends and neighbours who believe that you can wish problems away and they will go away. Society was spending resources to find an effective vaccine and an undercurrent of positive thinking freedom fighters were threatening any possible success of our efforts. While we had millions of life saving vaccines spoiling in the fridge, millions of people around the world were facing death and severe illness without help.

By midsummer, we all witnessed a new world shaping up all around us. Some countries were locking up, like Japan, and others faced bigger problems than the Pandemic. Hong Kong bravely stood up to China. Lebanon tried to restart life after severe damage by a government that ignored the people. Here we were facing a summer without tourism from our big neighbour to the south. Some tourist’s attractions suffered but overall, the economy didn’t see major downtrends. We learned that unemployment figures were artificial and we couldn’t survive without cheap temporary foreign labour. Also, the labour of new emigrants in businesses like meat processing was declared “essential.” Who would have guessed?

Mid summer spelled more disasters locally and around the globe. Heat waves and floods like we have not seen in our lifetime devastated the rich and poor alike. Here it was fires, in Europe and Asia, big floods and everywhere unvaccinated people spreading a forever changing pandemic. Being a student of history, I began worrying that all the changes merging at the same time may change the course of human history.

When I was a child, the world was fascinated by the British Empire. Although other powers were competing for ruling the world, people around me were convinced that the British were number one. It went into transition in front of my eyes and the world was divided into two major forces, the American Capitalism and the Russian Communism. Both were equally scary, but I was on the Capitalist side and feared the other. By the time I had children, Communism lost and Free Market won, headed by the United States. As I was raising my children, the Market Capitalism without the threat of the Far Left changed, and became a threat to its own followers.

I knew people who fought in the Korean war that ended with a stalemate. I came to Canada when young men who refused to take part in an unjust war in Vietnam were flocking in looking for a way out. Soon after, I saw the TV coverage of the US running away and countless people floated on the ocean trying to remain alive. We called them “boat people.” I met Hungarians who escaped to Canada when the US deserted them to fight the Soviets alone. Florida was full of refugees from Cuba. Far left and far right, both failed people like me.

Now I am watching Afghanistan. Twenty-year war that cost trillions and so many lives is coming to an end. The beneficiaries are the weapon manufacturers and the losers are those who believed that a war can improve their lives. The biggest empire in the world ever is defeated by a backward, poor country that doesn’t even have a unified nation. I no longer believe humans can win over each other by war, no matter how much we invest in it. I retreat to what I have learned about spirituality. It’s not much, but it’s the only way that makes sense to me.

I am not talking about any religion. They all have some good points and all believe that they are the true faith. Nowadays we can call science a religion as well. To me, spirituality is all of them, people believing that there is something bigger than what our senses can perceive and our logic can figure out. The bible dictates not to assign human description to the entity which we named God.

When people’s emotions are aroused, they say God, or Jesus, Allah, or whatever name. The religious Jews say “hashem” meaning “the name.” We should not invoke lightly the name of God. We pray and expect Him to save us by miracles. It is easily and conveniently forgotten that we have knowledge and must use it ourselves before needing the help of the creator. He gave us the power to do so and the free will to choose.

Spiritual beings must take a picture of the world we recreated in our image and study it. If we see that we became addicted to power, fame, money, immorality, cheating, electronic devices, a lazy life style, irrational fears, dominating the needy, losing touch with reality and more, we must take steps to fix the problem before calling God. Like a good father, He will not pick us up but tell us to stand up. It is the only way we learn.

Our enemy that we must defeat is called totalitarianism. God created us to be our best in the balance between universal forces. I am most comfortable with minority governments, moderate weather, and political ideologies balancing each other.

Here is a link to my blog: https://thesimpleravenspost.blogspot.ca/  Feel free to check other articles and comment.