If you’ve become accustomed to reading my short fiction writing lately, today is a short break from that, to discuss something that’s taken up some space in my mind.

It occurred to me today that I’m not sure that I feel the way that I used to feel about certain things.

2020 has been the kind of year that gets a lot of people looking at a lot of things differently.  But, I feel like I’m also getting to the point in my life where a growing level of maturity has me also questioning what it is I’ve been fed over the years.

* * *

Someone tried to pick a fight with me today, on social media –in a private message, at least– and times were that I would have entered into a battle of wits with this person. I knew that their insult was off-base and ill-informed, and as easy as it would have been for me to lay low this particular individual with some witty repartee, I decided not to –> through an exercise of much self-control.

Rather, I got to thinking about swords and baseball bats.

When I was a kid, probably in my early teen years, I wanted to purchase a sword, made out of real metal, that I’d seen in an antique store in a nearby town. This desire was part of a larger early-teen-years set of interests in things like throwing stars, all types of knives, and other implements of destruction. When I told my dad that I was thinking of saving up the money to buy that sword, he asked me –“What would you use it for?”– to which I most certainly shrugged my shoulders or gave some other ineffectual response to his question.

And, it wasn’t that I didn’t know what I would use it for, it’s just that I knew how silly it would sound saying it out loud to my father.

Of course, I was going to use it to protect my family in the event of an attack of some kind.

Kind of like the baseball bat in my mud room.

In the mud room of our home, at this very moment, there is a baseball bat, a sturdy aluminum one. I don’t play baseball; neither does anyone else in my family. I can’t say if any of my children have ever hit a ball, suspended momentarily in the air, with that particular bat, or any other bat for that matter.

The bat is there for protection.

Of course, you are starting to see the theme, here. That sword, that I never ended up buying and also never ended up needing, is just like that bat, that is sitting in the same spot that it’s been sitting in for years.

Do you know who Linus van Pelt is? A gold star if you don’t need to read on to know who Linus van Pelt is, and a mega gold star if you see why I would be bringing him up right now.

Linus van Pelt is probably the most famous example in media of a boy and his security blanket. Linus is the little brother of Lucy van Pelt, and the best friend of Charlie Brown. Linus takes his security blanket with him everywhere he goes because he feels insecure without it. He’s afraid.

And I know the feeling.

* * *

I own guns. Not because I’m a hunter, or because I love the hobby of freeing gunpower from the bullet casings that manufacturers tend to trap gunpowder inside. I don’t even really like the idea of getting good at marksmanship, practicing being as accurate as possible from some distance on a consistent basis. Rather, I have guns for the protection of my family.

Up to this point in time, I’ve never needed them for that purpose.

Just like the bat, and the sword that I never ended up buying.

Basically, I’m starting to wonder whether or not I’m Linus van Pelt.

At the end of the day, as a man of Christian faith, what attacker do I have to fear? Certainly, my God is greater than any attacker, or any attack, that I might face. Certainly He will protect me, if it’s His Will to do so, from any and all attackers. What good are these implements of destruction if I only keep them with the intent that I would use them one day against someone else?

Doesn’t it make me look a little hypocritical if I am anti-abortion/pro-life, but I’m also pro-gun, with the assumption that I would use that gun one day to attempt to end a life?

I’ll tell you what word gets thrown in here a lot, to legitimize what might otherwise seem like quite the conundrum.

Innocent.

How do I explain away the contradiction of being opposed to abortion, but in favor of shooting someone who comes into my home? Well, an unborn child is an innocent life, but that intruder had it coming to them.

And that’s where it rears its ugly head –> our tendency to pass judgement on others.

The fact is this: God loves the unborn child, and the home intruder. For if this isn’t true, then some measure of sin can cause us to become unloved by God. And, if that’s true, the sacrifice of Jesus is cheapened.

I dare any fellow Christian to tell me that God loves the home intruder any less than He loves the unborn child.

Then, of course, there’s that security blanket; it sure has its appeal. Holding it makes me feel safe. Having that bat in my mud room makes me feel safe. Having the gun in my gun cabinet makes me feel safe.

* * *

Looking back over this essay, in an attempt to tie up its loose ends here in this final section, I realized that I started off this whole shebang with a short discussion of not using the tools that I have at my disposal for launching a counter-attack against someone who attempted to insult me earlier today.

Then, it would seem, I got a little off-track after that.

Not actually, though.

What we have to work with in this life –the tools at our disposal– can be used for good purposes, or for ill. The steel that makes a sword can make a plowshare. The tongue that can build a person up can also tear one down. The mind that can devise inspiring and beautiful artistry can also plot and conspire and scheme. Without faith, without moral principles and guidelines, without maturity and self-control, humans tend to go their own way, to choose evil over good, to use their tools for vile ends.

And, over the course of this past year, I’ve come to feel a growing conviction that the greatest impediment to the advancement of the kingdom of God is the people who claim to be His followers, people who misrepresent, in increasingly public ways, Him at every possible turn.

