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.
It occurred to me today that the high road is probably pretty light on traffic.
On Monday, I posted a piece about hypocrisy and running one’s mouth. Unfortunately though, it doesn’t seem like our society is going to be going away from the ‘a lot of people talking about a lot of different things’ approach anytime soon.
So perhaps, we’ll just go to the highlight reel. A look at some of the hypocrisy that I’ve been privileged to witness over the past few days.
* * *
The other night, while I was watching a football game, there was a point where the announcers were agreeing with a referee’s call on the field, saying how the call was the right call and that it would have been an obvious call to make, all of this happening while the call was ‘under further review’. Then, when the call ended up being reversed, the announcers changed their tune so quickly that it was jarring.
I wasn’t the only person in the room who noticed.
My daughter turned to me and said, “How could they have been in favor of that call two minutes ago and also in favor of it being overturned just now?”
So, I took the opportunity to mention to my daughter what a ‘talking head’ is, and how people are often motivated to say the things that they believe other people want to hear.
But, that got me to start wondering about the number of people in the world who are subject to the ebb and flow of public opinion, leaning this way when it’s popular to do so, and leaning that way when it’s the more popular choice.
* * *
You may not know who Marina Sirtis is. In fact, you may only be slightly more likely to know her if I mentioned her by the name of one of the characters that has contributed most to her fame; Ms. Sirtis played Counselor Deanna Troi on the television show Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Since I happen to follow most of the actors and actresses from that show on Twitter, as a way to keep current on news about the franchise, I’ve been privy to a lot of information coming from the actress who once played a reserved, intelligent, empathic ship’s counselor.
One of her most recent tweets was anything but empathic, specifically in reference to whether or not it was likely to expect that she would gloat about a recent Republican loss any less than those Republicans gloated about Democratic losses in 2016.
Now, don’t get me wrong, because I am not at all upset when people of low moral character get voted out of office. Ms. Sirtis and I probably can agree on a number of issues surrounding the most recent political elections.
But…
While I was thinking about how great an actress you would have to be in order to play someone so compassionate on a television show, while it turns out to be the case that you are so much less so in real life, I was also thinking about how ‘an eye for an eye’ leaves the world blind.
I was also thinking about storming the field.
* * *
I don’t know if you heard or not, but the Notre Dame football team beat the number one team in the country (Clemson) this past weekend. It was easily the most exciting and satisfying game that I’ve watched Notre Dame play in the last decade, at least. At the end of the game, in celebration and excitement, the students –and probably most of the other people who had been allowed in the stadium– stormed the field to celebrate.
The President of the University, Father John Jenkins –a man that I have often had reasons to admire and respect– issued a statement expressing his disappointment about the decision of the fans to do such a thing, in the midst of a pandemic.
I was hoping he wouldn’t say a word, considering his own predicament.
On September 26th, Father Jenkins was present at the ceremony in the Rose Garden of the White House, celebrating the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, an event that Dr. Anthony Fauci later described as a “superspreader event”. In fact, Father Jenkins’s attendance at that event was a direct violation of instructions that he’d given to members of the Notre Dame campus community, asking them to restrict travel in the best interests of the University’s health and safety.
That particular choice of his, most certainly motivated out of a level of excitement about the nominee’s connection to the University, has caused much consternation for the President, from the students and faculty members at the University. Calls for the President’s resignation, and the threat of a vote of no confidence from the faculty, loom large for Father Jenkins.
His excitement lead him to poor decision-making in the same way that those students most certainly stormed the field without safety in the forefront of their minds.
Can someone please take the off-ramp to the high road? Anyone?
* * *
I guess, at the end of the day, what I’m trying to get at is this: hypocrisy is a plague among us. Its rampant destruction results from our inability to master our own tongues; the truth of the matter is that you’re not likely to find many silent hypocrites roaming around.
Talk is cheap, so cheap in fact that it seems to be what people are most likely to do –> in fact, what’s even cheaper than talk is social media ‘talk’, where people are free to say all manner of crazy things, things that they wouldn’t dare say in front of someone else in person, for fear of the repercussions.
BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH.
If your idea of making the world a better place is posting your opinions on social media, subjecting the people around you to your inflated observations –and that’s all you do in the name of social change– then you shouldn’t be surprised/angry/upset when the world around you doesn’t seem to be getting any better.
Especially if you aren’t living out those opinions in your daily life. I hate to break it to you, but some of the people that you are friends with on Facebook actually get to watch you walk around all day, acting contrarily to what you suggested we should all be doing.
