In order to take care of the one tree you need to see the forest

Most of us heard that saying about how you can't see the forest focusing on the one tree and lately as I watch the news I think boy that tree must also have a mirror in it.

Is it the media, so easy to blame because they so often are guilty, that we as a world seem so focused on what we want, what we want to say, what our opinion is and passing it off as fact and let's face it a bit to some degree even blogging falls into that sphere.  As an only child tasked with the burden of having to defend being an only child constantly, no sorry my parents as most parents of only children that I know forced us to be cognizant of sharing and not being just all about us because that is what good parents, I am dismayed at the culture of "me" only that we have devolved to.

I watch the devastation that ISIS like a tornado is bringing - devastation with an empty core, sucking up years of history, people's lives and for what ??? Their focus on that one tree because the forest that is known as human fabric is not even in their potential sights.  That focus on what they want because nothing else matters.  This is a group focused on apocalypse and their gain after it, by the way I did not surmise that it actually is part of their belief system that they widely tout.

I listen to people who deny climate change because doing so makes sense- why?  It makes sense because they are only focused on you being wrong so they could be right.  It is because the more ignorant the statement the more press you get.  Yet whether it is a natural cycle that we have sped up with pollution or a global cycle that we have created, it exists and denying it does not make it go away.  That is what children do, close my eyes I can't see you ergo you can't see me.

There are the people who feel their god trumps your god after all their god somehow spoke to them. All higher, evolved deities are all about getting top billing - oh yeah that makes no sense.  However, if my view is to only see one tree in a vast forest well that is the most important tree and maybe I have to cut down the other trees that are blurring my vision just a bit on the sides.

There is the sect of science deniers - you know the "anti" people.  They are anti things because after all the internet and sites that have no backing or studies and that can be disproven by a 10 year old are of course more full of truth then the vast conspiracy of people who went to school to get advanced degrees,  do studies that can be replicated and understand that the word "theory" in science does not mean it's a thought that randomly came to mind with no backing.  Well these people I am not sure want to even call it a tree but will wait for the next actor, who may or may not have played one of these science professions on TV to tell them what it is called, they know there might be no forest just because you showed them there was one.

There are of course the "look at my big stump" tree people who feel that they should legislate on behalf of the trees that are female - after all the branches of a tree by far, in their mind, are more prominent and important the cavities in some trees that house life often.

Me....me....me... mine.  That is the prevalent thought and it may be what is most scary for me as a parent.  I try to teach my children not to be so focused on their own needs, be open to questions about their beliefs and most of all love the tree as much as the forest that surrounds it.  If we cannot take care of the forest we will eventually lose the tree.  I see it in people who want a say in education, in healthcare, in every thing and not just an opinion or a clarification but an actual lawmaking say just because they believe they are entitled to it.  We have one bitty little planet and while even that seems like it is "superior" to some people it is but a pale blue dot as Carl Sagan so eloquently reminds us in the scheme of the multiverses out there.

Consider again that dot. That's here, that's home, that's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there—on the mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.  Carl Sagan