Compassion Fatigue

Sometimes I wonder if we're living more but enjoying it less. Actually, I know I am so I guess my question is am I the only one? And thanks to Lee, I think I know the answer (and yeah, it's starting to look like you don't have a real speaking part in today's rant, or even much of a walk-on so you might want to hit the amazon dot com and get a head-start on your Christmas shopping. Sorry.).

And yeah, I deliberately didn't say 'holiday' shopping because I was a grown man, or pretty close to it, when I met someone who wasn't a Roman Catholic and it took me forever to accept that he could be a pretty great guy and also still be going to the same heaven I understand the nuns to tell me in school that only Catholics got to be in.

Instead of life in these United States getting easier as thanks to the Modern Age, it seems it's just getting harder. More and more less of and less of the systems and processes we grew up taking for granted seem to work at all.

And it's not just governmental operations and areas of oversight and interaction that's broken, though more than enough of that is a mess-we're seeing private sector goods and services simply evaporate and leave no trace they were ever there in the first place.

When we our kids were in grade school, Sigrid and I were those parents who volunteered for everything (we gave the only resource we could afford, which was our time) and tended to see the same handful of parents at the library book sale as we did at the spaghetti dinner who were also the same folks who had a child in music lessons and on the traveling soccer team.

Lee offered an article on an aspect of the whole 'Ich habe die nase voll' life of quiet desperation that I found fascinating, and Sara whom I've also known for as long as Lee (and nearly forty years) suggested, quite rightly I think, that such fatigue isn't limited to those who attend a church, but rather, to those whose involvement in "The Big World" wears them out.

Leading me to wonder if we need to create rosters, where all the community chores are scheduled and get divided up across the entire adult population so we stop abusing the same two dozen people, or if we should just shrink the size of the world we are responsible for and lighten the load that way. Sort of like removing six inches from the front of the blanket, and then sewing it onto the back, making the blanket a foot longer.
-bill kenny