The Lone Wolf Mentality

    Everywhere you go the World is so full of hate.  Everyone is so busy 
drawing boundaries and miffed about the work they have to do that they 
loose focus of the humanity around them.  As a loner, anything I do or 
anything I say, people respond with vitriol if it's not in a constructed 
social or bureaucratic environment.  A caustic remark here, shunned interest 
there, it all adds up.  No one is sincere.  No one cares.   No one wants 
to stop.  They're wrapped up in their own problems and not interested in 
anything I have to say or offer.  
  I'd much rather be aggressive and go out and conquer, yell and shout and 
make an impact.  I can and I have.  The effort has to be calculated and 
carfully considered because there are boundaries and if you loose control 
of the expression people are anxious to take out their frustrations out on 
anything out of the ordinary.  It's not worth the effort to deal with the 
backlash and ignorance that goes along with it.  Standing out from the 
crowd only invites conflict.
  For this reason I believe a well fed society destroys its 
entrepreneurial segment.  Zig Ziglar wrote in one of his books about the 
crabs in the bucket syndrome.  That is if you have a bucket full of crabs, 
and one starts to climb out, what do the other crabs do?  They pull you 
back in.  
  It takes strength of character to rise above the din of the masses as 
they try to destroy creativity and expression.  We get this strength from 
family and friends, yet in this day and age of information and media we 
distance those boundaries more and more. 
  To this end we should be concerned that law enforcement has focused on 
the words 'lone wolf'.  The pursuit of the lone wolf is fine if it's a 
dangerous criminal, but if it is used to define new character attributes 
we may overstep the boundaries of freedom and expression.  At what point 
does a lone wolf become dangerous.  At what point does the pressure of 
society, money, property rights drive the individual to fall within the 
definition of law enforcements dangerous 'lone wolf'?
   There's an app now to report anything suspicious.  Homeland Security 
has sold it, law enforcement embraces it and the public accepts it.  
Bureaucrats have tapped in to social networking.  How long before 
neighbors start reporting neighbors?  Now more than ever before we can 
report anyone at anytime or from anyplace, anonymously.  The framework for  
paranoia and suspicion is in place.  
    What can we do?  We can reach out to our neighbor.  We can befriend 
the stanger.  Now more than ever before it's important to reach out and be 
kind to people we don't know, or on the job.   We must  work to rebuild a 
social fabric that can defend against the innuendo, panic and hysteria of 
the 'lone wolf' mentality.  The only catch is that it may be to late.  I 
hope nobody reports me for saying this.

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