By Celia Coates
How can we know what is true and real these days?
What is being hidden or masked or maneuvered?
When did cheating to get what you want become so common?
As I was puzzling over these questions, I remembered a post from 2018 that had surprised me. It had shown me something that was not part of my life decades ago when I was in high school.
Neil Krasnoff described being a teacher at a school filled with privileged students whose parents were highly invested in maintaining status – their own and their children’s. You can read what he wrote here:
https://winnpost.org/2018/09/14/high-school-is-rough-all-over/
It seems that for many people in our nation the old rules for how to live a good life have changed since the long-ago days when I was in high school. It has become so incredibly important to have wealth, status, and certain kinds of power that almost anything goes to achieve them. Cheating has become common. (Recently there were the celebrity parents who wanted so desperately to ensure status for their children that they lied and paid bribes to get them into brand-name colleges.) Winning the materialist competition has become so important that too often any means possible are used to gain that goal.
What will it take – What Is Needed Now ? – to help us renew a way of living with more honesty and creative purpose? There are many questions and so far, few answers.