REFER TO GREY: Contemplations by Robert Greigos © 2007-2024

Last weekend was the official annual birthday celebration for the United States of America, current age 232. In most parts of the country, save where fires raged in California and midwestern floods have not yet receded, it was a pleasant weekend fit for lounging with family and friends at the beach, in the park, or collected in someone's backyard, all normal worldly cares placed on the back burner at low heat to simmer until the inevitable Monday morning commute. All the while for the rest of the world it was just another desperate to ho-hum weekend. The tragically amusing irony has somehow been lost on nearly everyone. It's like folks sitting down to a feast oblivious to thousands with nothing to eat standing, sitting, squatting within arms reach being expected to watch patiently and say nothing. We couldn't be saying "Let them Eat Cake" more plainly.

The irony of the described situation wouldn't exist, of course, if today's almost instant worldwide communications didn't exist. In the not too distant past it was certainly possible and appropriate to celebrate one's local community achievements without offending anyone by inadvertently excluding them. But today, more and more, it has become fashionable to pointedly and overtly exclude almost everyone but a choice few. Messages of exclusion fly across all channels of communication. Some who receive such messages protest by throwing around accusations of arrogance and elitism, but nearly everyone chooses their flock to hang with to the exclusion of nearly everyone else. One global community of citizen members caring equally and profoundly for one another we most certainly are not. Former Senator Phil Gramm's recent comment that we are a nation of self-interested whiners, politically inept though it may have been, might not be so far off mark. There aren't many of us whining that people other then ourselves have been and are being excluded.