While I am not willing to suggest that all Christian gun owners are off-base, I do wonder how many of them would bear some resemblance to Linus van Pelt. I know that I do. If our guns, or bats, or antique swords, are really just insurance policies against a God that we think will protect us, then you can’t blame the heathen world for looking at us and scratching their heads the way they do.

I’m sorry if this has been offensive to anyone; I certainly don’t mean to be offensive. But, I do think that we are responsible for thinking about the things that we believe, for knowing why we hold the convictions that we hold. I’m not sure that Christian gun ownership holds as much water for me as it used to, not when my Savior had the arsenal of the universe at His disposal and He allowed Himself to be crucified instead.

That’s the greatest of all ‘turn the other cheek’ moments.

It occurred to me today that I should probably change my approach.

I set out at the start of this year to run three hundred and sixty-six miles (a mile for each day, on average) by the end of the year. I surpassed that goal months ago. I also had never run a 10K, or a half-marathon, before 2020, but I did both of those things this year.

But, the problem is, I’m not where I want to be. I’m not sure how to put this without sounding shallow and superficial, so I’ll just say it –> I don’t look the way that I would have imagined that I was going to look, at the end of a year of work like the year that I’ve put in.

Now, whether or not it was reasonable for me to believe that I could reverse thirty years of not being very physically active at all, with a single year of busting my butt, of course it seems silly when I spell it out in this blog post. But, that doesn’t change the fact that I was expecting it. But, since this is not a post about unreasonable expectations, I’m not going down that road. It suffices to say that I am not where I thought I would be, based on the amount of work that I’ve done.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’ve noticed some very real changes in my physique, and I am pretty excited about those changes. But, they just weren’t the changes that I was expecting to see. So, that got me to thinking about “Insanity”.

You see, “Insanity” is a DVD-series of aerobic training videos that I bought, many, many years ago. I’ll bet that you have a set of these DVDs –or some set like this one– somewhere in your possession, as well. I remembered, all those years ago when I bought them, thinking that –if I could just make my way through those videos– I would look like the person that I’ve always wanted to look like. The DVDs all have pictures on them of pretty, physically fit people. Of course, they got pretty doing those videos, right?!?!

I remember when I first tried doing one of those videos. It wasn’t even one of the workout videos proper; it was the pre-training baseline video, the video that was an introduction to some of the exercises that were going to be incorporated into the workout videos proper. I got out that first DVD, many, many years ago, and I tried my best to do what those people were doing, “to establish my baseline”.

My baseline was this –> I almost died doing that DVD. Like, I actually almost had a coronary event.

I haven’t opened the case on those videos since.

But, last week, when I was thinking about the running that I’ve done and the fact that I still don’t like the way that my body looks, I thought to myself, “Hey, I should get out the ‘Insanity’ DVDs. Maybe I’m in a better place, to be able to try to be successful at doing them, for real”.

In short, I thought to myself, “I need to change my approach.”

* * *

I am writing this blog post on the evening of December 3rd. Maybe a dozen people will read it on the day of the 4th, maybe another half-dozen will read in thereafter. I’ve tried telling myself that I don’t really care whether anyone reads them or not, but I know that’s not true, deep down inside. I guess I turned a corner when I started making these posts publicly available, and it’s a corner that I can’t “un-turn”.

I have been regularly writing on this blog since April 22nd. I don’t know how many blog posts that is, but I am probably closing in on two hundred, if I were to stop to count them all. At the beginning of 2020, my dream of becoming a writer was just a dream. And, while it’s probably still ‘just a dream’, it’s closer than it’s ever been before.

Just like me, wanting to look like the guy that I’ve always wanted to look like, is closer than it’s ever been.

Have you seen the Jake from State Farm commercials? The most recent ones, where Jake is working with Aaron Rogers and Patrick Mahomes? Can I ask you what an insurance agent needs guns like that for? I wish I looked like Jake from State Farm. I can tell you, from experience, just pounding the pavement for a few miles every couple of days isn’t going to get me there.

Writing these blogs posts has been fun. There have been more than a few of them that I’ve actually been proud of, having written them. But, just like running has taken me a certain distance –but maybe not as far as I wished it would have– I am wondering how much farther I am going to get down the road toward being the writer that I really want to be by writing these blog posts over and over again.

So, earlier today, I got to thinking about “The Writer’s Book of Matches”.

“The Writer’s Book of Matches” is a book that I bought, back during my college days, to try to help me with becoming a writer. Needless to say, back then, when I lacked the commitment that I have now, I never really used the book very much. I think I used it more as an English teacher over the years –> getting ideas from it to challenge my students in my English classes to some creative writing assignment or another. Earlier today, out of the clear blue sky, that book came swimming back into my consciousness.

And, I thought of an idea.

So, here’s the idea.

This book is supposed to have 1,001 writing prompts in it (I couldn’t say for sure if it does, although I would estimate that it’s true). From pages 22 (quite a lengthy introduction) to 243, there are probably about an average of five writing prompts per page. So, I was thinking that I will start to try to move in a different direction with my writing by working out of this book.

