7 deadly sins

 

TV

 Today is National Talk Back to Your TV Day. Tell the news what you think the news should be. Tell your TV you like car insurance company you have. Tell the TV you don’t want laugh tracks because you are smart enough to know when to laugh. Tell your TV you won’t be seduced by marching bands or celebrity influencers. Tell the TV you don’t want Kelly Clarkson in your living room, and you don’t need to ask your doctor about another medication. Be firm, be assertive, get it all out.

Sanitation workers

 Enough with love and beauty

Sanitation workers need a poem

Or even a statue in the park

Honoring them for lifting the endless 

Cans and poorly bundled sticks

That annoy the hell out of them

The stench too as they hop on

And off the truck, dancing to the music 

Of brakes and noisy lifts 

Anyone thank them or slip them

A crisp twenty dollar bill

So how many cans make a career

Or rainy days or tons of garbage

That disappears like they do

From our consciousness 

Normal

 Think about this. “Normal” is a brutal word. It spawns words like abnormal, subnormal and supernormal. It takes the complexity and mystery of a human being and turns it into a statistic. It becomes a boundary that classifies forms of mental illness, sexuality and social and creative behavior in destructive ways. Who in their right mind would want to be normal anyway?

Toxic masculinity

 Toxic masculinity has been a part of human civilization from the beginning—sometimes in the nature of men, sometimes institutionalized. Think: the pleasure of the powerful, primogeniture, slavery of women, physical dominance, John Wayne, motorcycle gangs, the lecherous boss, all that stuff.

Does this come from power, libido, evolution, opportunity, culture? What? Maybe all of these. Will toxic masculinity ever completely disappear? Unlikely. But more and more in recent years it is being called out and punished.

Like most behaviors, it must be addressed first in the family then in the larger social and educational processes. Name it for what it is. Provide alternatives, and live them.

Thomas Jefferson

 So, down comes a statue of Thomas Jefferson. Should we now take down the statues of all the presidents who were philanders, who sent young men falsely to war, who made their wealth off the backs of poorly paid workers or companies which invested in South African apartheid or the exploitation of African workers? Should we remove the names of philanthropists like Andrew Carnegie who grew great wealth off the misery of his workers? We put up statues to honor human beings not gods.

History’s truth must be understood in a fair and honest context. We fear climate change but continue to drive our vehicles and climate control our spaces. We seek equity but want cheap goods made in sweat shops. We talk about compassion but vote down tax levies for better schools and services for the poor. So would the statues of us stand the test of time?

Jesus

 Put aside the question of the divinity of Jesus. Put aside the miracles. What’s left is Jesus’ teachings, actions and courage in the face of suffering and his vision of the power of love and faith. Isn’t that enough?

Jesus didn’t create a religion. He preached a way of living in the world. The more an institutional religion moves away from this, the more it moves away from Jesus. He didn’t desire to be worshipped, but to be imitated.