2018? "Find something you care about, something which involves an act of creation. Let this creation lead you to opportunity!"

Joel D. Hirst writes,

America’s 2017? Four trillion in new wealth, unemployment at 4.7% is the lowest in 17 years, consumer confidence highest in a long time. A return of the rule of law after eight years of lawlessness; tax cuts that make even the EU tremble. Our supermarkets are full; our universities are the best in the world; we live long and prosperous lives full of choices and opportunities. Elysium in a world of want and suffering; something we were sensitive to in the age of our grandparents, prosperity and sacred values which we used as a platform for great acts of kindness product not of our moralizing vanity but because we truly believed that ancient axiom “To those who much has been given, much is required.”

That is before the arrival of the “The Age of Outrage” stole our sight, our soul. Narcissism marauding as correctness; ‘stilted justice’ as compassion; unknowing as wisdom.

“Age of Outrage”, or maybe I should call it the “Age of Misery”. And why? Why do we choose to be angry? Everybody is miserable all the time nowadays – and it doesn’t make any sense; measured against any standard you wish to choose, anywhere in the history of histories, America is a land of tremendous opportunity and incredible bounty and almost unlimited personal freedom; even more so in 2017.

I am genuinely baffled.

In his viral podcast Joe Rogan says “To put the world in order, we must first put the nation in order; to put the nation in order, we must first put the family in order; to put the family in order; we must first cultivate our personal life; we must first set our hearts right.”

Its so much about this, isn’t it? Gratitude, discipline in the small things, love of community and family and the reverence of gentleness and of those things which we know to be right and true and good. So, lest our “Age of Outrage”, our “Age of Misery” extend and we transform our planned paradise into a raging inferno through our bitterness, our wickedness – let me make a humble suggestion on this my last entry of 2017: Whatever your political leanings, I urge you, nay implore you to forget about the White House, forget about the Governor’s Mansion, forget even about the town council and the special election for the dogcatcher you are certain will herald national calamity. Find something you care about, something which involves an act of creation. Let this creation lead you to opportunity, for yourself and for others, and invest in that as down the rolling road of wonder you travel. Be positive, put down the IPhone upon which you are typing that spiteful Tweet to hurl against an unknown enemy, and lift your head. That first person you see…? Say something nice to them. Walk next door to your neighbor’s house and take a cookie platter or a box of chocolates; each time you find yourself filled with rage, make a kind decision. To those with whom you find yourself communing, devote yourself to constructive intercourse that uplifts and builds. And finally, do so locally in your communities and the places where you naturally rest your ideas of home. If you do this, you might end up turning the corner on your miserable 2017; and we might even discover again the bounty which we have so often used to help our hurting and suffering world.

Read more here.