It won’t be especially sad though. Today I have more of a thought “Why does abuse happen?”
There are many, many reasons, I couldn’t possibly address them all.
But for a christian family like mine, I believe there is one reason that can be common. It’s not the only reason, but it’s an important one to understand if there’s ever going to be road to healing.
That reason is Idolatry.
Idolatry is a fancy sounding word for one of the most common sins to man, that of worshiping something other than the One True God.
Even if you are not a Christian, it’s probably no strength for you to agree that there are things worth devoting your life to, and that many people do not devote their lives to the right thing, so if the religious term throws your off, just think of it like that.
Idolatry is just easier to use for me, since it’s one word, but in Church we usually call it False Images, False gods, or just Idols themselves.
In my family the False Image was My Family itself.
My dad has long been obsessed with being a better person, but his version of better was rather vague and unrealistic. It usually involved ridding himself of his faults as a parent and husband.
But his biggest faults in that regard was simply focusing on the flaws. He didn’t prioritize us ourselves, but this idea of what our family should look like.
Our family should have its own ministry (one he approved of)
Our family should make music
Our family should be more hospitable
Our family should all go tot he same church.
Our family should be a witness to the extended family.
He never took into consideration that maybe it was not his job to decide how we should serve God.
I am aware of the Bible’s teaching about a whole household serving God. However, it never says everyone in the house should do the exact same thing. In the New Testament the control of family is a little lesser, since may early Christians did not have their whole family’s support.
It didn’t stop with Church stuff anyway. That was just what annoyed me the most.
Maybe you’ve had the same experience with your relatives.
My dad would also say repeatedly that our family was the most important thing to him and he got his happiness from us.
Which bugged me, I thought “We get our happiness form God, not each other.”
Not to misunderstand me, people can greatly increase our happiness, but it does not spring from them. If it does it’s fleeting, people die, they move, they move on, they ditch us, not all of them, but human based happiness is just not permanent.
It sounds like a Christian Cliche to say We Get our Happiness from God.
Oh, we’re so spiritual, right?
I know, but it really is true. It can be misused sure, to hide real problems, but so can most things.
It’s not that God makes me feel happy all the time, it’s that when Id o feel happy, it’s in God. I know it is from Him, and it is a gift.
By the way, there’s been a teaching in the Church that says the Bible never says “God wants you Happy”
Let me set you free if you’ve heard this: That is bull-crap.
No, you won’t find the exact words “God wants you happy” in scripture, the Bible prefers the words “Joy” “Rejoicing” “Praising” “Thankful” “Peaceful” “Exalted” and “Satisfying the desires of your heart.”
All that is stronger than happiness as a chemically induced fleeting feeling, though that too, because God also wants you healthy, and a healthy person will produce that physical feeling of happiness too.
I digress.
My dad used our family as a false god. Like all idols, it had to be removed from him for him to turn back to the real God.
And we had also to give up serving my dad’s happiness, instead of serving God’s. We wanted our dad to be happy, sure, but we could not keep trying to fill the void of God in his heart.
And we could not let him punish us with emotional abuse for inevitably failing to do the impossible.
It struck me what the Bible is talking about when it warns about idols.
You are what you adore, what you trust in, you become.
If you trust in a lie, you become a liar, and eventually, if you fall in with C. S. Lewis’s point of view in The Great Divorce, you become a lie itself.
If you trust in money, you become a miser.
If you trust in drugs, you become an addict.
All these states of being are merging you with the thing you worship. In the case of drugs it literally will get worked into you bloodstream, your DNA, and your brain engineering, and passed on to your kids.
“Their idols are silver and gold, The work of men’s hands. They have mouths, but they do not speak; Eyes they have, but they do not see; They have ears, but they do not hear; Noses they have, but they do not smell; They have hands, but they do not handle; Feet they have, but they do not walk; Nor do they mutter through their throat. Those who make them are like them; So is everyone who trusts in them.” Psalms 115:4-6
“They have mouths but they do not speak; eyes they have but they do not see; they have ears but they do not hear; nor is there any breath in their mouths. Those who make them are like them; so is everyone who trusts in them.” Psalms 135:16-18
That’s why we are all sinners, by the way. Adam became a sinner, and in a way, he became sin, and so we carry that in our DNA now. We are born in sin, as the Word puts it.
