If extraterrestrials were to land in our part of the world seeking intelligent life, I often think they’d return to their mother ship reporting that none exists. I do not believe extraterrestrials exist, but on this point, I tend to agree with their nonexistent little selves.
We pay for little plastic bottles filled up with water most often from municipal water supplies exotic because they are not ours. Refilling a bottle from our own tap is evidently unbearably difficult.
We pay appalling prices for devices designed primarily for use in communication, chain ourselves to them as their indentured servants, and allow them to snuff out real communication with folks we love in the very same room.
The same country that once sent barely-college-age kids to fight for freedom and dodge (or not) bullets and shrapnel in world wars now sends kids to colleges with “safe zones” lest reality and free speech be too much for them to bear.
Sorry for this picture, but in our culture, I could actually pull my pants down around my ankles, show off my underwear, and whine that people are “disrespecting” me. May I summon all the eloquence of the English language to comment, “Duh.”
In this land where most of us have way too much to eat, models starve themselves to try to look or be anorexic while over 20,000 people in our world die of hunger each day. Shrink wrap fashions in our land seem absolutely designed to make girls of normal weight suddenly look and feel like they’re twenty pounds over the “limit” and deprive them of their already lagging self-esteem. As a grandfather of some beautiful little girls approaching the teenage years, I confess that if I hear anyone say “weight” around them, I will be sorely tempted to nail his or her tongue to the wall and set the fool afire.
That’s not funny, but, forgive me, this tickles my “truth is stranger than fiction” funny bone: In Texas, we just witnessed a Senate race between a Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke and a Rafael Edward Cruz. It’s not hard to figure out which candidate leans pretty hard left and which leans pretty hard right, or, for whatever difference it makes (none), which is of Irish descent and which of Cuban, but it was a good reminder to avoid stereotypes. If an Ian Alexander Sean O’Guitierrez runs for governor, I’ll not try to guess his politics, but I’ll likely vote for him just to get to chuckle—and for that aforementioned reminder.
And, back to the “Emperor Has No Clothes But We Buy Them Anyway” fashion category, we’re quite used to folks, mostly with no more holes in their heads than the general population, buying jeans with put-there-on-purpose rips for which they pay good money in pursuit of holey-ness. My favorite old Henley shirt has developed gaping holes in the sleeve-ends. I hate to part with it, but I’m tempted to jack up the price, pay someone to sneak it in to a teeny or tweeny section of Macy’s, start a trend, and start raking in the profits.
Long ago, Jesus said basically that Wisdom was everybody’s mama, or at least that everyone claimed to be her (wiser than average) child. We do crazy things in her name.
Yet how’s this for universe-class crazy, completely “over the top”? God sending his only Son as a baby in Bethlehem! But it wasn’t crazy at all. Within it was the breathtaking wisdom of God himself, mixed with unimaginable love.
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Copyright 2018 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.