First of a few end of calendar year thoughts

Hi everyone. Rather than long postings I'm just going to type in a few musings, keeping them to a few moments of reflection. I hope these help to ease some of the angst and regrets that many have about the sadness of the 2000-2009 years.

Many have written really good columns reflecting on this somewhat nameless decade, mentioning how instead of having names like the "80's" or the "90's," the "00's" really have no verbiage except the old expression, the "aughts." Aught is an old fashioned expression that indicates when the digit 0 is used as a place holder in a number. Old school marms would tell their students to write on the chalk board, in the year 1800 for example, "one, eight, aught, aught" instead of saying to write "one, eight, zero, zero." So the best anyone could come up with is calling this nearly past decade "the aughts."

I know that many are thinking that "the aughts" is certainly a correct name as a pun, regarding the regrets and totally missed opportunities for any sort of improvement or enlightenment, peace, love and reconciliation, as those are the "ought" to haves, or the "oughts." Hardly anyone has wrapped themselves in glory the past decade and they have, instead, missed nearly every opportunity to make a wise and/or generous choice in most matters. Even what seemed like great advances or victories, or progress, nearly all ring hollow now, often surprisingly soon after these victories were achieved. I'm not being critical about specifics right now, simply summing up the zeit geist (the spirit of the times, where spirit means the mood of the times) of the past decade.

Regular readers know that one reason the aughts were the oughts was that many beliefs and goals have slowly been revealed as being imaginary, false, unjust or simply plain wrong headed. The truth is never slow to be revealed, for lies are revealed in a flash, the moment the truth is spoken in anyone's hearing. No, it is the acceptance that one has been deceived, taught wrongly, or self deluding that is slower than a snail's pace in dawning.

The aughts aka the oughts are the culmination of previous (snappily named) decades of delusion and misguided focus (on all fronts in all areas of secular life and of course tremendous amounts of false prophecy in the spiritual life). It is like vats of sad gooey slowly burning tar has fallen onto many people's heads, but that tar has been collected and cooking for several decades now.

Here is the second problem with the aughts aka the oughts. Not only do you have the first problem whereby this soon past decade is the culmination (unpleasant consequences) of lack of truth and very bad goals, but the second problem is that even when the truth dawned of bad choices, many continued to try to use the false tools to "fix" things, the tools that were fashioned based on error and delusion in the first place. Often people who claimed to "think outside the box" were those most guilty of being stuck in tar, gum and chains inside a false box to begin with.

The only way to make the next decade bearable is to return to genuine faith and reasoning, with authentic search and emphasis for truth and justice, and not the "identity theft" that faith, reasoning, truth and justice have been subjected to. If I had to give a sound byte or a slogan to help focus good intentions for the next decade it would be to regain authentic understanding of righteousness.

The righteous man or woman, boy or girl not only are the ones who will gain heaven, but they are the ones who have the correct leavening of faith and reasoning to live life honorably and to pursue genuinely virtuous goals. Without faith based righteousness (as opposed to the undesirable self righteousness) each person and their communities are like compasses that not only lack the needle, the markings of the cardinal directions, but also lack the proper container, and one is only grasping at agenda and illusion rather than the truth.