Jesus became sin for us, the Word also says, in order to finally get Sin out of us. He killed sin by becoming it, and then dying.
The Bible also teaches that the Spirit of God is able to divide soul and spirit, and that is how we are saved from sin. God can separate the sinner form the sin.
We ourselves cannot do that, except by loving the sinner. We cannot transform them. But loving people will help them choose to be transformed.
In summary, I think almost all abuse happens due to idols
Many abusers are addicts, after all. All of them put power above God, certainly. Abuse is all about feeling powerful.
It’s important to keep in mind that focusing too much on being abused also can be a form of idolatry. God wants us to be healthy, and if we focus on him, we’ll start to heal. If we are letting Him help us.
But don’t wear your sorrow like a badge of honor, Paul boasted of his weakness because God was glorified in it, not because weakness all on its own is a glory.
One last thought
All of us are meant to be at rest, and to rejoice. Abusers and abused alike. However you handle your past, whatever you went through, even if you were the abuser in some ways, don’t think it mean you cannot ever be happy,
Happiness is not what we deserve, desert does not come into it at all. It’s the naturalstate of things. You can’t earn it because you were created for it, it’s just like putting a key into a lock. No question of deserving it, it would be stupid to ask that.
So, it’s okay to move on. Really.
And that’s all I got for you today. Until next time, stay honest–Natasha.
I wonder what people are doing when they find this blog. Surfing through internet stuff to kill time. Or perhaps checking their own blog and then seeing what’s new on WordPress. Not that I’m ungrateful or think that’s a bad thing, I just wonder how much of it we do.
People say we are over connected nowadays, we’ve all heard it. Most of us probably agree with the statement to a degree, just not as it affects us. I have heard statistics, but I’m not going to list any about the subject at hand. There are no statistics that can measure how connected you feel with the people around you. Can we take a moment to acknowledge that, good.
The truth of the matter is, nothing you see in front of you can make a connection with your heart of hearts if all it is is flashing lights. Why don’t we ever ask ourselves just what the substance of a text, or a post, or a picture is? It’s flashing lights, it’s not the sound of a human voice, or the touch of human affection, or a real face in front of us. It’s just an image. It serves about the same purpose as a photograph or a letter used to, conveying part of the person, as a way to remember them and get a small taste of who they were when they couldn’t be with us. The more you knew them, the more you could get out of such reminders. Pictures are good I think, and it’s fine to take them even on a phone, but can they substitute for actually seeing the person?
Three things that don’t have value in a culture of technology:
Privacy.
Silence.
Seriousness.
For the first thing: Moments of being alone with your thoughts. Time to yourself. This is not seen as a good thing, by you or by your friends who keep texting you all the time, or who constantly post new things for you to read. Wanting time alone can only mean you’re tired and cranky, not that you want to stay SANE.
Secondly, there is almost no silence. When we’re tired we turn on the TV or whatever our preferred form of tech is, ( if you don’t do this, then you have my apologies,) but I’ve found I’m more rested after just a little quiet time outdoors or in my room. If a stay at home mom is reading this, I know it’s hard to get a break; if a working person is reading this, I know that it can be just as hard to. Frankly, if you go to school it’s even harder because half your day is taken up without your consent. But there are still hours of time that most of us have that we fill with distaction form how tired we are, instead of rest.
Thirdly, When your day is crammed full of things that seem disconnected with each other, it’s hard to give full attention to anything. Again, if you go to school it is not your choice that subjects are seperated by the hour, but an hour is too long for some things, and far too short for others. I can spend hours writing, I get frusterated if I spend one hour trying to figure out a song on the keyboard. I have to take it in little bites. Our minds look for connection and patterns, we need them to make sense of the world. The whole world is one interworking system, nothing is independent of everything else, yet nothing is the same. Both sameness and irregularity play havoc with our ability to reason and think and feel.
