Once in a great while ... well, now it is once in a great while ... I feel the loss of something destroyed in the fire. Lately it's been my thesaurus.
It was very nice - leather, with lovely thin pages - but what made it special was that I received it from Drury College my junior year at Hillcrest High School for being student of the month. I used it alot. Unlike Diane Cort, I did not mark every word I looked up but I still used it alot.
I have not replaced that lovely book (nor the very nice dictionary I purchased while working at a book store - gotta love employee discounts). Any old thesaurus won't do so now I am grateful for dictionary.com. Today I looked up pander.
I do not like to pander. In fact I loath catering to people's insecurities. Along the left side of the web page were the helpful synonyms that made me miss my thesaurus: brownnose, gratify, massage, please, politic.
Ah. Politic. And suddenly I was thinking about the political pandering and posturing running amok. All the ridiculous fear mongering going on lately is nothing more than catering to the weakness and vices in too many others. Recently I lamented the volumn at which the ignorant have been shouting when I was told, "well, they are voters, too."
I'm still scratching my head at that being an appropriate rebuttal. Yes, they are voters and it's scary how lazy students have become lazy voters demanding censorship. In this day and age of information, how can we act so medieval? Ahhh, the images that conjures in my brain. Parallels of the Catholic Church and the Pharmacutical companies promoting allegience through fear and ignorance. Suddenly Darth Vater is replaced by a decrepit Cardinal waging to maintain a power structure at the suffering of the masses.
It's an old world and our problems are not new. Pander is an old word. Ignorance is a long standing condition. What is so disheartening is not that the world is worse than ever (it's not, it's just bigger and more connected), but that we constantly fail to learn from our past.