I guess that’s my point, having come around to it in a rather round-about kind of way: it has to start with us, with each of us. Am I responsible for Father Jenkins’s travel plans? No, I am not. Am I responsible for calling people to account for the opinions they profess that seem to be in contradiction to the way they live? No, I am not.
But, I can start with me. If we all just started being intentional about working on ourselves, and our own imperfections and inconsistencies, we’d hopefully improve. And, as a by-product, we’d have less time to be judging each other.
It occurred to me today that it has to start somewhere.
I’m a hypocrite, and I’m not sure how to fix it.
Maybe I should edit that last sentence.
I’m a hypocrite, and I have a basic understanding of how to go about fixing it, but I’m not sure that I want to do what’s required.
There. That’s more accurate.
Obviously, there are a couple of different ways to approach one’s hypocrisy. The first, and most obvious way would be to stop talking so much. Since hypocrisy is a combination of saying something to someone about what they ought to do, and then doing something else for yourself, people who keep their mouths shut more often are probably much less likely to be hypocrites, simply because they have less often said things that they might end up later contradicting with their actions.
If only the world was more quiet. If only people made fewer brazen declarations, out of a fear that they might end up being discovered as a hypocrite down the road when they contradict themselves. If only.
I’ve, on many occasions, written about our proper course, about the decisions that we should all be considering, that we don’t end up considering. Probably more times than I’d like to admit, more times than I might even be aware of, I am guilty of violating –in big ways and in small ways– the very positions that I claim that we should all be taking, the very choices that I claim that we should all be making.
Take this, for example:
In the spring, right around the start of the pandemic, I wrote a post on this blog about mask-wearing and about following the guidelines that –at the time– the CDC had just released. But, then, probably only a few hours after publishing that post, I was caught in public by someone that I know, someone who knows me, without a mask on. Truth be told, back then, I was still getting used to mask-wearing and having one with me wherever I go. I’m fairly certain that, back then, this person was not reading the blog that was, back then, just getting off the ground, so at the end of the day, my hypocrisy wasn’t apparent to them, and it probably wouldn’t ever have been recognized by anyone else. Back then.
Of course, the other approach to fixing the problem of one’s own hypocrisy is to modify one’s own behavior so that it comes into accordance with what one has claimed to be appropriate and right. If I decide to run my mouth on a regular basis, this becomes more of a challenge of course, since I end up having to bring my own behavior in line with a whole host of different comments that I’ve made.
Having said all of this, I’m not sure which would be more difficult: to keep my mouth shut more often or to obey the edicts that I hand down from my imagined position of superiority.
That’s a tough one.
I’ve written about division in our nation on this blog, but what have I done to unify the people around me? I’ve written about hatred on this blog, but what have I done to show love? I’ve written about moderation and discovered myself to occasionally be an extremist. The list goes on and on.
A little less conversation, a little more action, please.
* * *
I’ve often thought that there ought to be a talk-tax, or maybe a daily limit to speech. Say, everyone is allowed to speak five thousand total words per day, and then a tax accrues for every two hundred words extra you say after that. So, for example, I’d have to be careful with how much talking I do on Sundays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays, since I’d want to come home and then write a one-thousand word blog post in the evenings on those days. Or, I’d have to be willing to pay that price.
Perhaps I could get sponsored by some of my readers, people who (might) think that what I have to say (write) would be worth paying the ‘talk overage tax’ for me –in whole or in part. Any takers?!?!
Of course, we’d work social media posts of all forms into this, to keep those people who talk too much on the internet (including me, perhaps) from annoying the rest of us with their drivel. And then, people who talk for a living would have their ‘talk overage tax’ covered by their employers.
Of course, we’d have to play it by ear at the start. Maybe the daily total number isn’t quite right. Maybe the ‘talk overage tax’ concept needs to be tweaked. But, I’m sure we could work something out.
Oh, and here you go. People can buy extra words. You know how? They engage in making the world a better place, for points, and those points are redeemable for extra words. If I want to be able to go home at the end of a full day of talking at work, then I’ll spend time on the weekend volunteering at the local homeless shelter. This will earn me twenty-five points that I can use to purchase twenty-five hundred extra words.
At least then we won’t have as many people talking about a better world and not doing anything about it.
Ooh, and here’s an idea.
Everyone has a bank –> maybe it’s a weekly bank or maybe it’s a monthly bank (it seems to be that a daily bank wouldn’t have the same sting to it) and people would have to learn how to budget their words like we ought to learn to budget our dollars and cents.
Of course, I’m just shooting in the dark here.
Just trying to come up with a way to quiet things down a little bit.
