“One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.” Will Durant
So, I’ve thought about the above and decided to try to follow the advice. My thinking is that if Napoleon had done so, we might all be speaking French today. Meaning, that I agree with Mr. Durant, and agree that minding our own business is, historically speaking or otherwise, a good thing to do. The problem is that doing so, makes one appears to do nothing—and true, to the untrained eye. There is a difference in nothings, however, and only perceived by the eagle-eyed person: one is the taking a nap “nothing,” which as far as nothings go, is an easy and comfortable nothing. The other is the let’s not condemn them, let’s not get in their faces, let’s not bomb them to smithereens and teach them a lesson “nothing.” For some reason, the first one is easy for anyone to do as an individual, but terribly hard to do as a group. A group, usually wants to act, to “do”, and the people that are ready to go and “do”, are not the platoons of linguist armed with dictionaries and laptops that partly know the language and could go in and tell us what they are saying, or the teams of experts in other people’s cultures, traditions and habits, who could go in and explain the whys, but rather the “let’s rush in where angels fear to tread” fools of which we have an abundant supply. Why this is so, why all the rush to do, do, do, even if it’s the wrong move, will be explained by a panel of wise men that understand it better than I do. All this for the price of breakfast, at the usual place:
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