But, I also thought that I am going to need the assistance of my favorite readers.

This post –the one that you are reading right now– will go live on Friday. Then, I will write again on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday of next week. For those posts, I will write a blog post, based on the suggestions that I get from people who leave comments on my posts.

So, now that you’ve read this post, pick a number between 22 and 243. Leave the number as a comment on Twitter or Facebook or WordPress. Then, I will choose one of those page numbers and select a writing prompt off of that page. Then, I will post those creations as part of my new training program.

Let’s see how this goes.

It occurred to me today that it’s harder to find the bad guys than it should be.

I think we are all looking for the bad guy. We are trying to put a name to the person for whom we should all be on the lookout. We do this, if you believe the evolutionary psychologists, because it serves a survival purpose that has been with us for a very long time –> if we identify who ‘we’ are and who ‘they’ are, then we have a better chance of surviving. Who is the predator? Who is the prey? The good guys and the bad guys?

It’s a serious question: who are the ‘good’ guys? And, conversely, who are the ‘bad’ guys?

If you’re a Democrat, then the Republicans are the ‘bad’ guys. Or vice versa. But that doesn’t work, because I happen to know people who belong to both political parties that are jerks, and conversely, people who belong to both political parties who are angels on this earth.

So, maybe that’s not it.

I guess we could go about it some other way. If we don’t have any real reasons to believe that political bias is where it’s at, maybe gender bias is the ticket? Do you know any men that are just rotten to the core?

I sure do know some ladies who would fit that description.

Well, crap. That’s not the way to go, either.

If only it were easier for us to identify who the bad guy is.

* * *

Take the movies, especially horror movies, for example; they have a clear bad guy. They are usually identified at the beginning of the film, and they become the person that we are rooting against, throughout. And, boy, are they BAD!!! It’s easy for us to really despise someone who is despicable, whose actions are reprehensible. And not just slightly despicable, not just slightly reprehensible –> the bad guys in the horror films are evil with a capital ‘E’. They are so obviously bad guys that it’s obvious to us, as we watch them, that they should not be allowed to succeed in what they are doing.

Conversely, we end up cheering for characters in those movies, who we might not otherwise cheer for, because we are on their side as they battle against THE BAD GUY. The identification of the bad guy, at the beginning of a horror film, is a rally cry for everyone who wants to be alive when the final credits roll; we are all on the same team because we are all opposed to THE BAD GUY. There is nothing quite as efficient for bringing people together as identifying a common enemy.

So, if it’s so easy to identify the bad guys in the movies, why is it so difficult to identify them in real life?

* * *

While I could easily take this opportunity to launch on a tirade about how everything that we see on a screen has a certain fakeness to it, I won’t do that (if you’re a constant reader of my thoughts, then you know that I’ve done this before). Rather, let’s look at the other side of this particular coin, for a moment.

When it comes to reality, people just aren’t that bad, by and large.

The bad guy in the movie (setting aside the whole ‘It’s fiction’ argument for a moment) might be getting his worst moments filmed, while his kinder, gentler, more compassionate moments are missed by the camera crew –or worse– they end up on the cutting room floor, edited out by a director and an editor that are working to make the bad guy of their film truly bad.

And conversely, the good guys in the movies aren’t that great. They’ve got their downsides. Their drawbacks.

That’s the way that it is, when it comes to reality. Hollywood makes the bad guys really bad and the good guys really good so that there isn’t any ambiguity as to who we are supposed to be championing while we’re watching the movie.

The news media does the same thing, in case you haven’t noticed.

Have you ever seen the news interviews of the neighbors of the guy who turns out to be a serial rapist, after his arrest, when they all say things like, “He seemed so normal to me.” or “I just can’t believe it.” or “I never would’ve known.”

Most of the bad guys aren’t really that lousy. Most of the good guys aren’t really that great. To be truly amazing or truly deplorable, you have to rise to such levels –or sink to such depths– that would rocket you past the others around you, others who are just ‘kind of decent’ or ‘sort of a jerk’. Those types of performances are statistically rare, by definition of what makes them scarce.

But, if all of this is true, and we don’t really live in a world with ultra-great and/or ultra-horrible people walking around, then why is there so much division among us?

I’ll tell you why.

They are turning us against each other.

Once I’m watching you, and you’re watching me, and we’re both watching the guy across the street, then we start looking to the wrong place for the bad guy. Remember, at the beginning of this post, I said that I thought that it’s too difficult to find the bad guys. Is your neighbor a bad guy? No, despite what you’ve seen him do that makes you scratch your head. Is your coworker a bad guy? Is your boss a bad guy? Is your worst employee a bad guy? Probably not. And even if they are, how would you know, with the limited vantage point you have on their existence? That’s what makes it hard to know –> a lack of substantial evidence.

On the other hand, you know who you might be able to gather a significant amount of evidence on, toward proving, one way or the other, what kind of a person they truly are?

Yourself.

