Drawing Nearer To A Time When Everything Is Good

Inspired by the film Quills

I had this thought that our time line, based on goodness and badness, has a shape of a triangle. At the beginning of time everything was good, then slowly it climbs up into a slope as time progresses. It reaches a certain point--a time wherein there was a lot of bad things in the world--then it slopes down again, back to its original level of absolute goodness.


I have to explain what I mean by goodness, as well as badness here. A time of an abundance of badness is when there's a lot of things that can be considered bad at a certain time. And a time of goodness is when very few things in what people think, do or feel can be considered wrong.


There was a time when the first men, in order to fill the world with human beings, mate with their kin without hesitation, and even the Judean God said that, it was good (The multiplication I mean). Also, in the bible it wasn't only once that a tolerated incest occurred uncriticized. Almost exactly the opposite of this, there was a time when by mere words laced with suggestions of things properly restrained in private could cause such an outrage and even bonfires or rolling heads. And we can witness in our own time that this is no longer true or that the reactions to such actions are less passionate as in the past. I can cite a catalogue of other examples illustrating this point if I put my mind to it, but here are some which came without effort: we started as cavemen with very skimpy clothing, then somewhere in the time of manners, as if in a hysteria of shame covered almost every inch of our bodies, particularly that of the female species, but now, it's as if we only wear clothes to bare what's supposed to be hidden (particularly with the female species). In most cultures in the past, the women are the stronger gender in terms of religion and in some cases even in matters of state, but somewhere in time it became a bad idea, and the men dominated this arena, and everyone was comfortable and considered it as the only good way of doing these things. But now, not only is it good for women to do anything that men can do, but it's slowly becoming not bad for women to leave the care of their families, their traditionally good function, for their careers, which is now becoming firmly rooted not only as their right, but a renewed tradition.


This may sound like one lazy generalization, for not all of us may have necessarily experienced the same sloping up or down of this triangular time line simultaneously, depending upon kindred factors like beliefs, culture, religion, geography or economy, but it doesn't mean that this did not happen to other cultures significantly distinct from us. This happening earlier or later, doesn’t matter.


What matters is everything is slowly becoming good nowadays, regardless of what it means. It sounds like a twisted approach to a false paradise. Will incest be tolerated again, as of women empowerment? Or would killing a thief or a plunderer or an adulterer , without incurring bad karma, as stated in the Vedas, inspire people to do so? Will everything be good in the future, and the only thing that will be actually considered bad would be calling something as un-good?

Higgly Town Fears

She would block her tiny body against the TV screen whenever I raise the remote to that direction, as if that would prevent the channel from changing--my daughter loves Higgly Town Heroes, that much. So most of the time, I get to watch it with her. I even know the songs, and actually notice if the episode is a re-run. There's only one tiny thing I notice about the show that causes me to feel one tiny misgiving. There's this part in every Higgly Town episode where a problem will crop up, which is apparently "too big" a job for the Higgly Town kids, and so they need some help from the Higgly Town Hero featured for that show. Anyway, that's not where I saw something. It's that part where Twinkle would think of a very "lofty" idea to solve a problem, before giving up and eventually ask for help from the adults, because Fran, the squirrel character, and also their baby-sitter, would always bring it down with a condescending "Great idea there, Twinkle, but..."

I know kids should be taught logic and that the moon is not made of green cheese, but what's the big idea with "I hate to rain on your parade, Twinkle, but there are no such things as flying elephants and ant engineers..." This may sound cringy, but What became of make-believe? What became of dreams of being a swan or a princess in a sugar-coated kingdom? Should my daughter skip all of these and think like a realist, already? (Come to think of it, a talking squirrel, advising about reality, is a contradiction. Or was that the point I failed to see?) Recently, though, I had observed a noticeable cutting down with the "come on that's not possible" attitude. And the squirrel is actually "riding" with Twinkle, like inventing her own "fantastic" reasons like "the flying elephants are oiling their wings" instead of a cold, hard, "flying elephants don't exist." The Disney people probably just wanted to teach our kids about the balance of reality and fantasy, and that's okay, even if-- not counting books-- they are themselves, the store house of the biggest, and greatest fantasies in the universe. I only probably want my daughter to have a satisfyingly long suspension of disbelief, before she grows up and "naturally" think of these.

But then when she finally lets me have the control of the channels, and I arrive at these pictures of death and crumbling structures, of brutality and a world slowly coming to an end, I think about the border between fantasy and reality again, and this time my fear is no longer itty-bitty. Where can we put flying elephants and princesses on marshmallow carriages in the midst of this evil? And our children--how far out in Higgly Town or wherever dreamland their minds are, before being finally breached by the real?