What next, not if?
The problem isn’t that there are idiots out there. Idiots seldom commit long-standing damage in a grouply fashion. They don’t know how to organize and as a result, fizzle out quicker than an ember on a wintry night. The problem is there are powerful idiots (PI) out there. Their agenda is cut-throat clear and they leave very little to chance. On top of it, they work really hard to achieve their set goals. To the non-idiots (NI), those goals might be tantamount to witnessing a tribe of chimps experimenting with fire. [Spoiler alert: If chimps were to ‘discover’ fire, they would have set the jungle on fire. Not that we didn’t but we somehow knew how to escape to the caves.] But non-idiots don’t make things better for the world by knowing better.
Knowing is never enough.
PI don’t care what the NI have to say about them, mainly because they understand the dynamics of our being better. While the former thrust forward their collective ignorance, the latter tend to grab moral high ground. The disease of inaction, if you may. Nothing substantial gets done by the non-idiots because they are busy navigating their swamp of futile ideas and gaudy ideals. Somehow, over the years, they have convinced themselves they are better only by the sheer merit of existing. Just because they think good, they are good. This is precisely where the equation fails them. Just thinking and blabbering is not doing. Doing is. If I witness a robbery, I might not become a perpetrator but I continue to carry the burden of my inaction. The perpetual question called what-if: What if I’d acted more responsibly (read: courageously) and intervened?
On the other hand, PI do much more than they express. In fact, their ruinous actions speak for them. Interestingly, they worship the same objects in life that NI do but their methods to venerate them are vastly different: the basic is beyond compromise. An NI would very well enjoy great food, stay in comfortable apartment and wear branded garments like a PI would. This fabric of commonality doesn’t change. What separates them is the awareness of the damage done to accomplish these so-called bare necessities. PI castrates the bullock because he doesn’t care as long as he gets his rice on the plate. NI won’t indulge in this gruesome exercise of castration but at the same time, he won’t give up eating rice either. Lines of distinction are strangely drawn between these two feuding groups.
However, all options mused, we live in a world of contradictions. Nothing is straight here; every coin has three sides: yours, mine and theirs. So, it goes without elaborating any further, expecting only one group to dominate would be too much of a blind aspiration. If anything, we’ll continue to witness PI and NI slug it out in every ring possible and push the world to new frontiers. Sad as it may sound, they need each other to justify their time on this planet. Without them in the picture, who is going to wonder what category you and I fall in?