It’s time for us to stop spending so much time paying attention to each other, if for no other reason than the fact that we can’t possibly get enough quality footage on each other, to be able to substantiate a ‘good guy’ or ‘bad guy’ claim. What I know about you, and what you know about me, is a drop in the bucket when compared to what I know about me that you don’t know and what you know about you that I don’t know.

Rather than focusing on each other, in the hopes that we might be able to pass value judgements on each other, perhaps we ought to each be minding our own business a lot more than we have become accustomed to, lately.

Maybe then, we can have a greater level of influence toward changing the one person on the planet that we’ve really got a shot at changing in the first place.

It occurred to me today that there’s a problem with writing things down.

I don’t know if you use lists or not, but I think that most people probably do, at least in certain circumstances. Whether it’s a to do list, to remind you of the things that you have to do, or a grocery list, to remind you of the things that you need to pick up at the grocery store, or a Christmas list, to let people know that you have certain things that you’d like to get for the holidays, using lists to keep track of things is pretty common place.

In my house, we keep these lists on the internet –> in the ‘cloud’, so to speak. This allows for the grocery list, which would normally be on the front of the refrigerator, to be accessible to the family member who just so happens to be at the store to pick up some needed supplies. Or, the kids who share their Christmas lists with their grandparents by emailing it to them, are more likely to get what’s on their list.

In addition to lists, we have other things that we write down, so that we will remember them for the future. Recipes, for example, are instructions for making a certain dish in the future –> what you need to have on hand and what to do with those ingredients in order to make the food you’d like to have. Or, take the folder that I have in my office, on a certain shelf where it is easy to get to, that says “How To” on the front. In that folder, there are a couple dozen different sets of instructions on how to do things that I do fairly often, but not often enough to have the steps memorized.

More on this in a little bit…

* * *

A significant part of the work that my students in my Psychology class do –or at least they’re supposed to do– is to write down the notes that I post for the class, on each of the lectures, in their own handwriting. In the eight or nine years that I’ve taught Psychology in my school district, this didn’t used to be a problem. But, more and more these days, my students are opposed to doing the work –the study– of writing down the notes. Instead, they are just as likely to take a picture of the notes that I post with the cameras on their phones.

I explain it to them, at the beginning of every year in my class, and periodically throughout the class, that it is important for them to write the notes down because the process of writing these notes down actually serves to store the information in the brain in a different way than the information would be stored just by reading the notes. But, whether they just don’t believe me, or whether they don’t want to do the work, some of them don’t take the notes.

It never fails that the students who don’t write the notes do worse on the chapter tests.

Additionally, the process of preparing for the chapter tests, when we reach the ends of the chapters, is a process that primarily involves reviewing the notes that the students have taken.

I actually gave a test to my students on the Friday before Thanksgiving, over the material from the fourth chapter of the class. I had a student who didn’t do very well on the test and then, almost immediately, this student asked me if they could retake the test. When I asked the student how much they studied their notes before the test, they said, “I didn’t study the notes.”

* * *

My wife has been reading a book and taking notes during the process. The book is a book that we both thought would be a good book for us to read and understand, a book on parenting.

Yesterday, she asked me –as she was getting closer and closer to finishing the book– if I was going to read the book when she was done with it, or if I was just going to read the notes that she took. Of course, without missing a beat, I told her that I was going to be reading her notes.

So, she gave me a little bit of a ribbing that I was just going to be reading her ‘Cliffs Notes’. Truth be told, though, she has been sharing her notes with me, now and then, throughout the process of her reading this book. As she has faithfully been about the process of writing down her thoughts, her summarizing statements, I will happily come around, once she’s finished, and be the reader of that writing.

Because she’s gone to the trouble of writing it, it would be a shame if someone didn’t read it. 

* * *

The problem with writing things down is that, then, it has to be read in order for it to remain in the consciousness. If I write a grocery list that stays on my refrigerator, it’s never going to be able to help me at the store. If my wife takes notes during her reading of a self-help book, but if I don’t read the notes (or the book that they came from), I am not going to benefit from all of the writing that she’s done.

If, for example, the most important words ever written then go on to be read by no one, then what is the point in doing the writing in the first place. Sometimes, people don’t want to bother doing the reading. Sometimes, the writing gets reinterpreted by someone else and then that reinterpretation is what the person down the line ends up reading.

In the opening section, I brought up the idea of memory, and that writing (and reading) are even more important when it comes to things that aren’t in our memories.

I don’t need to read the dates of my children’s birthdays because I have them memorized. I don’t need to read instructions for frying an egg, because I have those steps memorized. But, those things are also not very complicated. The more complicated a thing is, the more likely you are to need to read it –and then repeatedly re-read it– to have it in your mind.

And, if I may close with an editorial comment, I feel like there are things that have left our mind, as a nation, because we’ve stopped reading them. They’re written for us to read, and we may have had them in memory, in days gone by, but now we are at a loss without those words.

It occurred to me today that we are all coming at this thing called life from different vantage points. We’d all do well to remember that.

This morning, I was ashamed.

