All pessimists rationalize their pessimism by saying they're just being realists. I think I'm being a realist, too, and yet I'm not pessimistic.I don't believe its pessimism I think its waking up to reality, which is a good place for Andy's vocation to be;
I couldn't agree more. Every new generation that comes along is told that the world is going to hell in a hand-basket, that the world can't possibly survive the evil that's spreading. We've been given a steady diet of this message for many hundreds of years. Yet we're still here.all generations go through similar things
Chas, I have a passing familiarity with evil. I've had all of my European relatives slaughtered in the Holocaust. I was in the U.S. Marine Corps at the height of the Vietnam war, and I've been exposed to some of the worst instincts in humankind. I worked in a film studio in Berlin that was a former poison gas factory that likely made the very product that killed my relatives. I'm not saying I've seen it all. What I am saying is that I'm in the last third of my life, and I refuse to accept the notion that the evil in the world represents the norm. So, if it's your and Andy's contention that the world is falling apart, then I reject that reality and substitute my own.
With respect.
- Dennis