Things Happen for a Reason

Most of the time, things happen for a reason. Once in a while there are accidents, but when we have something of the scale and scope of something like a national election and how the media reports on it, it’s very unlikely that what you are looking at is a coincidence. In fact, usually thing things that happen are in fact _intended_ to happen. So the thing to look at is–what is happening? Well, what it looks like is happening, to me, is a lot of people becoming unhappy and dissatisfied about presidential candidates–people who are likely to be highly dissatisfied when EITHER of them win.

So rather than argue about the candidates or what we know about them through the media channels, perhaps it would be more worthwhile to do a few other things:

1. Consider: what groups or individuals would benefit from Americans being hateful or dissatisfied about their government? Do any of those groups have influence over the media, political parties, or other groups?

2. What can we do to make our lives and the world a better place? Is the government going to do that? I don’t think that there are too many governments in all of history where you would look back and say that they were as effective as various historical individuals have been who intended to do something about the society. There are certainly exceptional individuals within governments from time to time. And certainly people like Gandhi went on to be in government. But why would you look to a government as a whole and actually EXPECT the group to be making the world a better place? That’s something we expect of Greenpeace, or the Volunteer Ministers, or the Red Cross. So why are we so worried about the government making the world a better place? It usually doesn’t. It does some good things here and there. But the world does not belong to it. The world belongs to you, and me, and anybody else who chooses to make a difference. Vote, please. But maybe the time that any of us are spending being outraged about the government would be better spent making the world a better place by helping ourselves, our families, our friends, our groups, even random strangers. I’d rather make one person smile than spend a SECOND thinking about Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. I’m not saying they are totally unimportant, or that we shouldn’t spend time on politics. It is important that we care about our group and its future. But we have a choice about where we spend our physical and emotional energy, and I think it’s better to spend _more_ of it on looking at how we can make the world a better place by the simple things we can do every day than spend hours or days worrying about what is so terrible about one politician or another and posting it all over Facebook. That is not making the world a better place to live.