I didn’t start out ashamed. I started out upset. That was part of what ended up getting me to feeling ashamed. The anger.

I got a call from a parent in the school district, saying that their student was having problems with their Chromebook. So, I asked for some basic information, and I logged into my inventory system, for tracking which Chromebooks get checked out to which students, and I came to discover that the mother who was calling was the mother of the student who’d had multiple Chromebook damage incidents over a relatively short period of time. As it turned out this morning, the mother was describing a bit of physical damage to her child’s third assigned Chromebook since the start January of 2020.

While I was on the phone with the mother, trying to contain my anger –how many Chromebooks can one student break, really?– I told her that I would set aside a Chromebook in our front office for her to pick up to use in place of the Chromebook that was needing repair. I felt pretty magnanimous, considering I should have been reading this lady the riot act instead.

That’s when she told me that she wouldn’t be able to come and pick up the device. She then asked me if I would be able to bring it out to her at her home.

I’M SORRY?!?! YOU WANT ME TO DO WHAT?!?!

That’s what I was thinking. Instead, what I said was…

“Well, I should be able to do that.”

And on my way out to this student’s home, I thought about what I was going to say to the student and their parent about repeated damage incidents and continuing grace from me and the well’s starting to run dry, etc., etc.. You get the drift.

However, when I arrived at the address that I was given by the mother, I was not prepared for what I ended up seeing.

I saw squalor. That was the word that jumped into my head as I was absolutely floored by the living conditions of this family. Of course, the anger melted away. The bitterness and frustration, those things melted away, as well. I walked up to the door and gave them the Chromebook replacement that I had to deliver to them. I felt so bad for them that I was significantly more speechless than I normally am. I dropped off the working device and I collected the damaged device, and I left as quickly as I could.

Less than a mile away from the home, I couldn’t think of anything else to do, other than to call my wife and tell her the story of the encounter.

All I could think about, as I made my way back to my office in my school building, was how sad I was that there are people in the world who are living lives of poverty, and how thankful I was to have a pretty good life. But also, I was ashamed of the anger that I’d had –harbored in my heart– during my trip out to drop off that Chromebook. Anger based on my ignorance of the situation.

Do you ever stop to wonder what percentage of anger in the world is based on ignorance of the facts?

* * *

Any of you who know me very well at all understand that I attended the University of Notre Dame after graduating eleventh in my class from Buchanan High School in 1994.

I was a staff brat, which was to say that I was attending the University primarily in thanks to the staff benefit that allowed for the children of staff members to attend the University for a fraction of the cost. There certainly wouldn’t have been any other way for me to attend Notre Dame, coming from a middle class family as I did. In fact, on the day when I got my acceptance letter from Notre Dame, I remember my dad saying that he felt like he’d just been given a substantial raise.

One of the most unnerving parts of that experience at Notre Dame for me was the culture shock. As a staff brat, coming from a middle class world, there was quite a bit of adjustment involved for a small town kid thrust into the midst of several thousand upper class fellow students on a college campus. I suppose that all students feel like they have some adjustments that they have to make.

But I had to adjust to the lifestyles of my fellow classmates, in addition. Seeing how they lived, and understanding that their lifestyles were not the same as what I’d grown up accustomed to, was something that was always constantly in the back of my mind during my years at Notre Dame.

Now that I’ve come to think of it, I would imagine that the feelings that I had at Notre Dame –feelings like I was a fish out of water– are probably similar to the feelings that my students, who come from backgrounds of poverty, feel when they exist in our school for the time that they are there.

* * *

I have no doubt that there are probably people who would look on the life being lived by the mother and daughter that I visited from my school district, people in the world who would look at what I saw, and think to themselves, “Man, they’ve got it pretty nice.” But, I can you tell you for certain that I was thinking no such thing. Additionally, I am sure that there are people who would have considered my upper-class fellows at Notre Dame to be some particularly lowly sub-classification of humanity, as they peered down on them from up-above. Again, that wasn’t what I was thinking during those college years of my life.

I guess squalor, like so many other things, is relative.

In the event that you ever start thinking too highly of yourself, I suppose here’s the remedy: consider those who are further down the road than you. Conversely, when you start to feel like you haven’t got much at all, you could always peer backward at those who are striving to get to the place where you wish you were beyond.

I guess, in short, the lesson that I learned today is to count my blessings. To be thankful. I might not have everything that I’ve ever wanted, but I’ve got more than a lot of people. As most of you will be reading this right around the Thanksgiving holiday, I’ll challenge you as I got challenged –> consider the place that you’re at in this world and be thankful that you are more fortunate than so many.

It occurred to me today that so many people have outgrown their need for God.

Now, to start, I must admit that I am making the above statement facetiously. As a Christian, I believe in my need for a savior, and I’m going to discuss that in this post. But, unfortunately, I do also understand that there are people who think that religious faith is a childish thing. For them, denying themselves a relationship with God is a sign of their enlightenment.

Many of these people have walked away from the church, and an active relationship with God, because of a movement that I think is dangerous, if taken to extremes –aren’t all movements, when taken to extremes, dangerous?– and that is the self-esteem movement.

