If you consider yourself an artist, you will appreciate this
from Bee Gee's Robin Gibb:"An artist is an artist because he is not
happy with the world, so he creates his own...."
Lewis Carrol's
'Alice in Wonderland' was an inside-out world in which he traveled and
laughed. Edgar Allen Poe traveled into far darker worlds where rather
than laugh he eventually became lost. Who of us can say in which of our
own worlds it is best to be?
Still, we repeatedly choose are own.
Which is probably why, when we look out from it, whatever we see is
seen as if it were a parallel universe. Parallel but not quite correct.
As we look out, we are constantly judging it by the norm. The norm, of
course, being us.
Once you get the hang of this parallel thing,
it's easy. Everything and everyone out there is Them; everything and
everyone in here is Us. Them are always slightly out of sync. Us, we are
the sync! Accordingly, there will always be parallel ball teams,
political parties, nationalities, races and religions to see as if
through a glass darkly.
Exactly how each of us landed in our
particular universe rather than that out-of-sync one is hard to explain.
Anthropologists might argue it was mostly a matter of when-and-where we
were born. Demographers could make a case for the particular generation
into which we were born. Racists... well we know what racists will say.
The
important thing to remember here is the record shows very few if any of
us have ever jumped universes. Have ever been able or willing to leave
the comfort of their "own" for the strange encounters that loom in that
"other." It's like asking a Sox fan to buy a Cubs skybox....a Republican
to attend an Obama rally....a subsidized corn grower to buy a Prius...a
Viet veteran to go to a Jane Fonda movie....a Redneck to go to
Temple....Grover Norquist to approve a tax...a Muslim to make a
pilgrimage to Rome.
What, are you crazy! Which instantly begs the question: In which universe do the crazies live?
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