I am in constant movement in all parts of my life. It can be maddening and it can be liberating. I can migrate from extreme sensitivity to being more or less callous and back again, and do often.
Some things I read about bother me greatly, but for whatever reason the slayings in Norway have not had much emotional effect on me.
I recently finished listening to Thomas Sowells excellent book “Basic Economics”. IN terms of articulating the virtues of free markets–which we do not have here in this country, by the way–he does an excellent job (although I would quibble with his treatment of monetary policy).
One point he makes is that many economic errors–perhaps most or even all–stem from looking at the effect of a policy on one group, but not on the economy as a whole.
When we protected domestic steel production from foreign competition, it helped that industry, but it also made domestic steel far more expensive that it would have been, here, and thus HARMED other domestic steel-users, like builders and car manufacturers. By most reckonings, the tariffs COST American jobs, even if they were not lost in the steel industry.
Although this likely sounds a bit clinical, this was the metaphor that kept crossing my mind reading about Norway. There are likely 80 black kids killed in the US weekly. There are likely 80 kids that have starved to death weekly for periods of time in North Korea, even in recent years. In the continent of Africa, a multiple of this dies weekly of war, hunger, or diseases that are gone from the industialized West.
I can and often have lamented the extent of preventable human suffering the world over. If you look at Africa, as an example, their pain cannot be understood without the initial efforst of many nations there to implement socialism, with all the economic injustice and stagnation that implies–and the efforts of international “aid” agencies to support such efforts, apparently as a part of their real mission, which is international Fabianism.
Norway has sheltered behind the shield American military power offered them from the ravages of history for more than a half century. Plainly, they are existentially threatened by facilitating their internal cultural subversion by anti-Liberal Muslims; even if, self evidently, reactions like shooting kids are evil, counterproductive, and ultimately amount to little more than the cry of a profoundly weak and self absorbed man for relevance.
If I believe cyanide is poison, and you do not, a reasonable compromise does not consist in diluting it by half and then drinking it.
To quote Bruce Springsteen: “There’s a dark cloud rising on the desert floor
I’ve packed my bags and I’m headed straight through the storm
It’s gonna be a twister that’ll blow everything down
That ain’t got the faith to stand its ground
Blow away, the dreams that tear you apart
Blow away, the dreams that break your heart
Blow away, the lies that leave you nothing but lost and broken hearted.”
As a postscript, I will add that my three favorite albums, taken as wholes, are Springsteen’s “Darkness on the Edge of Town”, Tom Waits’ “Heart of Saturday Night”, and Lyle Lovett’s “Joshua, Judges, Ruth”, all for different reasons.
In our identity-starved age, our musical choices in large measure define us, along with our profession and hobbies and perhaps sense of style (my style is invisibility, so I forget it is important to some).
Religion and family used to be primary, but in our optical age–where in large measure our interaction with culture and others is visual and abstract–these things have come into much greater prominence. That they are in many respects shallow is of course problematic. My whole output is related to solving that problem, so I will leave it at that for now.
The net, though, is that we need to stop making things worse. That is step one. “Primere non nocere.”