Now, as I begin, I must be clear that I am not in favor of people being made to feel excessively bad about themselves by other people who are attempting to manipulate them, usually for their own gain. Unfortunately, at times, the church as a political organization has been guilty of such tactics.

However, I think this approach can probably best be exemplified in the example of commercial advertising, especially as it pertains to products like fashion items (think, jewelry and clothes and shoes and such), cosmetics, plastic surgery, etc. Advertising for things such as these will often target people with subtle –oh so subtle– hints at how bad we look and how much we need something to make us look better. These manipulative attacks are inappropriately targeting people who have low self-esteem for the purposes of making a buck, and they would have been considered shameless not so long ago.

For example, some estimates suggest that women, during their adult life, will spend approximately a quarter of a million dollars on products to make themselves look better. The cosmetics industry is actively marketing solutions to problems that these women don’t actually have! Why is it that women, and increasingly men, are made to feel as if they need to buy these products? Just an example of esteem being lowered by the world so that they can then sell you the remedy to how they’ve made you feel.

However, the other extreme –situations in which people are made to feel excessively good about themselves by those who would manipulate them– seems to get much less press. I know it gets less press because I can feel inside my mind how much more difficult it is to come up with an example of such circumstances as these. But, be that as it may, let’s see if I can illuminate an example.

The danger on this particular polar end of the ‘self-esteem manipulation continuum’ is that we have been made to feel really good about ourselves by entities that want us to feel good about ourselves in order to keep us from doing things (read: uprisings or revolts) that would be counterproductive to their agendas.

If we were to ever end up feeling bad –appropriately so, I sometimes think– because of our circumstances and the world around us, we might not agree to play by the rules anymore. I mean, I don’t know if I’ve ever witnessed a period in America’s history like this past year, a period that involved so much protesting against the status quo. People are starting to get fed up; that certainly won’t do if those in power are hoping to keep them ‘under control’.

I don’t want to go all ‘Matrix’ on you, or anything like that, but the movie –if you haven’t ever seen it, then you absolutely must– is one giant metaphor for the situation in which most of us find ourselves –> programmed to believe the lies that we are being subjected to, in order to keep us from fighting against a system that isn’t really doing any of us a whole lot of good.

* * *

Of course, once we are controlled by others as to how we feel about ourselves, then we can be manipulated into making decisions that aren’t in our best interests. Avoiding the extremes, which I often recommend, means that we ought not to feel too badly about ourselves –as to open ourselves up to manipulation– or too highly of ourselves –as to open ourselves up to manipulation.

When it comes to our relationship with God and how we feel about ourselves –as I discussed above– we have been reinforced by the world to feel good about who we are, primarily because the world doesn’t want any revolutionaries rocking the boat. Because we don’t feel too bad about the way that things are going (and that’s the way they want it), we also don’t necessarily feel that we are in need of a savior.

But, it’s even more personal than that.

When I am able to downplay the things that I do that are wrong, and I am able to overemphasize certain menial aspects of my personality/character/skill set/etc. that I believe to be praiseworthy, then I feel better about myself than I ought to.

Now, before everyone enters into self-flagellation, which I don’t condone, let’s not go to extremes. People are broken, every last one of us. The best person that you’ve ever known is/was a broken person, with faults, inabilities, and sins that you may or may not have known about. Conversely, the worst person that you’ve ever known falls in the same category – broken. But, looking at others isn’t where it’s at. Most people will look at others in an attempt to make themselves feel better (when they look at the worst people around) or in an attempt to find something to aspire to (when they look at the best people they can find).

Either of these approaches has its extremist positions, which are to be avoided.

Instead, of spending so much time looking at each other and who’s doing what and which individual is to blame for what particular calamity and how do I rate compared to the people in my life –instead of doing these pointless things– I would like to suggest that we do something else.

We can get our esteem from the best place to go for esteem.

There is a God who loves each of us. We can get our self-esteem from that fact. Do I need the people that I work with to think very highly of me?

Nope. My God loves me.

Should I think so little of myself, just as the world would have it?

Nope. My God loves me.

If you’ve come to buy what the world is selling, if you’re going to let the world determine how you feel about yourself, if you’re complacent with being manipulated by powers that need you to buy their snake oil or to stay seated and stop rocking the boat, well then, congratulations. You’ve outgrown your need for God.

Which is to say that you’ve not outgrown anything. You’ve just switched out the one true God and replaced Him with the deceptions of mankind.

 

It occurred to me today that it can’t all be relative.

I saw a post on Facebook, from a former student of mine, and the student was talking about darkness, and how it always gets a bad rap. The post suggested that there isn’t any difference, really, between darkness and light and that people should give the same amount of respect and positivity to darkness, as they do to light.

My initial reaction was to logically dismantle the argument, which I easily could have done. Anyone with any scientific understanding at all would have no problem whatsoever showing that there are significant differences between light and darkness.

