If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my free Email alerts. Thanks for visiting!
“GET A LIFE”
by OPOVV, ©2015
(Jan. 15, 2015) — Ever noticed that the lower the IQ, the more people are prone to resort to violence as a problem-solving technique? Our prisons are filled to capacity with slow learners, people who think that a “trip” can only be generated by drugs, whereas it’s the imagination that can send people to different worlds in different times. For proof, try reading Edgar Rice Burroughs.
“Turf” is yet another measuring stick of a person’s challenge to worth, as in “my neighborhood” rather than “my world.” Inner cities are controlled by superficial quests and captures, retreats and defeats. Anyone for chess? Wasted lives due to meaningless values, where drugs are bought, sold and traded in conjunction with human trafficking. If you think that a streetwalker is a career choice, or working out of a bar for money, there are more than two victims involved.
Society suffers because of greed and moral collapse. The businessman out of town cheating on his wife. The wife cheating on her husband while he is at work. And for what? The destruction of a stable relationship and the absence of trust. If you can’t trust your spouse, you sure as heck aren’t going to trust a stranger. What chance, pray tell, would Jesus Christ have in America today, or Jerusalem? The same chance he had back then, is what.
Some people take offense very easily, saying stuff like, “You making fun of me?” and “What you mean by that?” If there were a scale of social blunders, those who are prone to be “offended” would lead the list. Lack of social skills directly equates to lack of education, and not necessarily the book-learning kind.
Sunday school teaches our children to defer to adults, among other social attributes. “Please,” “I’m sorry,” and “Thank you” are encouraged phrases that they master, even if the other person is in the wrong. I have used the “I’m sorry” diffusing technique often in life, even in the supermarket where someone obviously cuts my cart off. I’ll just say, “Oops, sorry,” as if I’m the one at fault when clearly it was the other person not paying attention and acting selfishly. It’s obvious, even to the offending party.
Some people get “offended,” which I’ve never quite understood. I remember the first time I saw a photo of Jane Fonda’s big smile at an anti-aircraft site in Hanoi. I remember the feeling of my stomach falling, but I wasn’t “offended,” just disappointed. When I saw a photo of a statue of Jesus in a tube of urine I was sorry for the individual who didn’t understand the teachings of Christianity. I wasn’t “offended,” but I was disappointed.
Even on 9-11 I wasn’t “offended,” just flabbergasted at the monumental futility of it all; a complete waste of human life; of people blaming others for their own shortcomings; using violence as an excuse for their own ignorance, for their own lack of maturity in forgiving the ignoramuses in life; their inability to look into the mirror and see an admission of failure rather than a challenge to make this a better world, if not for themselves than certainly for the next generation.
No, the reality is that we’ll always have the “Little People” among us. Pol Pot was little, little in refusing to believe in the worth of an individual, an ideology shared by other despots.
Now we have a great many people who believe they are “offended” when, after the veneer of destructive writings is exposed, they are just ignorant in the ways of the world and are unwilling, unable, and unbending to venture further than their narrow belief system.
The well-read cosmopolitan person has an immense advantage over someone trapped in a puritanical and a parochial belief system. Whereas one will add to the wealth of human knowledge, the other will, generation after generation, wallow in self-pity.
The advice? If you’re “offended,” get a life.
