Part I

Sporadically over the next few days or weeks, I'll be sharing segments of something I wrote earlier this year. I'll title my work Part 1, Part 2, etc., so you'll recognize when I'm referring to my "official" writing. I'll continue to write as much nonsense as possible about my other shenanigans as a mother of triplet teenagers, and the 3 other darlings I decided to have - all within a 5-yr period (!....) - in the meantime, though. (I'm now in shock having realized what I've done! :-))

Part I:Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Disney & Humanity

We've heard it before, perhaps too often, those fateful words of Shakespeare from his play, As You Like It, "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women are merely players." In the book considered by many to be the greatest novel of all time, War and Peace, (which unfortunately is known more for its volume than the words within), Leo Tolstoy penned similar words through the thoughts of Pierre, "... perhaps all these comrades of mine struggled just like me and sought something new, a path in life of their own, and like me were brought by force of circumstances, society, and race - by that elemental force against which man is powerless - to the condition I am in" (Maude, trans. 1942).

Words like these have a tendency to ring in our souls. As history reveals, many of us casually accept rolls in life directed by birth, while only a few create for themselves a new part. What ever the case of the individual, humankind has had to coexist in a political collective since before recorded history.

Whether we have lived nomadically or settled into relatively permanent communities, humans, for the most part, have recognized the benefits of living in cooperative groups with mutual respect being the ideal. Unfortunately, the concept of idealism and the reality of humanity rarely coexist in an unadulterated cooperative. Each of us usually struggle internally (and sometimes externally) with an innate drive for personal survival. As a result, for thousands of years, laws have been chiseled in stone, written on papyrus, scribed in Holy books, and inserted in national constitutions in order to protect society from the destruction that would come from raw, selfish ambition.

(to be continued... )