Disney Has Some Explaining to Do

I think as good, honest hard-working american citizens, we need to boycott Disney. Today. They are discriminatory biggots who give no regard to consistent thinking. Here's my reasoning:

Why should one dog get to be personified as a regular, doofy guy who tries hard but fails, and still ultimately ends up in a better situation, while one dog has to crawl around on the ground and be subserviant to of all things, a MOUSE, while yet another gruop of dogs are portrayed as good-natured criminals who cheat, lie and steal? Are not all dogs created equally? In real life, dogs are all like Pluto. They don't raise kids, rival with their neighbors over who has a better, bigger house, create elaborate schemes to steal money from talking ducks, or play sports (with the exception of frisbee).

So I am calling on all of you who live within the peramiters of reality to notify Disney of your decision to boycott their ridiculous portrayals of kid, loyal animals. Tell them to give equal rights to all dogs, beagle, terrior, hound, or whatever he may be. It's time for this foolishness to stop, and it begins with you.

If we don't do something before it's too late, Disney will be personifying their select versions of cats, birds, horses, even pidgeons, while leaving others of the same species to play menial roles, crawling on the ground, begging for food, and causing trouble. It isn't fair. It isn't right. Let's change this while we can.

Fire

I wanted to write an entry so I could use this picture I took at our fire last night. I decided not to write an entry, but just to allow everyone to enjoy the fire that I enjoyed. It was warm and big.

Life is good today. I got started on the next book in my "series" I'm writing. I wasn't in a hurry to write it, becausae my character Laurel is finally grduating from high school, and I feel about as ready as she is for her to leave for college. But it's OK now. I have my second wind with this story, and it's starting to fall into place, even though I'm only on page seven.

The Paradox of Humility

Humility is almost a paradoxal acheivement. Once you've reached that point, you can't even admit it to yourself or you risk arousing pride again. Ben Franklin put it nicely in his autobiography: "In reality, there is, perhaps, no one of our natural passions so hard to subdue as pride. disguise it, struggle with it, beat it down, stifle it, mortify it as much as one pleases, it is still alive, and will every now and then peep out and show itself; you will see it, poerhaps, often, in this history; for, even if I could conceive that I had completely overome it, I would probably be proud of my humility."

We are all guilty of depricating ourselves in an effort to be, or at least appear, humble. I never used to think a lot of it, but recently I noticed that a spiritual leader who I respect a lot, who carries insight and wisdom beyond his years, is frequently downplaying his thoughts and making himself look less respectable. I don't know what his motives for that are. Maybe he really does have low self-esteem. Maybe it's just because that's what he considers an accurate perception of himself. Maybe it is. I don't know him well enough to judge that, but it got me to thinking about myself.

I've always thought that I didn't have a lot to offer the rest of the world. I find myself getting depressed over the way people think about me, and how I preform. In high school, I would share these frustrations with a good friend and he was constantly syaing to me, "Stop depricating yourself!" I didn't really even know what it meant, and I certainly didn't know why he was telling me not to say something that was, to me, true. Now that I'm older and have been in his position, I think I understand a little bit of where he was coming from. He was my friend. He liked me as I was, and it sort of made him sad when I would downplay the gifts I had, talk poorly about myself, and compair myself to others. In a way I was telling him that I wasn't worth it to him, but he knew that wasn't true. Sometimes now, when I hear people I like or respect saying stuff like, "I'm going to say this but it doesn't mean much because it's coming from me" or "This is reading for those of you who are bored enough to actually bother with me", I want to stop them and say "Who is it who decides that?" It isn't always the writer that determines how useful his writing is. When people say things like that, it discredits them and causes others to miss out on opportunities to learn and be encouraged. If they don't value their own opinion, how can anyone value it?

It's not that you have to run around with absolute certainty on every statement you make/everything you do. That tends to annoy people, especially when you aren't always right but insist that you are in your demeanor. But when I say that, I leave the reader at a standstill because either way, it seems, you fail. Either you say what you think and devalue it in an effort to not sound like a know-it-all, or you sound like a know-it-all when you aren't. But there's a happy medium. I think I'd call it confidence.

This is starting to sound a lot like something Joel Oelstien would write, which wasn't my intention. I guess the point I'm trying to boil these scattered thoughts into is that there is such a thing as true humility, but it really has little to do with the way men view you, or the way you view yourself compaired to others. When I said it isn't the writer who determines how useful their writing is, I could have said that "It isn't the beholder who determines how beautiful a thing is; it's the creator."

True humility comes in understanding where you stand with God. Not in an "I am a worm" mentality, nor in an "God saved me so what's wrong with you?" one. Understanding where we are in light of God's judgement and mercy makes it possible to be humble. When we realize that we are wretched people who need to be saved, and know that we are living under the same grace as any other, it is easier for us to reflect the attitude of Christ. Therefore it is not self-confidence that we need, but salvation-confidence. Not self-deprication, but self-understanding.

So, preacher who I respect a lot, stop putting yourself down just because you know that your opinion isn't worth the weight of the world. And I'll do my best to set an example for those who look up to me too.

Media Manipulatives

The last thing any of us need is another person to tell us what to do. Everywhere we go in life, there seem to be bushels of unsolicited advice coming from everywhere and everyone--from your mother to your car, to your hairstylist or mechanic and everyone in between. We can get annoyed with these people, and we can shut them out. But there is another major source of opinions that we do not always recognize. It comes in the form of newspapers and magazines and film. Sometimes it comes out of the box you've set as the centerpiece for your living room motif, and sometimes it shouts at you from the grocery line. What I'm wondering is if people realize how much they are manipulated by the overload of media in our society?

