Which WOLF are You Feeding?

I'm enjoying a very pleasant start to my 68th birthday and later will partake of some beautiful friendship and fine food.  At the day's end, I plan to sip a little very special Single-Malt Scotch (yes, in capitalized initials due to my love of these amazing spirits), because my son & family sent me a gift card usable only at a store that specializes in a wide array of liquors including dozens of single malts.  I will stop there during my travels today!  I can already practically taste the smooth flavor of fine Scotch to come later.

But one of my emails this morning carried this forward and I simply had to address it:

Native Americans have a story of a grandfather walking with his grandson.  The boy asks the old man why there is hatred, evil, violence and broken promises in the world.

The grandfather replies. "The answer is within.  Deep inside each of us is a fight between two wolves.  One is evil.  He is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt.  The other wolf is good.  He is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, generosity, truth, compassion and faith.  This fight between the two wolves is going on inside of you and inside of everybody."

The grandson thinks for a moment and then asks his grandfather "Which wolf will win?"

The old Cherokee simply replied, "The one that you feed."

It occurs to me that there has rarely been wisdom such as this passed down to youth, much to our shame and gradual decline in character as a species.  

Hopefully we can all feed our good wolves today; mine is hungry.   

Well, I Did It!

Somehow I'm filled with the thrill of accomplishment when all I did was to remove an irritant from my daily life.  But let's face it, how often do we manage this kind of positive step?

My previous post was about fanaticism and on the spur of the moment I tossed out a simple thought while speaking of my disgust with a contact on my facebook account.  That thought was "just un-friend the whole website."

So now you might call me a fanatic also, but all I am is old and cranky, easily frustrated by a few things - such as daily email messages to check this or that notice that is pending.

Today I did it!  Over the year (or maybe three?) that I was a participant in that "social" media, I found it useful not at all and quite often the notices in my emails and some of the posts I did eventually see were downright irritating.  I suddenly asked myself the straight-forward question: Why would I invite and encourage a daily irritant in my life?  Aren't there enough of these that we cannot control?  While musing on my thought of un-friending the website, I tried to recall a specific unquestioned benefit I had realized from my having joined the facebook world.  Couldn't do it.  Oh, it was nice being able to look at the photo album of a grand-niece's wedding, to which my brother had to guide me to locate.  But he could have sent me a direct email with a few pictures attached and his sharing this highlight of family life would have been just as well served. 

What I began to realize, aside from the fact I was forever deleting the incessant notices that I was expected to rush to check out, was that the whole social media claim itself was a little weak for my taste.  Much of what began to be shared was anti-social behavior, and whenever I decided to respond to anything - even when I could figure out what was worth it and how to reply - it was usually something that mildly upset me to deal with.  I am not by nature confrontational and so many entries on that site needed rebuttal if they deserved attention at all.  It finally just got to be much more exhausting than I had the energy to address.

So not to be stymied like the cowboy in Brokeback Mountain, I looked at that mass of comments and questions, entries from far-reaching places and many folks I've never met, and said, Facebook, I CAN quit you!  And forthwith, I deleted my account.  Took me a while and quite an effort because as many observers know, I never was completely capable of navigating that confusing site, but I found the right place to click and I clicked.  Now I feel a weight has been lifted!  My world is lighter because it is less demanding of my personal attention to someone's birthday or another new baby somewhere, or to someone's goofy little cry for attention, to someone else's proverbial slap in the face that needed a return jab that hopefully might "slap some sense into him," and so much else that made that site, to me, not very sociable.  More irritant than entertainment; more demand than delight; more revolting than refreshing.

So long, Facebook - Hello sense of relief!

FANATICISM

My first heading for this was to be, Right-Wing Fanaticism, but it is a simple truism that those folks don't hold the entire franchise on fanaticism and I repudiate fanatic tendencies in general.

Facebook has become a bit more of a pain for me recently, though I still have almost no attachment to the site and rarely check in there.  Some near-acquaintance from my youth sent a "friend" request some weeks ago and I, as usual in my non-discriminating manner, accepted.  Since then, I haven't opened my profile without seeing piles of political crap directed toward our president and I notice that other former friends and/or acquaintances of mine are shown to have "liked" the bullshit.  Today I finally cracked and wrote a simple comment stating that I don't appreciate the filling of my pages with that fanatical trash and I'm sorry if anyone or everyone else I know happens to "like" it; I emphatically do not.  I do very much hope this man "un-friends" me.  Good riddance!  Or perhaps I will simply un-friend the website itself.

Ever notice that radicalism - fanaticism - does fall more readily into the hands and minds of right-wingers?  As I stated earlier, they aren't alone in this capacity, but I am absolutely confident that there are millions more bad jokes and cruel slurs aimed at liberals by conservatives than is the reverse phenomenon.  Can you recall a constant stream of invective and brutish jokes being hurled at the previous resident of the White House?  I don't think there were many at all, in comparison.  And if anyone ever deserved ridicule while in office, it was that imbecile who was an embarrassment to our nation.  Much worse, he was destructive to all that this great nation had come to stand for, from our founding until 2001.  Even Tricky Dick Nixon was far to be desired over that sorry excuse for a political leader, yet most of us who felt that way quietly suffered for eight years without constantly throwing verbal grenades at the clown.  Today I will bluntly say anything a damn well please about the ignorant prick, but for eight years, all I could do was rush to grab the remote whenever his impudent face came on the television screen.  At least muting him was a slight relief to me.

It occurs to me that many of the folks who are labeled "Liberal" and "Progressive" are a bit more educated, perhaps more intelligent, certainly more civil in their beings.  Conservatives seem to me to have one over-arching concept of living in society: Get mine while I can, however I can, wherever I can - the rest be damned.  And anyone who doesn't think my way isn't worth the air he breathes. 

Yes, I do know some people precisely like this.  Pity.