Yet entertainment is becoming increasingly both same and irregular. People who play the parts in the media industry now utter lines that come out of nowhere, and whose very randomness is supposed to be funny. I laugh sometimes, but unless it is very well done, such humor shows less, not more, cleverness. And plots are cliched. Based on what sells, not on a good message. I have to give Disney and Pixar credit for sometimes being an exception to this, but only sometimes. By and large there are no exceptions beyond the least popular movies and shows.
More than movies though, is our hopping from computers to phones to tablets to ipads to computers again, in a cycle of boredom.
Let me now quote a show called “Girl meets world”I heard this on one episode and liked it a lot.
“Not until we switch off our computers, put down our phones, and look into each others eyes, will we be able to touch each other’s hearts..there is no connection you can make with any screen that compares with the moment you understand only human beings have souls.”
Note the word understand. If you’ve read this far, I must have your interest on some level, so please, attend. I cannot possibly state enough the importance of knowing human beings have souls.
Personal story: A while back my sister and I decided to stop watching movies and youtube clips on the weekdays, we wanted to spend more time reading, and doing other stuff, and getting our studies done. At first it was hard and it still is in a way, (although I’m currently on break for a week,) but I noticed a change almost right away. I was happier, I was more interested in things. My brain was more receptive, I could enjoy reading more. I could go outside and really look at the world around me. I had more time to pursue interests, and more time to just rest without watching a screen, or to listen to music instead of watch music videos. I am more awake. That, versus yesterday, when we watched things for hours on end, and at the end of them I felt cranky with everyone, bad about myself, and confused about where I was in my personal life. I might have felt all that anyway, but it seemed so much worse than of late, and I couldn’t even think as clearly. To be honest, I’ve noticed the quality of what I’m watching plays a part, you feel clearer after good movies, and sutpider after stupid ones. It’s just the way it is.
I have found myself more paitent with people, and more at peace. Because in the absence of a screen, I have to use real substance to feed my imagination, not sicken it.
This is very long, so I’ll save the rest for a later post. I think we all have plenty to consider, myself included.
As of October, we’ve added yet another cat to our family.
This one might be my favorite story of how we’ve gotten one
My sisters legit almost stole this cat on Halloween, they saw a black cat along our street, and it came up to them, all friendly like, and they were a little worried about leaving it out on Halloween, because people do terrible things sometimes (I had a friend whose black cat was killed) so they brought the cat home.
I wondered if she was a stray, she seemed pretty well fed, but she was very clingy and affectionate, and seemed happy to be inside. She was only about 5 months old.
Well the next day we take the cat back to the house they took it from, after trying in vain the night before to find out who it elonded to.
The lady there tells us the cat is a stray they’ve been feeding, but she lives outside and doesn’t technically belong to them. And if we want her, we can take her and give her a good home. Because she’s lonely, and they can’t take her inside.
Glad we did too, because it got freaking cold at our house now that it’s Winter.
But of course I gave my sister crap for basically kidnapping someone’s cat, even if she wasn’t officially theirs.
Our grandma didn’t want to keep it at first, but we talked her into letting us at least get the cat fixed and some shots, and by the time she recovered, she’d gotten used to being here, and didn’t seem to mind the dog much, surprisingly. So we just kept her.
All part of my ten point plan of course, mahahha.
So now we have 4 cats. And 3 of them are black. We keep saying people are going to thnk we’re sme kind of cult.
But we didn’t plan it that way. Two of them were just in our neighborhood and happened to be black, mine is the only one I purposely selected the color so I could name her after a character.
I think you could learn a lot from cats, or pets in general, really. But cats act more like humans if you ask me.
I know people, dog people, say that cats think they’re above humans. But if you ask me, cats just reflect how obstinate and self centered most of us really are, if we take all our excuses off the table. Cats would make the same excuses if they could talk.
