Subscribe to RSS

Powered by Blogger

Weblog Commenting and Trackback by HaloScan.com


Search Blog:
Loading

Wednesday, March 07, 2007

SOMETHiNG TO STEW ON

Sumer, its rise and fall, provides the historian with the most ancient example of the poignant irony inherent in man's fate. ...It was the competitive drive for superiority and preeminence, for victory, prestige, and glory, that provided the psychological motivation sparking the material and cultural advances for which the Sumerians are justifiably noted: large-scale irrigation, technological invention, monumental architecture, writing, education, and literature. Sad to say, this very passion for competition and success carried within it the seed of destruction and decay. ...Sumer became a "sick society" with deplorable failings and distressing shortcomings: it yearned for peace and was constantly at war; it professed such ideals as justice, equity, and compassion, but abounded in injustice, inequality, and oppression; materalistic and shortsighted, it unbalanced the ecology essential to its economy; it was afflicted by generation gap between parents and children, and between teachers and students. And so Sumer came to a cruel, tragic end, as one melancholy Sumerian bard bitterly laments:

Law and order ceased to exist, cities, houses, stalls, and sheepfolds were destroyed

Rivers and canals flowed with bitter waters

Fields and steppes grew nothing but weeds and "wailing plants."

The mother cared not for her children, nor the father for his spouse, and nurse-maid chanted no lullabies at the crib.

No one trod the highways and the roads

The cities were ravaged and their people were killed by the mace or died of famine.

Finally, over the land fell a calamity "undescribable and unknown to man."

--Samuel Noah Kramer from INANNA

Man, this is exactly what I struggle with inside myself every day. It's all about finding the balance. So, come on people, we have a lot of work to do...that undescribable and unknown calamity doesn't sound so great. It's all about tapping into the everybody boat. Reconnecting with the Human Spirit both inside and out. No more, No less.

 
© Copyright Ears XXI Inc. All Rights Reserved