For twenty years, the average and above-average American alike have been laying in bed, ever since those planes hit the World Trade Center and government said “Go to your room. We’re in charge now.” It can be no surprise that some muscles have since atrophied. The emergency they said they were handling never came to an end. The terror alerts never stopped. Some people never stopped talking about them. To this day, I don’t know what those terror alerts mean or why they matter, and not for the life of me do I care.
But I know the tools I need to be a free man in this world.
And do I ever feel lucky to be able to train with them so much this year.
A pope once wrote “Let us thank God that He makes us live among the present problems. It is no longer permitted to anyone to be mediocre.”
By Allan Stevo
If I were to lay in bed for the next twenty years, and to then rise, I would not have much strength in my muscles to do the activities I once enjoyed.
I might collapse onto the ground, with my poor quivering atrophied muscles shocked by the sudden immense force that they have been called on to exert in this untrained state.
If I trained every day for a week, I might be able to get out of bed again. If I trained every day for a month, I might be able to go for a walk again.
It’s going to take some doing to work through that kind of rust, and to train yourself out of that kind of neglect — but if you know that going in, maybe that little bit of effort won’t be so bad.
You’ve done harder things. There was a time in your life, early on, when you spent every waking hour for about six months trying to figure out how to just roll your body over. You were also working on learning other tasks at the same time. Imagine how simple that movement probably is for you today and how hard it once was.
For a year, maybe a year-and-a-half, you tried your best to figure out how to balance head atop neck, atop shoulder, atop spine, atop hips, atop femur, atop knees, atop tibia, atop ankles, atop all those little movements in those cute little feet and toes that it took to keep you balanced that first time you let go and stood, and then dared to take a step. Why’d you do it? Because it felt as natural as walking out into the fresh air and feeling the sunshine on your entire face. Just feels right, this thing we call freedom.
To this day, you still probably trip and fall from time to time. Balance and coordination are a lifelong endeavor. Many efforts are a lifelong endeavor that not only stop growing, but atrophy, and even die if neglected.
Would the most innocent, lump of happiness and love that makes up a child ever sabotage her own growth, her own progress, her own advancement toward being a full, free and capable part of this world?
I’ve never heard of that child.
Then what would cause any adult to do that? Somewhere along the way something changes in some people.
It took you about two years to learn how to grasp a thing as simple as a pencil, and another two years of work before you could bring any precision to the process, perhaps even longer. To this day, you probably still have to work pretty hard, if you’re going to operate a pencil with much precision.
I’m not asking you to do anything that hard at all, nothing as hard as the work it took you to learn how to operate a pencil, which when you think about it is a pretty amazing accomplishment. Compared to all the thousands of challenges like these, that you’ve worked so hard at and accomplished, this one is a walk in the proverbial park.
For twenty years, the average and above-average American alike have been laying in bed, ever since those planes hit the World Trade Center and government said “Go to your room. We’re in charge now.” It can be no surprise that some muscles have since atrophied. The emergency they said they were handling never came to an end. The terror alerts never stopped. Some people never stopped talking about them. To this day, I don’t know what those terror alerts mean or why they matter, and not for the life of me do I care.
People have tried to explain it to me, perhaps not realizing that I stopped listening to them about twenty seconds before they started explaining, right around the moment where their tonality shifted away from the “I-am-telling-you-something-sincere-or-original” voice to the “I-am-now-delivering-a-preprogrammed-message” voice.
We still have alerts. We still have security at airports that touch passengers’ private parts “for the safety of all.” We still have a two decade unending war. We still have an even bigger military with all its parasitic appendages that a United States president and general once called the “military industrial complex” in his farewell address on January 17, 1961.
MCViewPoint 