Hi and Welcome to the A & J PEI Treasures E Jean Simpson Author Blog Post and Podcast. I’m your host, Jean coming to you from the beautiful Province of Prince Edward Island, Canada!! The blog post and podcast is an opinion piece and only reflects this author’s opinion and not that of any other entity. Today’s blog post and podcasts focuses on the importance of making a choice on what you see about the earth you live on and how you want it to be. If you want to find out more, then stay tuned…
It seems, with the advent of COVID a view of humanity has started to be propounded that we’re on our way to going to heck where did that handbasket go a la John B. Calhoun and others (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Calhoun)! I’ve seen everything from mice experiments on overcrowding that is sure to point out homosexuality to be evil (I don’t know why), to the conspiracy theorists who go around telling us that ‘big brother’ is watching. It is a full menu of death and horrors. It’s not like COVID is not depressing enough, but we have to go about giving people depressing scenarios to try to manage? We need to have less putting people down. We need to have fewer forms of intolerance, yet in some circles, there is more.
According to Myra Hudson “Learn to accept your past, whether good or bad. It happened! Just focus on not making the same mistakes again. Once you have accepted your past, you can live in the present and focus on the future to come” Many of the dystopian type views are brought up due to lack of understanding of life, history and humanity. Every time there is a disaster or a plague, in the historic past, there have been those who thought that it was not real. There were those that thought we were in the ‘End of Days’. There were those who endangered their fellow humans because they had the power to and did not want to believe the situation. This is not new to humanity. Plagues have been around for centuries. Naysayers have been around for centuries. Now, we just have the media with the ability to pass it around with the speed of light. I say, if you enjoy reading dystopian views, at least balance it with some understanding of the history of plagues and the death of people from plagues. It is not a punishment from a Higher Power or Higher Powers. It is not because someone was homosexual or bisexual or any other orientation. It was because a virus or bug spread a disease that was deadly. I’m not talking the form of writing, some people like that form of literature. I’m talking real life views.
Nothing will create ‘End of Days’ faster than people who think they have the right to put down someone due to race, creed or other societal variables. Nothing will create a dystopian future faster than the inability to accept that there is good in the world and that we should do the best we can to accept each other and our differences, while keeping healthy boundaries. If we want to, we can change the future for the better. We can change how we act and how we interact. We have to be the ones to choose to do so. We can’t do that without knowing where we came from as that will instruct where we are going. As John Quincy Adams says, “From the experience of the past we derive instructive lessons for the future.” Most who decide that there is little to no hope for society have not learned that we go through cycles. Pandemics come and go. They are real. There are those who don’t believe it and they endanger others, sometimes willfully.
I believe that there is a better way to live and I do my best to live according to that. My biggest downfall is having too much faith in people being able to resolve their issues, and dreams of them working together toward a better world. This can cause problems. People have the habit of not following their own beliefs in any reliable way. They say tolerance, yet only toward certain groups that are deemed acceptable. Others get so tired of the intolerant that they become free agents of sorts. So, even the ones who would love to see tolerance lose their tolerance of intolerance.
As Mr. Rogers is credited with saying, “I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’ I think that it is important for everyone to realize, especially during the pandemic and during bad times, that there are always and will always be helpers. They have existed in places like Nazi Germany trying to save Jewish people. Despite confused beliefs that it was lack of freedom that was the big issue in Nazi Germany, it was the attempt to totally annihilate whole groups of people who they did not see as valuable that caused Nazi Germany. It was not silence of voices, as much as wholesale slaughter in trying to make a uniform society. In short and simple terms, it was hate and intolerance rather than freedom of speech. You could say anything you wanted as long as it ended in death to the unwanted groups. Haters and Helpers have existed in many different times and many different places. Some of them are easily visible and some keep behind the scenes. I think the dystopian view forgets that there are helpers. In experiments of overcrowding, they don’t mention the Ghettos in Nazi held territory where there were people smuggling out children to try to save them. People who were delivering food and help where they could. Mouse experiments do not tell the whole story as there were no other forces in operation and no one bothered to understand the differences. The only lesson that this gives is that having everything handed to one makes for lazy and violent situations. At least that is my take on the mouse thing. In Humanity, there are helpers. So, for those who want to give themselves up to the dystopian futurists who see doom and gloom forever, recognize that there are helpers. There are people right now working on cures. It is slow work, it is hard work. There is hope. Don’t listen to those who think only of money and monsters under every bed. Often when we search for that monster under the bed, we indeed find, that the monster is a part of ourselves that we do not accept.
The only other thing I can suggest comes from an anonymous quote, “When you choose love over hate, faith over despair and acceptance over intolerance, you are doing your part to change the world.” I think there will always be a part of me that will continue to want to believe this no matter what has been suggested by others. That we can improve the world, that we can change ourselves and our path toward the future. We are not trapped in some course of action. We can think about it and we can change who we are if we want to. Many people are forced to. Many people, when they hit rock bottom, they find that they are capable of making changes to live a better and healthier lifestyle. It happens daily. If it can happen on an individual basis, then it can also happen on a global basis and hopefully we don’t have to hit rock bottom first. Things like global warming, racial inequity, religious intolerance, gender identity intolerance. All these things, we can choose to behave differently. We can change how we behave and that will help to change how we think. We have begun to work on changing language that we use. This can help us to think about things in different ways. This is an important step in moving forward to a different future. In early England, there were words that were used that we no longer use. There are changes made over the centuries to language and ways of reacting. This is not a novelty. We move forward and learn from mistakes of the past.
There is a long history of things that have created disharmony on earth. Different things were tolerated at different times. If we look at the actual research and the actual history, things have changed. At one time, I thought I would be the only person who would feel pity for Anne Boleyn. Over time, history has discovered information and the whole idea of who she was has been changing. Life is like that. You have to look at the past, find what you can learn from it. Make changes based on fact. We tend to want to destroy that which we don’t understand. We create the monster under the bed. As Friedrich Nietzsche said, “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”
In all this, what do we learn? We can change the future by knowing where we came from. We can change how we think. We can learn tolerance. As Led Zeppelin said in Stairway to Heaven “Yes, there are two paths you can go by, but in the long run There’s still time to change the road you’re on. So, I leave you here dear readers and listeners to decide if you want to think about a better future. Be the better future you want to see. If so, you’re going to have to live that better future. I know which future I would like to choose. I can’t make the decision for you. You have to make that decision for yourself. I hope I have given you something to think about. I don’t think the answer is found in the extreme of either, but rather in an understanding of both sides and hopefully find something that meets in the middle. Thanks for listening to my podcast and/or reading my blog post and thanks for your interest in A & J PEI Treasures!
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Change is all in the Mind? – E Jean Simpson, BEd, BA, MA Author A & J PEI Treasures
A & J PEI Treasures/E Jean Simpson, BEd, BA, MA 
Good think piece this morning. Thanks.
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Thank you!
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