See, if you like dogs, you’re either an optimist or a pessimist about people, but if you like cats, you’re a realist. The good and the bad.
And each of our cats reflects something different about human nature if you ask me, maybe I read into it too much but pet lovers out there can relate.
So why not, let’s see what I got.
1: Cata
Well our boy cat died, but his sister, our only non black cat currently, is still around. She’s up there but since cats can live 15 years, she might still be middle aged, we’ll see.
Cata, the cat, has always been kind of a princess, as we call it. She never was much for roughhousing, even as a kitten, she loved playing with anything shiny or girly (seriously, it was weird how she went for girly stuff, like a cat shouldn’t really know that right? Could she smell the estrogen?) and was one to want affection even before food.
For real, we’ve seen this cat refuse to eat multiple times unless someone pets her first, or she’ll eat if you sit and pet her, but if not she’ll just ignore the food. Can’t say the others have that problem.
Conversely she’s also the most sensitive of our pets, she doesn’t like being picked up, and is very particular about when she wants attention. But if she’s lying on a bed, she’s usually in the mood for snuggles, she knows that our turf. But if she’s on a chair in the office, leave her alone, that’s her territory. (The office is our cat room so they have somewhere safe from the dog.)
But I remember when I realized that Cata might be onto something was while I was house sitting alone, while my family were all on vacation.
Cata got kind of lonely without all of us there, and would come rub on my leg and sit in my lap while Iw aosn the etoliet (a weird habit all of our cats have for some reason) and get her loving, as my Mom would say.
But I had a revelation: This cat isn’t ashamed of it. She asks for love when she wants it and needs it, and doesn’t apologize.
It reminded me of how very often, I wouldn’t bother to go to God, or even to other people, if I feel sad or lonely, just because I don’t want to admit it, or because I think I can get by.
But can I really? I mean even the dumb cat knows that love is more imporant than food soemtimes, and sehs’ a cat.
Weird right?
But I guess maybe Cata is onto something, what is life without affection? Empty.
True, she’s a diva and has hidden from us for 48 hours straight just to get back at us for ignoring her or getting new cats, and also poops on the floor when we make her mad or don’t clean the litter box fast enough, or she’s just too lazy to bother (she is mobile enough to) so she does have that desolate helpless female thing going–but hey, don’t we all wish we could get attention that easily?
I think Cata’s eccentricness is partly because we’ve had her since she was a couple weeks old. She is our most comfort kitty type. She’s sa with us when we’re sad, even with my grandma, who she ignores the rest of the time, after her dogs died, Cata woulsit in her room…she stopped after a few weeks, and now that there’s another dog, never goes near that room, but it was like she knew we were sad.
Cata also seemed sad when her brother cat was dead, like she knew something was missing. They say animals don’t notice, but I think we did see a change in her behavior. She was more okay with her sibling cat than she was with our newer ones. But she did become a bit nicer to them after that, like she had to fill a void.
It’s odd, but even in animals, it seems like dealing with loss sometimes is easier when you open up to something new. Go figure.
But maybe Cata likes attention because she values company, on her terms, she is still a cat, and that’s something we could learn form, in our isolated society.
2. Winnie
Winnie (Winter or Winnie-the-Pooh, we still argue over which it was originally) is our next oldest cat.
She was dumped in our neighborhood, before we moved, right around Christmas–which in that area is the meanest time to abandon a cat, because it ices over sometimes.
My mom put an ad out for a lost cat, but no one responded, so we kept her.
Winnie is definitely the weirdest cat we’ve ever had…I mean I’ve only had 5, but she was unique.
She’s not mean, she actuall ran righ up to my mom when we foudn ehr and seemed used to people.
But she was pretty brash too. She was only about 4 months old, but when our boy cat, Tiger, tried to get all territorial with ehr, she dug her heels in and gave it right back to him, that was her first day.
Tiger was so surprised that he backed off and left her alone mostly, then they became bffs because Winnie liked to play more than Cata, who was such a “girl” (at least that’s what I think Tiger would have said if he could speak)
Winnie had kind of a cracked out look in her eyes though, and would rush around the house like a maniac, she would play with herself, and my mo is convinced she was nearsighted.
