Catering

Just going to drop this idea of mine with the hope someone finally comments.

 I like my group sessions for meeting and hearing guys younger than me. Especially the leader who appears to be educated (he likes to be discreet about his background), who gets his news from TikTok, does not like history, thinks Will Ferrell's career has imploded due to his political views, and dresses like a Yuppie. As for my peers, they are all working class and do not seem to have any experience with newspapers; they are all in survival mode due to their status and educational background does not offer much in the way of work. 

The leader gives me an opening into the online bros.

My peers provide an insight into the people who are MAGA's bedrock, their street level crew.

What I am seeing in the wider world when I am at the grocery, elsewhere, and what I am getting through my political news also factors in what follows.

 And it comes down to catering.

Catering in the sense that people think they should be given whatever fulfills their lives.

Psychological counseling emphasizes the psychological well-being of the person. Ethics are denigrated. I am not sure if it even includes character. Why not? Standards of character depend on social, not psychological, standards. Society, the community, does not appear in what I have seen or heard.

 Character Is Countercultural - by Mark Hertling 

The private sector “uniforms” are different, the language is different, and the tasks are different. But the essential requirements of character and leadership remain unchanged. Competence is expected in every profession, in every industry. Great organizations define what competence looks like and usually train and teach it well. What separates good organizations from exceptional ones is their understanding that competence alone is insufficient. Character—one of the key attributes of any leader—determines whether knowledge is used with wisdom, whether authority is exercised with humility, and whether success is measured not only by achievement but also by service.

Looking back across that journey—from family and school to coaches and scoutmasters, from West Point to the Army and eventually the private sector—I realize that none of those institutions believed character development was someone else’s responsibility. Each accepted a share of the task. Each expected young people to become a little more than they had been the year before. Most importantly, each reinforced lessons that had begun elsewhere.

Most Americans, regardless of political affiliation, still admire leaders whose actions consistently match their words, whose integrity survives public pressure, and whose decisions reflect something larger than personal ambition. We may disagree passionately about policy or ideology, but few would argue that honesty, humility, courage, and responsibility are obsolete virtues. 

 This is not a left/right thing; albeit the left talks about community, the right depends on its online communities. It seems generational. It seems to deny responsibility to a community.

Either we have a severe educational deficit in this country from the street to the highest echelons of power, or we have a poorly educated population manioulated by politicians who should know better. 

Now Bicycles Are Woke? (Sheila Kennedy) a nation of idiots or a nation besieged by idiots?

I have never quite appreciated (liked) The Sun Also Rises; only after reading The Sun Also Rises at 100 (First Things), I wonder if I should not think more highly of Hemingway.

Hemingway conceived his signature prose style as a way to reckon with suffering. A man who knows his worth does not bare the painful underside of his soul; he keeps his agonies to himself. He is on familiar terms with death and has learned to contain his fear. And while he enjoys the good things in life more than most others do, he is laconic in even his most extravagant appreciations: He knows pleasures are not made to last. As Hemingway wrote to F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1926 of his failing marriage, “Our life is all gone to hell, which seems to be the one thing you can count on a good life to do.”  

What I feel as underlying this demand for being catered to is that those being catered to expect a good life without an end to their pleasures. No more “no pain, no gain”. Just give us what we like, bury what we do not like.

Have we all gone mad?

Call It What It Is (Sheila Kennedy)

It isn’t just dementia due to aging, although that condition is clearly worsening the problem.

There’s ample reason to worry about Trump’s longstanding mental defects: frequent statements that are, at best, detached from reality — the repeated false claims about crowd sizes, election results, and other easily verifiable facts; his
erratic and/or contradictory statements made within short periods (sometimes within the same speech); the constant
grandiose rhetoric (his self-comparisons to historical figures); and his assertions of victimization by nefarious “others”…The evidence is overwhelming. 

Mental health professionals have argued for years that he demonstrates narcissistic personality traits. (Several even wrote a book in 2017 titled “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump.”) 

Where to now?

sch 7/30