Is enough, enough?

I woke up yesterday morning needing something.

Wasn’t exactly sure what and it was accompanied by a sense of foreboding that gave me warning that I was headed into a bad day.

So as soon as the babies were fed, I grabbed my coffee and headed for Lake Parker. The week had been full of wonderful sunrises and I thought maybe I could create a buffer of wonderfulness before the day turned to shit.

Mother Nature didn’t deliver her normal reds and violets for me (I guess she was sleeping in) and I couldn’t help feeling cheated by it all. I clicked as best I could to try to grab some decent shots and hope you find one or two here that appeal.

(As a footnote, the day did turn out dreadful and at the end of the day all I could do was try to ride it out. But that’s a separate story.)

It was towards the end of the day when I began to think about how everything played out and in looking for a positive, I revisited the images from the morning.

There have been many times when images like this would have made me very happy, but this time it just didn’t seem enough to make me happy.

Which got me thinking about the whole “when is enough, enough?” question.

The Merriam-Webster dictionary definition is “ occurring in such quantity, quality, or scope as to fully meet demands, needs, or expectations”.

It’s an interesting concept; that we should be happy with “enough”.

I think in many cultures and throughout history, enough is/was absolutely seen as enough. But current times and in particular in American culture, enough is almost never enough.

We insist on more. For example look at how TV shows have altered this idea within a few decades. The Brady Bunch proposed that having six kids in a family was enough to write a mayhem-based comedy show in the early 70s. But by the end of that decade, the bar had to be moved higher to Eight is Enough.

In more recent years we needed that number to be 17, 18, 19 with that pathetic baby factory the Duggars. Could that be any more ludicrous?

But beyond family sizes, look at wealth accumulation … recent decades have produced so many billionaires that it now pales the late 90’s show “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” into insignificance.

And all the time while these wealthy parasites look for more, so many people in the world are left with less.

Being a billionaire isn’t enough, they need to be president, using what used to be a civic office as a way to channel more wealth into the family. And at the same time, shutting the door on impoverished immigrant families or hurricane victims.

Which in truth finally brings me to the point of this ramble …. greed.

It used to be seen as one of the seven deadly sins. It was generally derided as a major character flaw. But now we applaud it on so many levels.

From that initial moment where we give our kids more birthday presents than we received. To the moment where we create a birthday party industry with outsourced event planners, party locations, entertainers. We ingrain this into children to where they will never be satisfied.

Then we medicate the ones that can’t live up to their own over-sized expectations and now suffer depression.

We develop bigger armies, weapons, and means of destruction than the next fifteen nations combined. Do we really believe there is even the remotest possibility that they are all going to gang up on us and attack?

We destroy rainforests and arctic preserves so that we can have more oil, timber, and minerals. Which in my opinion is not just a sign of greed, but also self-destructive lunacy as we lay waste a planet that our children and grandchildren are supposed to live on.

Our forefathers in justifying the need for militias wrote a second amendment as a right to bear arms. These men used muskets, knives, and swords. Those are the arms they wrote of. But recent decades have taken us to where “enthusiasts” equip themselves with not just one assault rifle, but many and more killing power than the troops we sent to Vietnam and Korea.

Even the whole Christianity concept which is supposed to be based on a simple carpenter’s son who healed the sick and devoted his life to the poor, has now become home of the mega-churches, where parking lots are filled with hummers and other oil-guzzling luxury vehicles.

We’ve heard all the justifications for biggest army, personal gun rights, oil and mineral industries. We’ve succumbed to much of the spin.

But at the end of the day (much like my day yesterday), we have to stop and slap ourselves in the face. Greed is a major flaw in humanity. It doesn’t really exist in many other parts of the natural world. It is simply a perversion that we have embraced, shone, and put on a pedestal.

But enough …ok? Enough.

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