If I had a dollar for every time that I’ve heard someone opine about the world in its current state, and I knew in my heart that the person in question wasn’t going to do a darn thing about the situation, other than whine, I could most certainly afford to pay may ‘talk overage tax’ for weeks and weeks to come.
It occurred to me today that there are many things that vary by degrees.
Three students take a test in a class. The first students fails the test with a 58%. The second student gets a D- by scoring at a 62%. The third student gets a 74%, which earns them the mark of a straight C.
Should that student –the one with the straight C– be proud of themselves? I don’t think I would be proud of a C. But, maybe one hundred students have taken this same test, and only thirteen of those one hundred were even able to pass the test; what then? Imagine if the top score of all one hundred of the students to have taken the test is that 74%. Should they be proud then?
What if the proctor is expecting only As? What if every score that isn’t an A (90% or higher) is determined to be a failure?
That’s a pretty high bar.
Or imagine it this way –> three men have problems with looking at women with lust on their minds. The first man looks at just about every woman that he sees with lust on his mind. The second man does it once or twice a day. The third man does it a couple of times a week. Is one of these three doing a better job than the others? On the one hand, you’d be tempted to say that these men are various in their level of depravity; on the other hand, though, they’ve each got a bit of a problem.
What if the expectation is that a man should never look lustfully at a woman –except his own wife, perhaps– ever in his whole life?
Imagine three children come in from playing in the backyard. One of them has dirt all over their hands. The second has dirt all over their hands and face. The third is covered from forehead to feet with clumps of drying mud and caked-on dirt. Would you say that one of them is dirtier? You probably would, and you’d be right. But, that doesn’t make the other two not dirty. All three of these children are dirty, and they vary by degrees, but they ought to EACH be defined as filthy –> because they are.
Or are they? I can hear you thinking it –because I’m thinking it, too– that the kid with just the dirty hands isn’t filthy, per se. And I’d have to agree with you, if we’re going to compare that kid to his two peers. But, what it we are going to compare that kid with the dirty hands to a fourth child, one who is freshly out of the shower, who is as squeaky clean as they are ever likely to be? Then, that kid with the dirty hands starts to feel a little more filthy.
* * *
I’m becoming more and more disgusted with some of the tendencies that I see in American Christianity. Of course, if you know me, you know that I’m a Christian, and you know that I’m an American, so a statement like this doesn’t roll easily off of my tongue. Nevertheless, my conviction is growing that we are getting a lot of what we’re doing completely wrong.
One of the things that I think we are messing up is our attitude of self-righteousness.
Ten is larger than six, and six is larger than four, but is ten big? How about when we compare than ten with one billion?
Am I better than my neighbor because I go to church and they don’t? Are my neighbors better than the axe murderer rotting in a federal prison? Are any of us ‘good’?
Nope. Especially when you think about where the bar is.
Isaiah 64 has a great verse on this concept. In verse 6, it says that all of our righteousness is like filthy rags. Or, if your a New Testament kind of a person, look at Romans 3. Verses 10 through 12 say that there is not even one good person on the planet.
And here’s the problem with filthy rags. The unsaved, unchurched, lost sheep in the world, the lost sheep wandering around in the yard outside of the American Christian church, they are all wearing filthy rags. But, here’s the thing:
So is the American Christian church.
The only difference –besides the forgiveness and mercy and grace of God– is that the lost sheep aren’t feeling better about themselves and their behavior than they ought. American Christians who’ve forgotten that they are in need of a savior repel the lost sheep by pretending that they aren’t still wayward sheep, most of the time –> filthy sheep themselves.
No one is good; there is not even one.
Ten is only four more than six, and it’s only six more than four, but ten is also nine hundred and ninety-nine million, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety short of one billion.
That’s what American Christians would do best to keep in mind. We fall short. SO VERY VERY SHORT. The bar is so high that we couldn’t get over it driving the shiniest Cadillac to the prettiest church on every Sunday of every year for our entire lives.
And what we lose by pretending that we are better than we are is that we end up distancing ourselves from the people around us who need the same mercy and grace and forgiveness that we’ve found at the foot of the Cross, not because of how cool we are or how well we know the Bible, but because we heard the message. How can we tell people about the message that we’ve heard when we’ve built walls between them and us, walls built out of our own self-righteous non-sense? There isn’t a person on the planet who wants to approach their friend or neighbor to discuss the things that they are struggling with, when that neighbor or that friend has forgotten that they’re a sinner as well.
Ladies and gentlemen, I am here to tell you that I am filthy. And so are you. And so are your friends –the self-righteous ones and the wallowing heathens, alike. Heaven isn’t going to one day be full of people who mastered appropriate human behavior.