Some days I wish it would all go away. Like out of sight out of mind. News travels fast through phones and letters these days; we would eventually hear what we needed to hear, form our own opinions, and discuss it with each other as respectable adults. But alas, the days of ignorance are over. Now, any politician so much as sneezes the wrong way and we hear about it for three weeks! It's ridiculous the way we feel like it's our right to know every nuaunce of information that passes through the hands of our society.

I'm not trying say that we should eliminate all news and advertizing from our lives. but being aware of how we are affected by them would be the first step in fixing what I consider to be a problem in our society. Why should three guys sitting in an office at a computer be able to dictate what we think about a natural disaster? Why does one guy whose scripts are written for him, get the credit of being a great commentator?

Now I realize that you'd argue that you aren't affected by tehse people, and that you form your own opinions on things. But how are you to even know what opinion to form when the very presentation of the news is tainted with media bias? Please don't fool yourself. We are all maneuvered by words. We live in a wordy society where stories and words change lives and attitudes. If your wife saying, "I love you," affects you before you leave for work, then Ted Coppel and Connie Chung can sure as heck affect your thinking too.

I don't know. I just get annoyed with people who think their opinion should be valued more than anyone else's, when it's something that they are equally as ignorant about. An expect or someone with good credentials may be worth listening to more.

Tonight I'm just feeling like there's no way to really know exactly what has happened in our country, let alone the rest of the world, because people seem to have an agenda with everything they do. Maybe it's unavoidable. But maybe people should do what they can to get all of the information they can before forming such vehement conclusions. And maybe I'm being too idealistic.

Raking Inventions and other conspiracies

Thinking about conspiracies lately has gotten me into some strange thought patterns that I'd like to share. I am a friend of some conspiracy theorists, even related to many, and there is some kind of draw to that underground information in my brain and personality. It makes me want to believe it because it's counter to what the rest of the world is thyinking, and it challenges the status quo. Those are things I enjoy usually. But fret not. I have not jumped off the deep end yet.

I have decided that most of the things that happen in our lives that we don't agree with are the result of conspiracies. And conspiracies lead to more conspiracies. Let's take raking, for example. It's a conspiracy by s ome old people who wanted to hold off winter as long as possible. Their thinking is that if their yards still look like summer, then maybe everything else will follow suit. I don't think it worked, but look at all of the money gardening companies can make on poor saps who feel obligatedt o stand in their yard for three hours a week tediously piling up a carpet of leaves that were meant to fall and fertalize their grass. Now not only do they have to pay to go to a chiropractor, they also have to pay another company to come in and fertalize their lawns.
Someone took advantage of these folks' desire for warm weather. Maybe even more than one.

Here's another example (one I've been considering for quite some time): Flu vaccinations. We've gone for years having influenzia as a part of the winter season. Pepole get it, go to the doctor, get lots of sleep, vomit too many times to count, drink lots of fluids and it passes. All the sudden someone finds it necessary to invent a vaccination for the simple means of eliminating a small inconvinience. (I know, there's someone out there whose grandma died of influenzia, and I'm not downplaying that. There is a place for vaccinations.) But what I'm saying is that every Will, Joe and Harry don't need to go out and pay for a vaccination for a disease that they never had before and probably wouldn't have gotten anyway. It happened suddenly, covertly, and it's hard to get explanations out of people who should know more. That suggests conspiracy. Someone out there wanted to make money for a vaccination, so they some how convinced us that we need this drug shot into our veins. Five years ago, I don't remember anyone worrying about it. Am I crazy, or is there some kind of latent brainwashing happening disguised as "concern for health"?

And this strange and sudden influx of worry about the bird flu. What's up with that? I'm no MD, and I really don't have the first clue about these kinds of things, but have there been any cases of it yet, or is it just some kind of FDA-induced hysteria making people think they need the vaccination?

I didn't see a lot of credible information from either end. But I don't exactly trust the FDA or any of the other loonies that come up with these mass disease scares. Call me unwise, but I'm going to go and get a needless shot to prevent something that *might* happen, especially when they're cranking those things out like they do with such unproven tests and so little time to see if they're actually effective.

After reading a little from both ends of the discussion on whether or not to worry about the Avian flu, I've decided that it too is a giant conspiracy that even the crackpots on the internet haven't yet detected. I mean, what if the so-called vaccination is a couple of benign chemicals designed to do nothing but pull from our pocketbooks in order to fund the research and testing of other drugs? Or, worse yet, what if the "innoculation" has some other kind of checmical? One released only under certain circumstances? Some kind of mind-altering drug that, when combined with some airborne pathogen, causes people to act in a certian way favorable to the conspirators' plan. Maybe I just watch too many sci-fi, super hero movies. But it's something to wonder about, really. Is it possible for beurocrats to actually be concerned about our wellbeing?

You've gotta love these conspiracy theorists. It's too bad they're so far off the deep end. I wish one or two of them would look into finding out just exactly why the "government (fda)" is pushing for so many vaccinations, ignoring the potential side effects and strange results. I think that there's a great conspiracy in that alone, but what would I know. I'm just a kid at a computer with a big imagination.