About something I said in the post below (is that a sign of insanity, wondering about what I said? didn't I know what I was going to say before I said it? perhaps I should have said wondering about the implications of what I said... but I digress.)
How could one of the Pope's priorities on his visit to the States not be coming to my troubled diocese and "being part of the healing"? is a question that was asked.
Assuming ones own concerns are central to everyone else's concern, mistaking ones own situation for the universal, obliviousness to or at least denigration of pain that that is not our pain, (nobody suffers like I suffer!) -- is that in some specific way peculiarly American?
It seems to me that Europeans in particular, but now many from the emerging world as well, like to chide the US for its inability to imagine any system in which she and her concerns and her needs and her way of going about things and her view of affairs is not the sun around which everyone and everything else orbits.
And it also seems to me that others think national egocentricity is a result of our size and money and power, that it's a sort of bullying.
But is it?
This lack of imagination is nearly identical to that which to my great annoyance seems the primary attribute of adolescents (by which term I often sadly mean people well into their twenties and beyond.... there are Peter Pans in their 60s.)
Alarming numbers of people seem to not to acknowledge that anything of any significance happened before their own consciousness. They do not know that people (let alone arts, sciences, faiths, areas of any sort of endeavor, really,) have histories, or at least any back story of which they need take note.
My proposition is that our self-centeredness is a result of our relative youth as a nation.
Does that make sense?
Think there is any merit in the notion?
Universalis, your very own breviary in pixels...
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment