Saturday, May 14, 2011

Maybe it ought to be in the news: Confessions of a Blogger


Confession: I am a news junkie. I do not think, however, that this confession is good for my soul, any more than I think watching all that news and commentary is. Sigh.

What was helpful amid the political name calling and fist clinching, was to be sent back to the Gospel of Matthew.
            “Do not judge, so that you may not be judged. For with the judgment
            You make you will be judged, and the measure you give, will be the
            Measure you get…
I love Matthew. When this book on the post-traumatic has run its course, I am going to pull out my manuscript on Matthew and see if it is publishable. Matthew nails it: be a name caller and that is what you will be called. What, give up “socialist,” “liar,” “un-American,” “liberal,” “racist”! (What is there possibly left to discuss?)

Being judgmental is like drawing a cartoon character in front of the viewer’s eyes.
            Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not see the log
            that is your own eye?
What happens, of course, is that it becomes increasingly obvious that the cartoonist is placing himself – or herself - in the originating position of sinfulness: it’s all about Me. The cartoon is inevitably drawn by a cartoonist.

            Or how can you say to your neighbor (across the aisle?), “let me take the
            speck out of your eye,’ while the log is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first
            take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the
            speck out of your neighbor’s eye.

The grounding of judgmental, and ensuring its exhibition of hypocrisy, is the assumption of exceptionalism. On principle, for example, we are against torture – except when it serves our purpose. It is the double standard that is flown by the army of the judgmental. We even had a governor ready to get his state to succeed from the union – and in a month was publically toying with the idea of running for president. We have some Civil War enactors flourishing their super-patriotism while  exhibiting the characteristics of post traumatic stress of withdrawal, alienation, and rage: blind to its implication of  undermining patriotism. No wonder PTS has the added D for disorder. The situation is, I think, a time of recall of a saying of my friends who were pipeliners in the Gulf: “You might as well laugh as cry; it’s going to pay you the same money.”

Perhaps we should be recalling Shakespeare’s line spoken by Julius Caesar:
            Let there be fat men about me. Thin men think too much.
There. I don’t care what my wife says, I am going to give up on my diet.

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