I was going to have a great post with a seven minute video at the end. I tried to put it up yesterday. In case you didn’t know: Seven minute videos don’t load even after you leave the little blue thing spinning for a whole day!
So this morning all you are getting is me saying I have a whopping headache, worse than the one I went to sleep with, drugs are not touching it. Made worse I am sure by video recording my ride on the back of Dirt’s bike on Sunday. And it wouldn’t be so bad if I had not had one of my stupid “the world is ending tonight, you’re separated from your children and all is chaos” dreams.
I have not had one of those in a long long long time, stupid world-ending dreams. I started them in junior high when everyone was convinced we were all going to be vaporized by our nuclear weapons, except for the fourteen people who had the perfect bunker with couple dozen years to wait out the radioactivity. Something akin to Blast from the Past.
When I was in elementary school I just had plan old war dreams. I attribute those to all the war movies I watched with my dad, the stories he would tell, or my mom’s stories of life on the home front or the history behind it all, and playing WWII in the rhododendrons with my brother, Chris (you know the one with the clam in his teeth A Flag On the Ceiling and a Promise Kept).
It wasn’t until the teachers drummed it into our heads that we would most likely be the last generation on earth because man was going to foolishly destroy himself, that I began to have dreams of complete annihilation. The nuns just had us practice hiding under our desks every so often, it was the lovely Public School teachers, the highly educated teachers (the nuns went to their own school not a university you know) that felt it necessary to drum it into people who could barely think a straight line that we had no tomorrow, not really. Well, if you did have a tomorrow you should spend it perpetually in school of course, that was the way to get ahead in a future none of us had.
By the time I hit high school doom and gloom was in full throttle for me. There was no point of anything. Why try to think very hard about what you were going to do in the future, there wasn’t going to be one. Even though my parents tried to counter act this, this sentiment continued, decisions were made on short term basis in my head. “What if we have a year or two.” Yes, for the most part those same people were yapping about planning for a future but the furture talk was not any where near the level of the hand-wringing-fatalistic talk.
Even getting married, I was convinced by the doom and gloomers that Dirt and I would never see old age, it wasn’t just a matter of not being able to picture myself as old, I actually had moments of seeing myself as an ecentric old woman, but those were blotted quickly out by visions of nuclear winters.
Then I went back to college.
And though I was there to focus on science, I got caught up in history classes. I loved history already but on a very surfacy level. Now I was digging deep and seeing that for most of our modern times man’s way of politically motivating each other was through dire doom and gloom scenarios. It truly appeared before me that those in power had more to gain by keeping everyone slightly off footing by hyperbolizing all that could happen. Making it sound as if it was going to happen any day now.
I thought it couldn’t get any worse than what I lived through from junior high to about the fifth year of marriage. But boy howdy, this era has sure topped that one in doom and gloom scenarios from all sides. Fortunately I don’t live in doom and gloom land anymore. But every once in a while through the Nightly News cast, or well meaning hyped up friends, or lovely talk radio, my subconscious tries to click in with some version of panic and fear. So then I wake with a headache and the job of calming my poor defiled brain down.
My dad had a story of when he was young and sold an item called the Baby-Tenda when his family needed extra income. He and my mom both talked about it and would describe the “book” he made up and took door to door, it had pictures and news articles of highchair accidents. My dad would tell me that it is a salesman’s job to impress upon someone their need for the salesman’s product; safety was always a big draw. What better way of showing the safety of your product than by showing the danger and irresponsibility of other products out there.
When you are a politician your product is essentially you, and to some extent your causes, some politicians are more closely associated with particular causes and some only care about themselves. Applying the safety/hazzard concept it is easy to see why politicians act the way they act. It doesn’t just occur during election cycles, politics is always selling, they require repeat customers. As do those who turn a commercial buck off of political climates, no pun intended but I will leave it. Even if someone only buys your product, politics, every two years you really must be applying sales techniques constantly, lest the other side draw them away.
Even as ordinary citizens we want others to think like we do, we like company even when we are recluses, the company just needs to stay on their side of the hedge. This is another reason we are constantly baraged with “believe this brand of doom and gloom,” we ourselves, once we have succumbed to the sales pitch, desire that others join us. We have all seen how the hype, the hyperbole of danger, works and we certainly do not care to be standing alone on any particular decision. Even if it really is a non-decision, something that we actually cannot change or effect and will not actually change or effect us personally. If we have made a decision on a subject, we want company. So we employ the same tactics as those the salesman and the politician used on us.
There really are few people that are totally objective on any given subject. Yep, I am that cynical. I do it myself. I can get as zanged up as the next person. Convinced, of course, that if a person disagrees with my view point they are a fool and deserve the demise they are headed for, however the splatter will most likely hit me, hang it all.
I try not to. Well, when I slow down and think of being a Baby-Tenda salesman, and how repulsive that seems to my inner being, then I try not to. When you are scooped up in a thought pattern, when you whole heartedly believe in something, you might want to take a few moments to reflect on how you got there. Slow down and emotionally detach yourself and look at the facts, research both sides, attempt to be as objective as you can be. Avoid obvious hyperbole. Look at the paycheck. What investment, commercial or personal, in the concept does the packager of the information hold?
I’m not saying that everyone who has something to sell is lying. Everyone has something to sell and hopefully not every one is a liar. But truth can get distorted, information can be withheld, we can have a blind spot because of our history. We are all influenced by someone, we are all someone’s student. Who are you a student of? Who influences your life? What things do we just naturally assume without investigating and weighing the options.
What? Am I going back on previous posts about feelings being valid? Not at all. I am convinced that “facts” and “logic” can be as distorted as emotions and our emotions can be as obedient to Christ as our “logic” without ceasing to be an emotion or feeling.
Our “logic” is alway based on premises and if those premises are allowed to be cripplingly narrow, our logic that flows from them will be likewise. If our premises are allowed to be of the type that have undergone the likes of this verse: We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ (2 Corithians 10:5) then we are headed on the right path.
We ought to be careful of what we leap to believe because it “sounds” similar to what we already believe, we need to be careful, not fearful, careful, of who we put our trust in when it comes to influences for our very lives. We are told this in Colossians 2:8: See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the basic principles of this world rather than on Christ. (emphasis mine)
And I know it seems weird for some subjects to be run through the Holy Spirit mill, but you know I cannot think of one area of my life that God would care to be excluded from. Everything, everything, belongs to Him. After all He created all that is made. So therefore everything in my life, in Dirt’s and my life, gets run throught the Holy Spirit mill, well we aim for everything to go through it, not unlike Apostle Paul,yet even more so, we are hardly there but we certainly keep running on the right track.
The Holy Spirit mill? What the heck am I talking about? It is testing things, mostly our own hearts and minds and what others say, to see where it comes from. Run the word test into your concordance tool, check out the New Testament references and you’ll see where I am coming from. You may not agree and that’s okay, today I am cool with disagreement. Disagree away. It really is okay. I’m not zanged up anymore and I don’t need company, (well I do, I just won’t twist your arm or subvert myself to get it.)
But now I really have to run the girls to the feed store to get poultry leg bands and drop off books at the library and pick up ones on soil etc. This was a lot to say with a headache, and yes, it will be better, and no, it doesn’t have me on the couch with ice. I will be okay; and you…? have a great day Dear Reader.
