daily java

Daily Java:

They offer superficial treatments
    for my people’s mortal wound.
They give assurances of peace
    when there is no peace.
12 Are they ashamed of these disgusting actions?
    Not at all—they don’t even know how to blush!
Therefore, they will lie among the slaughtered.
    They will be brought down when I punish them,
    says the Lord. (Jeremiah 8:11-12)

I was having a good discussion on Facebook yesterday with someone. The subject was a dress Ella Fitzgerald was wearing (almost wearing). She was falling out of it. I made some light comments about how she kept the top on. Being a rather large woman, she could barely, it seemed, keep her top on.

My online friend commented that she was not a large-breasted woman and I said I was married to one who had good sense in dressing.

Another young woman came on and told me that I had no business in telling women how they were to dress and that all it did was show how mean and judgmental and intolerant I was. I had no place in this discussion because she didn’t like what I said.

I wrote back a small comment, it would not have been bad, but I realized that there was nothing I could have said that she would have listened to. She was a fool. I was casting pearls before swine.

So I erased my comment and marked her comment as spam. No more was needed. Anything else would have been gasoline on her little fire and I like my online friend too much.

Yet it has bothered me. I have always been the kind of person that can be told something great and wonderful by 999 people, then have the 1000th person say something negative and dwell on that last comment. I don’t know why I am like that but I am. And I hate that self-punishing side of my personality.

I told Ella about it and she told me I was making too much of it.

In some ways her comment was a reaction to the things that have been going on lately in my own life. I have found that a lot of people think highly of me and they have been very gracious to me in my cancer sufferings.

But this was something else. It was a finger leveled at me telling me that I had said something she didn’t like so I was in the wrong. It was the same kind of comment that has sent our young women in America going into the toilet culturally and has even led to the military debacle of women in combat. The attitude she displayed was what had killed much of our culture.

The country is having troubles and instead of addressing them, people who speak up are driven off the stage with the cries of mean and self-righteous, judgmental  and intolerant.

And as long as those cries dominate the national conversation, we will sink as a nation.

I had a dream in the first part of the night in which a friend of mine, one I had considered a Timothy of sorts had done kind of the same thing. As it turned out, I did not agree with him in a subject and in everything being black and white. In the dream, I said some things that he thought were wrong and he strongly condemned me, even to the point of condemning a white suit he as wearing. I had planned on showing him my convoluted reasoning, we would laugh and drink some more coffee. Instead, I told him strongly what the wrong he had done was (allowing for no other viewpoint than his even in a fun debate) and left, then waking up.

Even though I do not know this young woman, it hurts me that someone, on the basis of a single perceived word, would condemn me as being mean, judgmental and intolerant and to tell me that I had no right expressing my personal opinion.

As long as that attitude is prevalent, and it is in much of the country today – all you have to do is read the news sites to know that – our country is doomed.

Yes, this was a silly little woman, empowered by the school system, by society elevating her “uniqueness”, by the fact that white men were rarely ever right, and that, in the rotten dregs of the 1960’s philosophy “do your own thing,” that she can do what she wants and no one can tell her different.

I hurt for her although she probably hates me.

May God bless her and keep her, may he cause the face of his knowledge to shine upon her and give her peace. She certainly has none now.