The SoSA Perspective

Inevitabilities

The older I get the more it becomes apparent to me that an awful lot of life is inevitable. Once you’re born, you will grow up, go to work, seek (and in most cases find) relationship(s) with the opposite sex, generate offspring (or successfully avoid generating same), grow old, decline and die. Somewhere along that line you will come to grips with the meaning of life (or lack thereof). As a result of that epiphany you will then relate yourself to whatever deity, moral code, and/or metaphysical system that appeals to you.

The choices we get to make are involved only with the details of life. (Which job/career, which spouse/significant other, kids, no kids, adopted kids, Christian, Muslim, Jew, first church of what’s happening right now, etc.) If you look at life that way the details can be a lot of fun to pick out and the stress of the whole exercise is much lessened because the over all outcome is, well, inevitable.

Oh, that our fearless leaders could look at our social policy that way! Take my field, hunger, for instance. There is an ongoing struggle to find ways of insuring that all the poor people (35 million by recent count) are fed. This debate has gone on for all of my 28 years in hunger work and we are no closer to finding a solution than we were when we started. The bickering, back biting, posturing and bloviating that goes on between liberal and conservative, Democrat and Republican, is enough to tax the patience of Job.

If you just look at the inevitability of the situation, the solution can’t be that hard to find. Here’s the thing. Are we going to stand idly by while people starve to death in America? No, of course not. Well then Senator, Governor or whoever, that means we’re going to feed them. Inevitably. The only question is how is the best, most effective way to do that. Finding the answer to that question won’t be all that hard for a nation who can send a man to the moon. It might even be a fun and rewarding thing to do.

Oh yeah, and Merry Christmas.