She definitely had her own style, we used to joke that she’d be the atar of an action movie if she could be. We called her “ninja cat” because she’d jump up and do wild poses and swipes.
She freaked out one of our neighbors just because she was black and hada nutty expression.
But despite that, Winnie has never been a mean cat, just odd. She didn’t bit or scratch much (actually Cata drew blood more than any of our other ones) and in her older age, she mellowed out a lot. She’s still kind of funny, but now she mostly just rubs on our feet, and hides in boxes.
Winnie is a little more accepting of new cats than our other ones. And more welcoming of strangers in the house.
And call me crazy, but isn’t that a little like humans too?
Sometime it’s the weirdos who are the least judgmental–not always, but sometimes. Because if you know you’re different, then other people who are different also tend to be drawn to you.
And hey, sometimes feet and boxes are just the simple things in life to enjoy.
3. Saucy
Well, I suppose I have to take full responsibility for how Saucy turned out, since I raised her and all. I mean, it was a joint effort, but she’s my cat.
I got Saucy because someone who worked at the school behind our house had found kittens and offered me ne to conle me because I thought Cata had gone ising (turns out she just hid under a bed for 36 hours behind stuff so I couldn’t see her).
I had thought about getting another cat anyway, for myself, because one of ours haddied (got hit by car really) so I said yes.
Now everyone told me not to do it.
My sister, Mom, and Grandma all said the dog would eat any new cat. They all seemed to have this odd idea that our dog is more viscous than she really is. She ties to herd the cats, about as successfully as most people, but she doesn’t bite them. She’s a sheep dog, so she nips at their heels to get them to move, but it’s not real.
Despite them all saying it was a bad idea, I got the cat anyway, and introduce ehr to the dog little by little, the dog never tried to eat her. While she was too little to run, we kept them seperate, but once she was big enough, she was actually the least afraid of the dog, sometimes she’d rub under her, unlike the other two who avoided the dog like she was a wolf.
They say cats reflect their owners, so I suppose it’s my fault that cat has a personality that’s pretty stubbornly independent.
Actually I’ve gotten compliments from our vets that my cat is very calm and cooperative when they examine her. She doesn’t stress much. And I am much calmer than some of my family.
Aso I tend to be bolder, and not avoid conflict, and this cat wouldn’t avoid our older cats, she would go up to them. And the dog.
In fact she was so fearless I worried about letting her outside because I thought she’d go up to strange animals and get bitten. So we waited till she’d had her operation and shots to let her outside.
Strangely Saucy, while fearless, alway understood boundaries fairly well. She used to stand in the doorway when we left it open and looked at us like “I know I’m not supposed to go outside, but I really want to”. She didn’t climb on stuff as much as Winnie did, because she knew she wasn’t supposed to, when she’s inside, she sticks to her furniture we allow her on, for the most part.
Just can’t take th hint with other cats.
But this is like me too, I push limits soeitsm but I also know when to dra wa line.
Once we finally let Saucy out, she wound up being much more comfortable outdoors than indoors, she loves it. And her fao game to play is tag, she wants to be ah all over but she tsy sotu of reach until she’s acut tired and then she’ll let herself get caught and taken inside, or she comes in when she’s hungry or cold.
Despite being bold, Saucy was actually our most gentle cat. She never bit us, or scratch us hardly at all, was okay with being held more than the others, and when I give her bths, put sup way less prost than the older two, she even enjoys part o fit.
She growls and hisses and snap over having new cat around, but usually it’s all talk. (Some exceptions).
I can see myself in this also, I make a big noise and I ep myself, but I really really try to hurt anyone. Forceful but not harmful, that’s kind of my way. Though we all have our moments.
Sh definitely is Saucy, guess I did that one to myself.
But saucy and mean are not the same things. Saucy may be independent, but she’s not antisocial, she just likes to be social in a more active way, and she sticks to her guns about it.
