The world needs problem-solvers – the theme we follow on this date. To solve problems we look for wisdom (maturity) which is the conclusion of knowledge and understanding. We find it in persons who have a wholeness concept of the world and mankind. It is obvious in the family relationship, a relationship with many facets: genders, mates, parents, workers, and other factors which, if in balance builds community starting with individuals in families. Accents change as decades roll by, but there is a trace of optimism in the person or community that gains good leadership from safe and sane persons who hold objectives for all.
What happens when we disassociate ourselves from some segment of the society, a society we are called to serve? F. Scott Fitzgerald died in 1940, the year I went off to college. He was 44 years of age. His wife, Zelda, was in a sanitarium at the time being treated for serious schizophrenia. He died already an alcoholic, in a hotel room with a woman who was not his wife. Death came swiftly from a heart attack. His short literary streaking star emerged in 1922, the year before my birth. By 1940 the only work left for him was hack work and he was already being overlooked even for that. For a few shining moments from some refracted light the writing and life of Fitzgerald (with Hemingway and others) held the imagination of masses of active young people. How could that occur, and how could people care, long after his death, to bother with so dysfunctional a life? All some of them did was illustrate the problem sans solutions. Fitzgerald wrote: I do not like old people. They are incapable of self-improvement. Your average grizzled patriarch stumbles about making the same mistakes in his senectitude that he had in adolescence learning nothing believing in the same white list of approved 20 carat lies. He called the aging almost barbarians. (WSJ 7/30-31/2011, Pg. C-9) He seemed to start old at about thirty years of age. (Thirty became a popular definition.) Within a few years after Fitzgerald’s death the 30s concept was applied in something of a refinement of Fitzgerald’s statement when collegians and beatniks shouted: Don’t trust anyone over thirty. Some actually believed it until they passed their third life decade. One is appalled that they received so much attention and press coverage. Many died or dropped out, and we have witnessed many trying to recover their lives and the attention they once were given. The wise, the problem solver, the serious evaluators were diminished, overlooked in much of practical life, for the loud mouths, the sign carriers, the puckish, the disillusioned, the drug addicted. My response to all this is a general statement of common sense implied in the question: Why are generations so moved by their dysfunctional peers, peers who are often taken with the drug culture, by secondary ideals expressed in negative terms? Much of it wrapped in a gross use of music and communication. They are often rebels, with some appeal because problems are apparent and troublesome, but they are unable to define the problems and make the effort, sometimes slogging, to solve problems of flawed mankind and a challenging nature world.
Wise persons know that individuals and societies need values. They sense that those values should be lived out, observed and honored. They would like to avoid hypocrisy whether it is found in good or bad people. The unwise find themselves doing, or supporting, what they deplore in others. We need to gain orientation to the integrity of the details of our lives. If not we will not do well enough in the larger strokes of the social movement that touch the lives of others. For example, we know that the cavalier way society has managed marriage and children, has led to untold suffering in disruption, even broken lives – all at a cost the nations cannot afford or recover. To carry it further, the cost in funding, the loss of care, the conflicts interwoven, make fools of us, with impossible burdens foisted on our institutions to provide solutions. Our imperfect institutions are imperfectly supported in the confusion. The answer, on the human level, is to listen to our wisest instructors, to draw upon the best in our young and old as high minded persons, with values we know can protect and guide our communities, and the particular community we care about so that we find how to live in an imperfect world with respect – and success. Society is learning that politics do not make effective leaders, nor educations wise counselors without firm values – best found from divine values. What prevents us from designing from God’s value words for life? *Mark W. Lee, Sr. — 2016, 2020