But I didn’t, primarily because I’ve come to understand that Facebook is never the place to engage someone in that kind of a discussion, but also because I recognized that this student’s post is a symptom of a much deeper disease that has been plaguing our country for the better part of the past century.

The problem is relativism, and the extents to which people are applying relativistic thinking to all sorts of things, things that aren’t necessarily capable of being thought of in a relative sense.

As many posts as I’ve written about relativism, I’m starting to come around to the idea that a little bit of relativism is probably necessary in society.

But, let’s not get carried away.

* * *

I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed the scene in The Little Mermaid where Ariel combs her hair with a fork, but I often feel like the world is heading in this direction.

I don’t know how you reacted when you first saw that scene. I was fourteen when that movie was released, so I can’t even tell you how I reacted when I first saw that scene. What I can tell you is that, when I see that scene these days, I think of Ariel as a little bit lost.

I mean, everyone knows what a fork is for. Well… obviously not everyone.

And that’s the thing. Ariel doesn’t know what a fork actually is, when she finds one in the sunken ship that she explores at the beginning of the movie. What is a girl (mermaid) to do when she doesn’t know something? Why, you head to someone with more knowledge, of course.

Ariel heads to Scuttle, the seagull. Her reasoning is sound enough: Scuttle is much more likely to be able to answer questions about the human world because Scuttle has more access to that world than Ariel has (which is almost no access at all, aside from swimming in to shore to stare at whatever might be taking place on a beach –> not likely any formal dining experiences including, but not limited to, the use of cutlery).

The problem with Scuttle is that Scuttle is a seagull, and only slightly more connected to the human world than your average member of the mer-kingdom. What Scuttle tells Ariel is that the object that she’s found is a dinglehopper.

Which it isn’t. It’s a fork.

And Scuttle tells Ariel that humans use dinglehoppers for combing their hair.

Which we don’t. It’s a fork.

The problem with this comes later in the movie, when Ariel is sitting at a dinner and she uses the fork in front of her to comb her hair; she ends up looking like a fool in front of the people who know better, including the guy she is trying to impress.

We will set aside the motives of a seagull who fabricates a story to explain something, to someone who doesn’t know any better, for the purposes of looking knowledgeable. However, this conversation (Scuttle’s motives) does have something to bear on our analysis of a world where someone might try to convince you on Facebook that light and dark are really not that different.

Rather than getting into that, let’s talk about the invention of the fork.

According to a quick read of an article from Wikipedia on forks, they’ve been around for more than a thousand years, as members of the “meal tool” family. As with anything that old, it would be impossible to say who the original inventor of the fork actually was. But, someone came up with the idea, and very few ideas –as a percentage of all ideas that have ever been thought– have the shelf-life to make it for more than one thousand years.

But, for the moment, let’s theorize about the existence of a man named Leonidus. Leo –for short– invented the fork, all of those hundreds of years ago. He invented the fork to solve a problem he and his friends were having at meals, a problem that begged for a solution. And, for more than a thousand years, Leo’s answer, to the question of how one if going to get a certain solid food item from one’s plate to one’s mouth, has stood the test of time.

Leo certainly never intended that someone would one day use his meal utensil as a hair-styling tool.

Now, whether or not you can effectively use a fork to comb your hair is arguable. Whether or not a fork is a better choice than a brush or a comb is probably also arguable. What is not arguable is that Leo didn’t invent the fork to style hair. Using it to do so is a misuse of the tool, regardless of whether or not one is free to do so.

Here’s where the relativism comes in. You see, there are many things that have been designed to work a certain way. Whether or not we know who designed certain things to work a certain way is irrelevant, and I know that it is irrelevant because people still think of Ariel as a fool when they watch her combing her hair with her fork, despite not knowing anything about the origins of the fork.

But, what if Ariel isn’t the only one forking her hair? What if a lot of people start doing it? What if, one hundred years from now, someone sits down at a table and uses a fork to pick up a piece of chicken from their plate and everyone around them gasps and laughs at them?

If you think I’m being ridiculous right now, then you’ve not been paying attention. The established ways for doing things are being slowly discarded for different approaches.

Not all of these new approaches are good approaches.

* * *

Just like anything else that I tend to write about these days, I feel like the extremes of relativism –and its sibling, absolutism– are to be avoided by anyone with a level head, especially in situations where these two philosophical approaches are used to legitimize extremist behavior.

And, if everyone –over the course of the next hundred years– decides to abandon the fork as a meal tool, in exchange for the fork as a hair-styling tool, it probably wouldn’t be the end of the world.

But, there are some things that aren’t up for interpretation. Some things have been designed to work a certain way, and they are not meant to work any other way.

Relativism would have us believe that everything is up for grabs. This isn’t true. Absolutism would have us believe that there is only one way to skin a cat. This is also not true. Somewhere between ‘skinning cats’ and ‘forks as combs’ lies this fact:

When you open a closet, darkness doesn’t pour out into the lighted room. Light pours in.

It occurred to me today that there’s been too much unleashing going on.

