Treadmills. For as well as they can bear us up and move us along they can certainly be hard to spot in our everyday lives.
My big "for instance" here is public education. Most parents think nothing about sending their children to their local public school. We didn't. We even moved to a neighborhood with a 'better' public school for our babies to attend when they got old enough. In fact, it never occurred to either David or I there might be another option until our oldest son, suffering at the hands of classroom bullies - including his teacher - begged me to pull him out and school him at home.
Having just read the Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis, I have made it rather my heart's desire to spread this 'gospel' as far and wide as I possibly can it was such an influential read for me.
Toward that end, I found a link to a PDF copy of Screwtape Proposes a Toast - a "Satirical Epistolary Short Story" written by C.S. Lewis for the Saturday Evening Post, December 19th, 1959. This piece was included as an epilogue to the bound version of The Screwtape Letters, and was even more powerful than the book because of the inclusion of the ways in which public education and Democracy would be rendered completely useless by the devils machinations and the human's lack of brilliance in, not only not recognizing these, but falling for them utterly.
I'm including the section on Democracy below. It is lengthy, and all I can do is lead a horse to water so to speak, but if you choose to read it, you will forever be better for the time you spent to do so. On to Lewis;
This is a still from the end scene of the first Terminator movie. Sarah Conner has just been told that machines will rise to prominence and begin subjugating and killing all humans. As she drives toward the mountains of Mexico where she must hide for safety, a storm rolls in - a fitting allegory for her future.
