WelcomeRoots
It's a double whammy: (1) People who can't create anything need something to keep them from being bored, and (2) the people who run the show need people to wipe their asses for them so they don't have to do it themselves. And since many of the latter can't create anything either, the idle rich too need something to keep themselves from being bored.
Enter traditions, celebrations, roots. Everybody who can't create anything can celebrate anything: a wedding or Christmas, or they can pick a fight with a neighboring tribe. Then the rulers get to play general and the wage laborers get to play private. It surely is intereting to plan how to kill your neighbors and if your neighbors are trying to kill you that relieves your boredom. A lot of people in August 1914 were bored with peace and liked the prospect of something mor interesting.
Roots are at the root of a lot of trouble. The Grim Reaper rightly protests:
"I didn't make you people kill each other in Vietnam 60 years ago nor today in the Donbas. You people cooked those things up for yourselvs. Neither did I deprive young persons of having sex; you all cooked up chaperones, too. It's puzzling to watch you all mess up your live when, in the end, I will come and get you, just a lot later for most of you than if you had not brought so many additional troubles on yourselves, in addition the ones i will stick you with. I'm not enough trouble for you people? I don't get it, but it's none of my business."
Roots are for people who have nothing to live for, whose lives are either like a gerbil wheel: the reproduction of individual and species life, and also for htose who not only have nothing except the repetition of the past to look forward to but also nothing to do (the idle rich). They can live to die, not ingloriously in their bed, but in battle! The machine gun was a big downerer, at least for the officer corps: There is little honor in either mowing down you enemy in a miniature storm of steel, nor in charging in a calvary line into one.
My kind of roots
Here is the kn=ind of root I wanted and needed but have no had: Parents wh had my back and if I failed at doing, they would still underwrite me to succeed in living. You didn't do anythin bad, son? But lost your job; you flunked out of school; your wife left you? you've got everything you need here in our home and our friends have nice daughters looking for a man like you; it's a cold cruel world out there but we do our best to keep it there; we've got you back, son. Me? I dared not take a course in school tht I did nt expet to get an "A" in, because: Or else!.
And the is a second important part to this fantasy: All my life I would hav elived in the same house with everything I needed within convenient ideally walking idstance. I wouldd not hav ehad ot go away to ollege. The college would have been in the same town. I wuld not have had to move for a jog: rewardng work would hav ebeen coe=se by. Wvwrything i needed or wantee would be close by. And the house would have space for me to keep everyhing I ever had in my life that I liked. My parents did have a house which could have come close when I wa in the 5th grade in eementary shool, whith 4 bedrooms and a lrge walk up attic and a dry full baseent: here>
