My Thoughts
Why is it so many unhappy folks seem to be on a quest to make everyone as unhappy as they are? It feels as though happiness is something one must no longer pursue; be unhappy as I am unhappy, or else, I will find something to make you unhappy. How dare you be happy when so many are so miserably miserable!
Why is it so many discontented people are so singularly focused on spreading their malcontent like a virus, infecting all who are obviously happily contented? Why is such deliberate infection not considered criminal any less than infecting someone with HIV? It is a perplexing conundrum.
Why is it so many are so stuffed with hatred there is no room for goodness, kindness, or love? Have you noticed those that hate the most love nothing, most specially, themselves? There simply is no room in a hateful heart for anything but hatred. Hatred is all-consuming, no good can ever come of it.
Why is it suddenly everyone is a racist, except the racist foolishly calling everyone racist? Since when did ancestral lineage confine and imprison one to an unescapable caste? In truth, that is what racism has come to mean: a systemic caste system based on the accident of your birth and your ancestry. Color and ethnicity may determine your caste unless you are deemed to be one among the multi-colored deplorables caste, which includes conservatives, flag-waving patriots who believe in liberty and freedom, Christians of every color and stripe who are pro-life, pro-family, pro-school choice, love their country, their neighbors, and their God.
What precisely is “peaceful” in hurling rocks, metal balls, baseball bats, sticks, bottles and fists at police? What exactly is “peaceful” in tearing down statues, defacing monuments, destroying businesses, burning police stations, gunning down innocent people and assaulting police engaged in protecting those they have sworn to serve and protect? Why are all police suddenly guilty until proven innocent, but all criminals are innocent until proven guilty?
Why has common sense succumbed to the feral, angry mob of masked marauders bent on chaos, anarchy, and establishing hell on earth? Why have those with the power—granted them by those who elected them to serve and protect—and the duty to enforce the law so derelict?
Chesterton once wrote of misunderstanding, remarking of how Abraham Lincoln and the American war between the North and the South was of some profit to certain Englishmen. Prompted by certain desires and prejudices some opposed the Northern power and opposed Lincoln along with it. He noted that “the sort of misunderstanding I mean is not the misunderstanding of a man or of an incident; it is rather the resolute refusal to understand anything.”
Now the sort of thing I am thinking of at the moment is this. A man might hear of an American and assume that an American was an ape. A man might dislike apes or dislike Americans, or reach the stage of fury which does not mark sufficiently the distinction between the two. A man might be so bitter against the North as to want to put a bullet into the President in the manner of Wilkes Booth. All that is red, rabid, raging prejudice; it not unfrequently reaches the point of raving lunacy; but it has nothing necessarily to do with stupidity. It is simply a hatred which hates even to hear the other side. Many men of very fine intelligence have been carried away by such hatreds. But suppose a man more or less mildly self-satisfied, not especially enraged, not in any way threatened, sat down to read Abraham Lincoln’s lucid statement about Slavery and the War. Suppose he reads it slowly and calmly, and even in a sense carefully. And suppose he then says that it is a lot of long-winded words that seem to be all about slavery not being half so bad after all. Suppose that is all he can comprehend of what the clear brain has striven so hard to make comprehensible. That is the dangerous sort of fool; that is the world-destroying sort of folly; more foolish than the bullet of Booth; more foolish even than the burning of Joan of Arc. To be unable to understand a thing intelligently because it is stated intelligibly—that is the madness with which indeed the gods destroy men.
Why is it actions no longer speak louder than words? Why is it to disprove a thing is to prove the truth of it? You say potato, I say Idaho, the mob burns the barn in “peaceful” protest. Perhaps we should just call the whole thing off. Wake up America!
Just my thoughts for a Tuesday, for what it is worth.
