Getting Going

Check in 2;  still keeping after it.  Not really keeping a common string of thought but beginning to pull some disparate but related strands together.  The goal is keeping me engaged with the writing and that is sustaining some decent thinking, if not writing.

I've been thinking a lot about mockery.  Mocking someone.  Mocking something.  And also thinking of something a friend of mine once told me - "we don't have the right to not be offended."  If something offends me, I can choose to ignore it or do something about it.  But I'm not sure there is anything that guarantees that I am not to be offended.

The something that I choose to do about it should be within the law - that is, I shouldn't hurt someone who has offended me.  I shouldn't hurt someone bodily.  Can I inflict mental or psychological pain?  Can I offend the person or the thing back?  I don't see why not.

What is the fundamental thing at stake?  To not be offended?  To be honest?  To be clear? To be accurate?  To make a point?

Somehow I think wanting to be 'right' is near to being the fundamental point.  Wanting to be considered more accurate or more learned or more 'in-the-know'.  Don't we all want to be right?  Don't we all want our worldview to be valid?  To be not discounted?

When I was in college and in a fraternity - I think I was a pledge at the time - the fraternity football team won the campus intramural football championship and we pledges thought we'd make a banner touting the victory in a smug, rather pointed way.  The members of the team took down the banner - they didn't feel that was an appropriate way to celebrate the championship.

When I was in high school, our principal would not allow any signs or cheers that were about the other team.  We were not to cheer against the other school - we were to cheer for ours.

These may not be stories exactly about mockery, but I think there are aspects of mockery in each.

So there is a tension within me, within everyone - here's a quote from a book, a very important book to me - The Necessity of Empty Places by Paul Gruchow - p. 148 in my copy:

"There are two large approaches to life.  One is to know your enemies clearly and to poor your energies into nullifying them, into scorn and satire, cynicism and protest, into the arts of nay-saying and emasculation.  The other is to know your enthusiasms and to give your energies to celebrating them, to praise and thanksgiving, curiosity and wonder, to the arts of affirmation and lovemaking.  Both approaches can be moral, intelligent, forces for betterment.  But one is so much more beautiful than the other.  Why should it be so easy to make the uglier choice?"

Why indeed?

On to the next check in.....