Keeping Your Head in a Mad Mad World!

Ok, so once again… I’m reminding you that I am a follower of Christ.

Please don’t read into that, where you think you hear me saying I am somehow perfect… or better than anyone in particular… or all knowing… etc…_ you fill in the blank.

So, when I wax (in someone’s eyes anyway) judgmental, please understand that I am most often referring to what I believe to be true and supported by scripture (the Bible).

Now that that’s out of the way, here goes:

I try really, really hard to not over watch network news or any other mainstream news, simply because it is in fact ratings driven. Therein lies the biggest reason why it is somewhat untrustworthy and unreliable (some people, well known people are referring to it as: “fake” these days).

You be the judge.

In fact if there is any challenge in this post, this is it: Sort through the recent news and try this: Come to your own opinion. Make a judgment call on your own. Decide where you stand and don’t let me, a “news” network, a friend, or a conspiracy theory website make your decisions for you.

Stop being a lemming!

Stop being the follower of a crowd just because it is the popular thing to do… Rock the boat… just a little.

I can tell you all kinds of stories about what it’s like to take the unpopular view.

Much of the time it really isn’t much fun. Much of the time you meet with ridicule, being ostracized, cruel talk, and maybe even violence for holding an unpopular view.

I say this with not a little fear and trembling.

I have taken stands in the past and even in the present where my beliefs, my talk, and my actions were all in alignment, but they weren’t lined up with many of the people around me.

I’m ultimately ok with that. I am.

You see, I know and understand that somewhere in there lies the true definition of tolerance.

To be tolerant has never meant that I have to agree with what you say, what you believe, or what you do. It in its most simple form is that we agree to disagree and that we can do so (in my opinion at least) peacefully. This is an example of true gentility, where we can be adamantly opposed to what we each believe, but we aren’t going to resort to bully tactics to force the other to not only accept and/or adopt our beliefs, but to actually present them as “normal.”

Now, this is not to say that our society within the rule of law, should take on such an open ended way of thought that it should accept no standards for right or wrong, no standards for what is viewed as acceptable practices, nor allowing our country’s citizens to come up with their own interpretation of law and practices.

I am a firm believer in the U.S. Constitution as it was written and I am personally firmly opposed to those who would alter it. If you read it through, I don’t for a minute believe that it there is any reason to conclude that it is any less applicable today than it was over 200 years ago.

It’s that well written.

Those who keep crying out that it is a living document and subject to change don’t understand that at its heart lies the truth, and simple straight forward protections for our freedoms.

If you rewrite the constitution, then you risk losing some of the foundational reasons why it was created and the protections that it provided to us all. If we rewrite it now, during one of the most contentious and divided times in our nation’s history, then we risk making it into a document that steals the freedoms from the masses and hands them to an elitist minority.

Instead, we need to focus our energies on building on its foundation to build bridges from one group of people, from one cultural viewpoint, from group of opinions to establish understanding and sympathy for other’s points of view.

Once we have the building block of sympathetic understanding, then we can dialog about meeting in the middle on some issues to establish compromise and mutually agreed upon solutions, not band aids.

The hardest part of what I’m discussing here is this:

Not everyone can have their way. Not everyone will be satisfied. Some minor individual needs will go unfulfilled.

If we insist that every individual and every minority opinion must be satisfied, then we will never reach a state of sustainable peace.

And this country, this world… we desperately need peace.