Fable

Way down in the land of good, or over or up, whatever your perspective, lives a woman, or a man or a child, who has never been tested.

This woman is exceptionally ugly or beautiful or ordinary, but because beauty or lack thereof in the land of good is neither here nor there, it is almost not worth remarking except that visitors to the land of good always remark.  And the remarks often sound like these:

Oh, did you notice how ugly she was?

He was far too ordinary for my taste.
My, what a lovely child!

And when the visitors leave, they almost always say that the land of good isn’t what they had expected, not nearly as bad.  You might think it strange that people expect the land of good to be bad, but if you consider that people in general are not looking for good and are almost always surprised by it, then you will begin to understand.

The untested woman, child, boy, girl, man, ugly, lovely, whatever lives near the entrance of the land of good and on occasion looks longingly out into the wider world.  Perhaps this too, seems strange, but again it’s important to consider that looking is a very good thing and longing is a very fine emotion.  All good.

The child decides to leave the land and venture out into the wider world.  Still good.  Everyone agrees, a child should go out into the world, especially bad people who stand at the door of the land of good waiting for innocent children, naïve teenagers and complacent adults to step across the line.  Bad never has to wait long because the people of the land of good believe that experience is good even when it’s bad.  To put it another way, in the land of good, bad is as important as good; good wouldn’t exist without bad and so therefore, bad is good.

In general this is a confusing concept and so some people, particularly those who live outside the land of good, try to adhere very strictly to the rules of good in order to gain permanent resident status.  They punish people who are not good, which is both good and bad.  They teach their children about a very narrow road that leads into the land of good and they scold them whenever they venture off the road.  Again, good and bad.  These people, almost all adults, are generally very good people, but alas, they don’t understand what the people in the land of good, almost all children, know almost without thinking, namely that bad is good, and too good is very bad. 

The test, obviously, is to learn how to accept the bad with the good.  Very few people can do it, but very few out of 6 billion, say one in a thousand, still add up to 6 million.  Not bad.   The trouble is that the percentage is steadily declining, in fact it has been declining since the creation of people and that group which had started out as a very large percentage, is rapidly falling.  Not good.  The good news is that so far, the population is growing so fast that the real number of good people hasn’t gone down, but no one knows how long we can keep that up.  All the evidence suggests that the land of good has a crisis on its hands, which as you can imagine is both bad and good. 

It’s good because it usually takes a crisis for meaningful change to take place, but bad because a crisis means that some good people are going to be hurt in the process.  In fact, the crisis has caused many good people to act uncharacteristically bad, for example, many good people have become dogmatic trying to protect the land of good and many bad people have altogether given up trying to enter the land of good.  What was once in balance is now out of whack.  In fact some things have gone so far out of whack that most people don’t know what’s good or what’s bad, which isn’t as bad as it seems because it makes the test fairer and a little bit easier to pass.

By the way, did I say that tests are both good and bad?