Even idols have feet of clay

When you've reached a certain milestone on the journey of life,you find it hard to keep the idealistic vision alive as time and time again,your hopes are disappointed and your expectations are frustrated.so reality bites and life sucks,always has been and always will. So ,the disillusionment leads one to take a cynical perspective on the world. One man's meat is another man's poison as the adage holds true.When people hero-worship a person and puts them on a pedestal,sooner or later some years down the road,the hero becomes zero when his human foibles,misdemeanour or wrongdoings are exposed and judged by the values of a different context and culture,we find that even idols have feet of clay. Now the younger generation in the US want to pull down statues of confederates hero as they are tainted by allusion to racism and white supremacy.When i finished reading George Saunders "Lincoln in the Bardo",there were excerpts that struck one as he was not portrayed as the brilliant orator,the polished diplomat and skilled leader but a real sordid character who sent thousands of young men to their deaths in the civil war and the self centred person who neglected his parental duty to hold an evening dinner party while his young son lie dying of an illness. Saunders put it beautifully in his novel "Evidently,a person of very inferior cast of character,wholly unequal to the crisis.Will go down in posterity as the man who could not read the signs of the times,nor understand the circumstances and interests of his country..who had no political aptitude,who plunged his country into a great war without a plan,who failed without excuse and fell without a friend.You have seized the reins,made yourself dictator,established a monolitic new form of government which must dominate over the rights of the individual.Your reign presages a terrible time when all of our liberties shall be lost in favour of the rights of the monolith.The founders,look on,in dismay." So all Saunders wrote about that demystify Abe Lincoln has been a lesson in which history has repeated. Capitalism and industrialisation were the pillars that drove imperialists to capture Africans to be bought and sold as slave labour to work in the cotton plantations of the South.This was free labour for the plantation owners to increase the profitability of their labour intensive industry just as in England child labour was used in cotton mills as they could pay underpay them and exploit them to work long hours.Its only thro use of mechanization that free humans from non living wages and poor working conditions.The only downside is mass unemployment in the agro sector when lowly uneducated manual labour is replaced by automation and drones and robots.The business is caught between the devil and the deep ,blue sea.How to provide employment and improve living standards of rural inhabitants and stop the exodus of rural urban migration,overcrowding in cities and creation of slum settlements. I would dearly love to buy the blu ray DVD of Pixar's newest animation Soul as it puts an African American as its protagonist just as Mulan has elevated the status of Chinese females in Disney movies and Pohacontas,the native American females.Soul has an interesting plot that is optimistic and positive like all fairy tales of Hollywood.It casts a talented musician who at the cusp of achieving his life long dream is killed in the city and meets a wise young soul called 22.It's like the antithesis to "Lincoln in the Bardo' as both are caught in the intermediate state between life and death and whereas wwillie is a young soul mentored by the wise old Reverend Everly Thomas,this midle aged musician is mentored by a young soul that sees all the suffering and ugliness on Earth and rejects Life on Earth. Now Im half way into reading Richard Dawkins "Brief candle in the Dark".The man is abominable,irreverent but never a dull moment as he can go from being in the ivory towers of Oxford academia to exotic,remote jungles that time has forgotten.It's only when he talks shop on evolutionary biology and fascination with wasps and leaf cutter ants that my brain suffers from brain fog.The theory and observation are way above my head.