Ten really isn’t that much closer to a billion than six or four is. God forgives the ten for not being a billion, and the six, and the four.
There are two kinds of filthy sheep in the world –> forgiven filthy sheep and lost filthy sheep. There aren’t any clean sheep. And if you’re a filthy sheep that’s looking around and thinking, “Hey, look at how clean I am!”…
It occurred to me today that the tower sometimes falls.
If you are unfamiliar with the game Jenga, it starts with a tower that is made out of rectangular blocks that are laid on top of each other, three blocks to a level, in levels that lie perpendicular to those above and below, eighteen levels in all.
Once the tower of fifty-four blocks is built, players take turns removing blocks, judiciously, from the tower, hoping to avoid causing the tower to fall. The player who causes the tower to fall is the loser, obviously.
The game is fun, inasmuch as it is fun to watch the tower fall, especially if someone else is responsible for that oops. Early on in the round, it’s not a terribly difficult thing to do –> to get one of the blocks out of the tower. But, as play progresses, the tower becomes more and more unstable, and it is more and more likely that a person –especially if they have a particularly low level of dexterity– is going to cause it to fall.
This morning, it occurred to me that the game is a metaphor for life, in a few very interesting ways.
* * *
2020 has been a pretty decent year for me; but I feel kind of bad voicing that sentiment out loud. With all of the memes going around that discuss the horrors of 2020 –I literally just spent fifteen minutes looking at 2020 memes; it’s no wonder writing these posts takes me so long, sometimes– and the fact that a lot of people are just clawing and scratching their way to December 31st, hoping for a new start in 2021, there’s a little bit of guilt that goes along with saying to people that I’ve had a great year.
I am in the greatest physical shape of my life, as nearly as I can tell. I ran a half-marathon on October 10th, which I certainly wouldn’t have been able to do at the start of this year. I’ve written more than 650 pages of fiction and non-fiction prose since the start of the year, and I have most definitely never done that before. I’ve made some other, minor, positive changes in my life that have contributed to my overall sense of health and well-being.
All of these changes have reminded me of Jenga, inasmuch as the game really is about removing things from a structure and hoping that the thing is still standing when you’re done.
Getting rid of the excuses and making the necessary changes to move myself forward this year was challenging, and I was a little afraid of how some of those changes were going to affect my lifestyle, but the tower is still standing; dare I say that the tower is better off for me having removed some of what was getting in my way.
Of course, you don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, which is to say that you can’t go overboard when it comes to making a bunch of changes in your life, and I recognize that. But, I’m also starting to recognize, the older that I get, that I’m not looking down the road at as much ‘remaining time’ as I used to see. It’s time to stop kidding around, for me –and maybe also for you.
No change means no progress.
* * *
As I was discussing the concept for this post with my wife, she reminded me that there was a particularly challenging part of the game of Jenga that I was totally forgetting about. If you are a fan of the game, maybe you noticed it, as well, when I described the game in the opening section.
In Jenga, when you remove a piece from the tower, you have to place it back on top of the tower, which is to say that you are building on top of what it is that you are slowly destroying.
Admittedly, it has been some time since I’ve played the game, so I have to apologize for having left out that little detail. And, as my wife was reminding me of this part of the game, I was already thinking about how that affects my metaphor. If you can imagine the game a little better now, where you remove pieces from underneath to place them on the top, you can see that this ends up becoming a balancing act, of sorts. It’s an additional, challenging part of the game to be sure, stacking the pieces on the top of the tower without causing it to fall over.
I don’t know if you’ve ever thought of your life as a balancing act, but I’ll bet a lot of people have. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a plate spinning performer before –perhaps at the circus– but I often feel like my life is a constant exercise in trying to keep several spinning plates up in the air, on top of these thin poles, and it’s not as easy as it might sound. Others think of their lives as a tightwire act, where they are really doing their very best to maintain as much balance as possible, in order to avoid falling off the high-wire.
Jenga is as good a metaphor as any for this difficult balancing act that we call life, come to think of it. Removing blocks from the base of the tower to build onto the top of the tower becomes, without great attention to detail, an exercise in improper foundational mechanics. Of course, at the beginning of the game, the fifty-four blocks that you start your tower with are a very solid foundation –perhaps lacking a little width, but otherwise pretty concrete. But, as you go through the process of weakening your foundation, block by block, you are then hoping that what you’re left with is enough to build upon.
Life is a balancing act, to say the least. It’s not nearly as delicate, or dangerous, when you’ve got a firm foundation. The less firm that foundation is, the closer you probably are to a crash.
It Occurred To Me Today 