From the "Finish Reading This" Shelf of Books

Anyone who has been to my apartment or helped me move knows I love books, read books, collect books, and even the Kindle Taran gave me (many many thanks!) hasn't lessened the enjoyment I get from holding a book, the feel of it, the weight of it. So I have shelves of them, organized in my own way, complete with a shelf or two of  books begun but not yet finished -- for whatever reason -- that I fully intend to read all the way through.


Today's choice was a 1986 Judith Viorst book,  Necessary Losses. I don't know why I stopped reading at the point I did, but there was a sticky-note marking that place with the my words,
"Government Regulations -
Abortion
Assisted Suicide
Drugs/Alcohol/Tobacco/Etc.Restrictions"


On the page, just before I marked a paragraph, was a discussion of psychopathic personalities.  What I marked read, "But we don't have to be a psychopath to allow some person or group  to stand in the way of our individual conscience. And yet this too can lead to deficient guilt. For when we relinquish to others our sense of moral responsibility, we may become free of central moral constraints. This giving over of conscience can turn ordinary people into lynch mobs and operators of crematoria. And it may enable any of us to act a certain ways which on our own we would surely regard as unthinkable."


These days of social media and the decreased size of the planet due to the expansion of media from everywhere on the globe, most people are allowing their own morality and conscience to be led by others - and with no second thought, these misled continue mislead their own children and those with whom whey come into contact.  There is something very wrong here.
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The more control and regulations we allow, the less our consciences and our own morality diminish. We become "sheeples" -- and defend our right to be so.  Ethics never enter the picture.  


Later in the book I found an eight line strip of paper I wrote those years ago inserted into the chapter, "Love and Hate in the Married State" that reads, " This is the time of knowing. Not knowing is expensive adolescence and inappropriate for a grown-up. Choices require knowing, and ignorance of the law  stopped being an excuse when we were ten." 

Applying the latter to the former, the message is clear: Each of us us responsible for her own morality, ethics and morals.  We develop these, not by reading current media or listening to what our well-meaning friends tell us.  It means doing the work ourselves, the fact finding, the research, the  comparisons and thinking --really thinking -- developing set of morals and ethics with which we lead our lives, an example for our children.  


And now back to Judith Viorst.  I think in this case I will go back to the beginning.