Sunday/Message from The Dark Fields of Venus
The disorder and lawlessness of the current summer have some definable origins. Bad cops certainly are one. But the unhappiness of the richest culture in the history of the world is harder to pinpoint. The disparity between the average guy and uber-rich is difficult to object to when the average guy is richer than Charlemagne. Then the average man's grousing looks little more than envy.
Yet it seemed to be that we are in a period of great discontent, despite our wealth and security. Would more money solve this? If so, where would that come from? If it is taken from someone else, would that make him unhappy? What are the rights of a guy who wants to be richer? And would that redistribution solve the problem?
The causes of happiness are not simply the absence of irritants. The content stomach may help a lot but that is not a problem where the poor's identifying mark is obesity. There must be other elements to a content heart.
Years ago there was a small book called The Dark Fields of Venus--maybe even self-published--by a physician who fled Eastern Europe in WWII and settled in New York where he spent his life working in a venereal disease clinic. It was not a significant book. It consisted of a series of anecdotes describing the men, women, and the families afflicted with venereal infections and how they suffered in the world, suffered in an infected bed that they only partly contributed to. Poverty, drunkenness, violence, and despair were the constant companions of his patients for whom venereal disease was only a part. The miseries of these people, chapter after chapter, after a while, drowned the reader and eventually became indistinguishable so I no longer remember the specifics.
But I do remember the last line: "Sometimes, penicillin is not enough."
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