I heard a friend the other day, speaking to a group of people, mistakenly use the word ‘unleash’, when it was obvious by the context of what he was saying that he meant to say ‘leash’. It got me to thinking about our default toward unleashing things. I was pretty sure that he made the mistake in his spoken word choice because we probably use the word ‘unleash’ more than we use the word ‘leash’. Am I wrong?

Certainly, as verbs, ‘unleash’ gets used more than ‘leash’. The contest between the two words –which one gets used more often in casual conversation– would only be a close competition if ‘leash’ got to include his noun variant –> as in, “take the dog for a walk on its leash”. ‘Leash’ as a verb, which would mean to put something under control, and ‘leash’ as a noun, which would mean the cable, cord, or rope by which someone might leash something; those two could gang up on ‘unleash’, all by its little lonesome verb self and make a decent battle of things.

In the end though, I think ‘unleash’ might win. I think ‘unleash’ has got a little spunk to… well… unleash.

I couldn’t resist.

But, my point here isn’t to theorize about why we use one word more often in conversation –> at least, that’s not my whole point.

* * *

I have a dog named Spike. As mean and fearsome as that might sound, Spike is mostly a sweetheart. He loves to greet people when they come to our home, usually through some excessive sniffing of them and their clothes, he enjoys peeing on things in our neighborhood when we take him for walks here and there; he’s pretty much a normal dog. He has always been loyal and kind to all of the members of our family; he even puts up with the cats that the girls brought home several years back.

I’ve only had one opportunity to see my dog in the midst of what I would have characterized as wild behavior –and I don’t mean having too much to drink and then taking your top off.

During a walk around the neighborhood, many years ago, Spike and I happened upon a stray dog. This isn’t supposed to happen in town, since I believe there to be a leash ordinance in my neck of the woods. Nevertheless, there it was. It made its way toward us, in a bit of a playful trot, and I was frantically looking around for some owner somewhere, holding onto a leash that would certainly have no dog at the end of it because that owner’s dog was making its way toward me and my dog.

I didn’t see any owner.

What I saw was this dog getting closer and closer to Spike and I. Come to think of it, I’m not sure why I didn’t drag Spike back home with me, in retreat, but I didn’t. We kind of just stood there, my dog and I, bracing for impact.

Then, as the stray got close enough to raise the hairs on the back of my neck, Spike started this low growl that I’d not heard from my dog before that day, and I’ve not heard from him since. It was a growl that I think my dog must reserve for the exceedingly rare times when he knows that something is about to go down.

Initially, the stray seemed to have come up to Spike to sniff him, for that was what it started immediately doing. But, that only lasted for a moment or two. Then, they were on each other. Spike was being bitten on his side by this stray and Spike was returning fire on the stray’s head and neck. All of this while I was trying to pull Spike away and while I was also trying to get my foot or leg in edgewise to separate the two dogs from each other. Spike was easily the smaller of the two dogs, but you wouldn’t have been able to tell by his level of fighting fervor.

And while I was totally preoccupied with the fight going on and whether or not either of these two were going to end up seriously hurting each other, the owner of the stray made his way up to us, to lend his hand in getting control of his fifty percent of this entanglement. With the two of us humans on the case, separating the two dogs from each other was simple work.

I don’t remember what that man said, other than it was a slew of apologies and regrets; I wasn’t really listening to him. In my head, in that place where I go when I have thoughts that override what it is that the people around me are saying, in that place, I was all alone and I was screaming, as loudly as I could…

WHY WASN’T YOUR DOG ON HIS LEASH?!?!?!?! WHY?! WHY?! WHY?! WHY?!

Spike ended up being okay. There wasn’t any serious damage to either of the dogs, not that either of their owners could determine. Not that I would have cared if that man’s dog had taken some damage in the fight; after all, my dog was just defending himself from a menace.

Right?

* * *

If my assertion, in the opening section of the piece, that ‘unleash’ is primarily a verb, is true –> the question becomes, “Why are we using the word ‘unleash’ as often as we do?” What is it in the world that we are suggesting, so much and so often, needs to have its leash removed?

Think about it. It’s us.

Don’t believe me?!?!

I could show you the Pinterest board that I have for running inspiration, and then you can pay me a dollar for every time you see the word ‘unleash’ on one of those inspirational posters. Do you want to do that with me? We could make a game out of it?

No?

So, if we’re not in the practice of telling people to release their pets so that they might freely roam around the neighborhoods of our fair country, picking fights with other pets, but we are in the practice of encouraging each other to ‘unleash’ whatever part it is of ourselves that has been locked up unjustly, I’m just wondering about the inconsistency that’s inherent in this juxtaposition.

And if you’re thinking about telling me that animals are animals and people are people, save your breath: I’ve seen too many animals masquerading as people to think much of your attempts to draw a clear line between the two.

As a matter of fact, I know I’ve been off of my leash a time of two.

Maybe part of our problem is that, in a contest between words –which one gets used more often in casual conversation– it’s close, when it shouldn’t be that close at all.

How about you control yourself and I’ll control myself, and we can all keep our dogs on their leashes.