Thursday, May 5, 2011

The Passion

If one morning I walked on top of the water across the Potomac River, the headline that afternoon would read "President Can't Swim".
-- Lyndon B. Johnson

A friend sent this quote to me a while ago and it has stuck with me. It says a lot about who we are, a nation of people who love bad news.

You just can't make it bad enough for many of us.

It's like a cosmic game of telephone played by a million people. Each one adding their darkest and most negative thought to spice it up along the way until the truth is buried so deeply that if it ever existed at all, we would be hard put to recognize it now.

I used to wonder who these people were who wanted all this gore and goo, but after looking at modern society from the grass roots on up to that orb we all moon over, I have decided we are them.

There are people who base their entire ideology on keeping things stirred up. Give them what they ask for and the problem morphs immediately into something else. There is barely a breath in between. They want the passion, the drama, the blood dripping from some human body and by golly it they don't get it one way, they'll get it another!

I say, "sunshine!" You say, "sunburn!" I say, "relax." You say, "indolent."

There is a place for righteous indignation, but it isn't in every moment.

Pick your battles, don't let them pick you.

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