This is the next to the last post I am going to make before tomorrow’s election. In this post I would like to take a step back from the election and try to look at things from a broader perspective. Whenever I have needed to do this in my personal life I have gone back to a book that I read in college in the early 1970s, The Octopus by Frank Norris. Here is a very high level summary of the book from Google books.
The Octopus is about wheat growers who are in conflict with a railroad company during late 19th century California. The railroad company, controlling the local newspaper, state legislature and the land prove to be a tough force for the local wheat growers to fight against.
It is not an easy read, and is not a happy book by any means, but the last paragraph of the book made it all worthwhile for me.
Falseness dies; injustice and oppression in the end of everything fade and vanish away. Greed, cruelty, selfishness, and inhumanity are short-lived; the individual suffers, but the race goes on. Annixter dies, but in a far distant corner of the world a thousand lives are saved. The larger view always and through all shams, all wickednesses, discovers the Truth that will, in the end, prevail, and all things, surely, inevitably, resistlessly work together for good.
Those words continue to ring true to me. I firmly believe that good will always eventually triumph over evil. It may not always happen in the timeframe that we would like, but eventually it happens. Many times individuals have to suffer, but in the end, everything works together for good. These are the words I would like to leave you with tonight.
None of us know for sure what the results of tomorrow’s election will be but whatever the results this great country will continue to move forward and the good in the country will eventually prevail, even if it doesn’t happen tomorrow.
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If you think you might be interested in reading The Octopus, I encourage you to do it! Here is what Sarah Payok had to say about the book in her review on goodbooks.com.
…it is a story about wrongs against humanity and he wrote it for the masses. There is nothing privileged about this book. It is a warning against the concentration of power and the risks all people run if they lose sight of their morals. This book does not preach but it would be hard to miss to message.
thebestmusicyouhaveneverheard 