It is funny how phrases from my youth are resurfacing now to help me see just how wrong everything is these days. It is hard not to shake your head and make comments like Captain Kirk on the Starship Enterprise: “Beam me up Scotty … there is no sign of intelligent life!”
Shakespeare used the phrase “primrose path” several times because his audience would have been very familiar with that analog, drummed into them during most Sunday sermons of that day. Jesus is quoted as saying that if you want to go to heaven, you must take the steep, narrow, thorny uphill climb.
The preacher would declare the road to hell is wide, pleasant and easy, and downhill all the way. The central idea comes to us from the Gospel of Matthew 7:13. “Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go there.”
Shakespeare seems to have liked that idea very much since he uses it several times and creates the metaphor of a flowery road to bring it into focus. He does that three times in his plays and two of them become a primrose path or way. On the surface, the primrose path is simply a flowery path or road. In the plays, it’s a metaphor with a reference to the road to hell.
It is fascinating to me to see so many parallels today indicating we are so willing to avoid the narrow paths that lead to a better world. I know it is politically incorrect to question whether we should be doing things in the first place, but we need to. We seem way too prone to pick the “shiny penny” idea that on the surface seems to be “the easy way out of our dilemma.” The full consideration of all paths is just not politically expedient in today’s soundbite culture.
Most recently, I saw a fabulous documentary on Netflix about milk production called The Milk System which divulged the myths we have all come to believe about milk being an essential part of our diet both here and around the world. If you watch it, you will be quite angry at how we have been led down that primrose path by people who have a profit motive as opposed to doing the right thing for their fellow man.
Cowspiracy covers the environmental damage associated with the diary and beef industry. I encourage you to watch both movies and listen carefully to the interviews with milk producers and scientists around the world. They all expose that we should not be raising cows for milk production in the first place.
So, given we are going down the primrose path of milk production, we now see billions of dollars going to figure out ways to eliminate the cows. Take a look at this article from The Washington Post. The right path is to simply produce calcium supplements and eliminate the idea of milk in our diets!