Barbara Bates

I’d like to start a series of articles concerned with where you consider your “Bottom Line”.

“Bottom line” refers to the final, determining consideration in a decision. It’s the grit or core of a subject; usually the basic or most important factor, consideration, or meaning. It shows a net positive or negative result — in your business, your career, your life. Let’s extend this to include: your community, the country, our society in general.

Not only am I interested in where your bottom line is, but also your opinions on things I think can and cannot be considered a bottom line item. So, let’s keep the “nice article” comments to a minimum and let me know how you feel about these items. Agree? Agree with reservations? Disagree? Disagree, but with some modifications, maybe? State your opinion. Take a side.   

Our society as a whole has gotten too — materialistic, commercialized, egocentric, and electronic gadget oriented. Should we refocus? And if so, to what? And how?

Have our brains been rotted out by our music, video games, advertising, and focus on ourselves instead of on our environment, community, children, and things outside of ourselves? What can we do to change things? Is it worth it, or are we “too far gone”? Have we reached the point in our civilization, like that of the Roman Empire, where the only direction to go is down? Can we pull ourselves back up to the top and fresh air and sunshine? Or has the rope rotted through and it’s only a matter of time before we drop into the dark abyss?  

In case you haven’t noticed, we’re raping the earth of her resources, polluting her water, land and air at an increasing rate. It may come as a shock, but there’s no place else to go. Once the earth has been ruined, it’s too late. We’re stuck.

How much longer can we ignore our own in our attempt to have the biggest, newest, best? Does the pig at the top realize others underneath can’t breathe?  Have we lost sight of the meaning of life, if we ever had it?

Millions of years ago, reptiles, in the form of dinosaurs, ruled the earth. They gave way to mammals, which over thousands of generations, led to Homo sapiens taking their turn as the ruling class. If we don’t change our evil ways, will a new ruling line emerge? Will we be supplanted by the insect kingdom? Will giant cockroaches rule? Will the billions of insects inhabiting the world be the only ones able to live amidst the polluted, resource sparse environment our world is heading towards?  

The big question remains — do we still have time to stop the decline? Or will the human race be just another blip, too small to notice, on the timeline of our universe?

Tags: Bottom Line, opinions

This entry was posted on Friday, January 28th, 2011 at 3:15 pm and is filed under environment, individuality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.