Omni

The Quick Study Series : IX

I used to understand well … the expression … ' I never met a person I didn't like. ' These days I'm reminded that I used to say that … in my younger days … but … life exacts a high price … on positive attitudes … and we are often a little poor … on liking everybody we meet.

 

I thought … the problem arose because … people stopped understanding me … after a while. I seemed to represent a palliative attitude … and the appearance that … it referred to my need … to be constantly agreeable. In time … I think … it came to mean … a self concern … an absorption in a self ideal … and entirely predictable … in my responses.

 

It brought me … into a career in diplomacy … and the one United Nations conference … I attended in the Hague, Holland … in the autumn of '81 … promised me a visit with what I had thought … is the civilized world of manners. However … like Martin Luther's visit to the Vatican … I came off disappointed. It appeared to me … that all the delegates at the conference … were simply concerned about themselves … and the priority of their national interests.

 

Joseph Conrad's book ' Heart of Darkness ' … which was adapted by Coppola as ' Apocalypse Now ' … introduced to audiences … the product of disappointment … as demonstrated by Col. Kurtz. However … any attempt by the Colonel … to overcome his own predictable positive nature … was founded on being the antithesis of his former self. What was obviously required … was a synthesis.

 

That synthesis does not rest in making others understand … or to make the world a better place. It's in getting ourselves … the individual … to understand … the difference … between individual concerns and the concerns of society. It refers to the obligations of the individual … and a clear measure … of what the individual can fairly return to society … what society has brought to him.

 

It is also in going out there … and creating the contribution … not by engaging in purely conscientious arguments alone … about what is possible and what is not. To confront the notion … that my fellow men have needs different from me … is such an alienation of ourself as an individual … that many of us … simply adapt … without being selective.

 

I realized after a while … that within my positive natures … there was a clear divide … between reason and faith. We engage them interchangeably … without a proper discernment … and often find ourselves … supporting the cause of faith … with palliatives. But where reason is trained to be discerning … it brings a greater attention to bear on faith issues … and in the process … enforces the divide with a will of cognition … of the totally alienable identity of the two qualities.

 

Where a government of the people is organized by a division of the judiciary and the executive … such a people that it serves … would certainly practice a similar decorum in their attitudes. In the judicious expectations of faith … we realize that we … as humans … have a right to its design … and the intimacy of its corporeal nature. Such an act would remove the use of the pedestal … and re-introduce the living omni … of the true faith.

 

The view of such an experience is idealistic … and it brings me into contact with my youth. It is for each individual to create the understanding himself. But as a society … we are founded on such ideals … and the young people today … need to know that … as a society … we expect to achieve such an ideal some day … by the commitment we bring to its daily living.