Welcome to the Third Degree: Tough, Brief, Weekly Interrogations on matters public and private that force thinking and response. This Sunday, we target: Seeking
- When Diogenes, that often naked, cantankerous cynic, stalked the streets of Athens carrying a lantern in daylight, what was he seeking?
- Was it a search for an honest man or trying to identify friends and foes?
- Isn’t human search over recorded history, and the current American political search, essentially a seeking and sorting of friend and foe?
- For the unbeholden, those not already bought out by convenience, paycheck, promises or vacuity, is a worthy process, a seeking of that combination of personal and greater good that is affordable, effective and sustaining of the nation?
- Are there enough earnest and seeking folks out there and distributed in such abundance to make electoral difference?
- Have we guarded, sought, the sanctity of election machinery and process to be assured of fair outcome? Who are the friends or foes of such sanctity?
- How does seeking ideological purity or outcome play in the face of domestic and international vulnerability?
- What shrinks to insignificance when the choice is fight or flight?
- What if there is no place to run?
- So whom do we seek to lead us? Who is the friend and who the foe?
- Do observation and experience attest that over reliance on government is the problem?
- Have the centuries of remarkable American progress and promise reached a point where we seek, want, need, require, a reset where we ask government to do for us only that which we cannot be reasonably expected to do for ourselves?
- If that Lincoln paraphrase needs support, better check out the Preamble to our Constitution?
- So, after seeking, what’s our choice, and trust, if we meet a foe, it isn’t us?
Socrates reminds: “The unexamined life is not worth living”. The answers and actions are yours.