I am particularly thinking about the way we people react just a tad too late and miss opportunities to be a factor in saving someone's life or preventing a disaster from taking place.  How many times do most of us not react when we clearly see a tragedy being set up by the actors in a little scene - themselves being unaware that they are to become part of an accident or something worse? Think about if you had the wits to involve yourself in the problem with a solution that instantly was clear to you but about which no one else could see or were flexible enough to be set to be able to do anything helpful.  Most of us are not that aware or have the stuff to be helpful in situations that have bad endings.  We cannot see into the future and cannot go back to make things right that happened while and where you would have been able to be part of a solution rather than a problem.

Most of us, I think, are of the lag-behind great majority.  We do not all belong to the MORAL Majority which instantly is reactive to things which smell of sulfur and brimstone.  I refer mostly to the everyday lackadaisical kind of behavior which is neither here nor there but in a limbo of going about activities which we perform perfunctorily without seeing beyond our little area of expect-ability.  It is the unexpected which brings to the fore that we lag-behind what our eyes, ears and minds see as a need unfolding and you are the one who can be Johnny or Janie on the spot to prevent something bad from happening.

Our world is generally in a lag-behind condition.  We are not ready for the disasters which are in the making that are clearly marked out with those with distant vision.  We do not see the hunger and ill health of millions until our noses are rubbed in the enormity of the numbers involved.  We are in a war that is clearly brought home in the body bags of those killed. They were kids in uniform who were trying to protect and serve us thousands of miles from their homes. Then there is the conflagration that destroys the lives of the hapless who are in the way of terrorists and war machines. Then, again, I may be talking about foresight and hindsight.  "If only".

Being there at the exact moment when you could have done something escapes most of us.  Being part of a body politic we exist in a stasis where we wait for others to come up with answers that are much too late and clearly just not enough.

The "lag-behind" reaction is much more prevalent than the Johnny or Janie on the spot inspiration to do the right thing to pluck success out of disaster.  We are much too late with our letters to our law-makers who need a kick in the behind to wake THEM up so they can get busy to simply avoid defeat.