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I didn’t think anybody could possibly be more critical of me than I am of myself, but I discovered tonight that I was mistaken.

I learned as a child to be harshly critical of myself and to blame myself for everything, whether I was responsible for it or not. These days, I’m still strongly inclined to concentrate on my faults and weaknesses. If you’ve paid attention to what I’ve written here, you already know this, though.

I received a nasty anonymous email tonight. No matter how much my own internal dialogue attacks me, I now know that someone out there has a much deeper and more vicious dislike for me than my childhood programming implanted.

It hurts to be attacked on such a personal level. Seriously. On that score, this cowardly attacker scored a bullseye. For a few minutes, I was really, really hurt. Maybe that will make someone happy.

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It must be nice to pick a political “team” and then never again bother to question whether your team’s beliefs might be fundamentally flawed.

It must be nice to do a shallow scan of everything you encounter and look for anything you disagree with — so you can use that as an excuse to disregard everything else a person might be trying to say. It must be convenient to know you don’t have to bother considering anything you don’t already believe is true.

American society is still pretty good at doing things and making things. We have better tools and technology than ever for molding physical objects into what we want them to be. (Those are an extension of open inquiry by previous generations.) But we are failing on a deeper level — and we are heading toward a devastating collapse — because we have become intellectually shallow and morally arrogant.

We are rushing over a cliff as fast as we can — and everybody can point a finger at someone else to blame.

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