Edging Toward Utopia

When we moved to Hot Springs Village, I assumed we’d identified our last house and our last community. Speaking only for myself, and not for my wife, I am having second thoughts. I don’t know this is the place for me for the long term. I think I would be more comfortable in an environment in which more of the populace shared my morals and my values and my beliefs. I think I’d find another place—where intellect is valued and nourished and where diversity is encouraged and celebrated—more comfortable. I suppose part of my shifting frame of mind is due to laziness. I don’t want to have to try to change minds by educating people who need compassion. I don’t want to have to struggle through the ugliness that circles around irrationally conservative drains. I need, or at least want, peace. I want love and acceptance and appreciation…not just for me, but for everyone. I want the kind of world the Unitarian Universalist church claims to want. Tolerance, decency, forgiveness, appreciation…you know, the ideal in which all people get along together in accepting reverence. But I know, though I wish it were not so, that no such ideal place exists. It could be. If only people would collectively seek it out. But people are not the kind of neighbors I’d want to hang around. Our neighbors are, by and large, deviants from another galaxy. At least I hope they are. I’d hate to think they are “of us.” Because that would paint an ugly picture of us. This is a long, strange way of saying I think I’m going to suggest to my wife that we look at our options. That is, moving away to another place where utopia might be just a little closer.