While it can worry me, I have to respct it at times, I like a stong mdinded erson, env i fhteyr a cat.
And it does put me in mind of another truth about life, the worst of liking people who have a mind of their own is that they will have their own way sometimes, and it won’t always be what you want.
But deep down, you love them more because they are more themselves, then you do if someone bows to our every whim. It’s hard to like a personality if someone doesn’t have one, right?
And not everyone who is strong willed is a jerk, they may just be that way, but not mean any harm by it, don’t take their independence as a lack of affection, they may just show their affection differently.
Wow, that go tdep dint it?
Now for the last one:
4. Mimi/Jemima
We still call this cat different things, but she doesn’t care anyway, she really understands “kitty” best.
Mimi still is the most affectionate cat we have, maybe because she’s still getting used to having a home.
But it has changed a bit in 4 months. When we first got her she wanted attention constantly, she seemed worried we’d kick her back out. She didn’t really want to go outside, and we made sure not to let her because we worried she’d run back to her other house.
But she never acted like she wanted out the door anyway, she just wanted food and love.
Now we let her out but she still hasn’t tried to leave us, she sticks close to the house more than the other and comes back in quickly, partly she’s just cold, but partly, she’s just not interested. She’s know the good stuff is here.
See none of the other cats were homeless long enough to remember it, but Mimi was alone, sort of, for 5 months of her life, and she picked up the habits of a lonely person.
ingShe wants reassurance that she’s welcome here, but she also has an annoying habit the others don’t have, she steals our food. Especially bread and chick for some reason.
I get the chick but one of the other cats like bread, it makes no sense.
We think it’s her instinct to eat whenever she can and to take people food because she probably went through trashcans before. She still has that stravation mindset.
She’s getting a little better, but it’s still a problem, we have to hide food from her.
Mimi also likes to play more, since she’s still a kitten, and is slowly wearing Saucy down. Saucy was the baby before, and has the jealous sibling thing, but he’s getting over it. The other two didn’t care as much because Mimi and Saucy look like they’re twins, we think they might have had the same mom, and I think the older cat could tell the difference from a distance and got used to it faster.
Mimi likes people, but despite being very eager to come up to us when we found her, she has not been like that with strangers.
But I’ve seen this behavior before. We had another cat who loiterered outside and went between houses to eat, he a very affectionate to people but it was because he only got attention outside, and he never really wanted to become an indoor cat, just kind of liked to go between different houses.
Most really affectionate cats I’ve known were lonely ones, in fact, they ram as much aatn at hey na ge tinto small sauer of time.
But Mimi, now that she’s accepted this is her home, no longer feel the need to advertise to other people who walk by our house, she feels more secure here so here she stays.
And this, maybe most of all, is like how people are.
Some of us, when we have been alone a lot, we are very needy and beg for affection. It’s hard to help it when you’re empty. Even though Mimi had food from her other helpers, she wanted a family.
Once you have one, you stop looking, but you still may have some “hungry habits” to break.
Even when we know we’re at home, we can still steal food and act like we’re hungry again, it’s hard to go from one mindset to another. And a cat doesn’t have the self awareness to know that, bt we human do, but we can be blind to how nonsensical our habits are.
We need to accept that if we have a home, we can’t act like strays anymore, when you steal food, someone else has less of it, after all, it’s better to take what you’re given and be grateful for it, not to beg for more than your fair share.
We love Mimi anyway, but what’s a habit in a cat, can be more of a deliberate thing in a human being, and something we should try to grow out of it if we can.
Even a cat can learn better, so why not a thinking, person.
I guess that’s my point in all this. Each of our cats has their good and bad points, and they all mirror human qualities in a way, but our cats have no self awareness to know what is good and what isn’t, unlike us, who can choose.
So we can learn from them, what to do and what not to do. And that even if you have your quirks, the right person will love you anyway. But don’t be a beast and not at least try to change, we can forgive a pet, but a human should be willing to learn, but around that, we still need acceptance.
And I guess that’s what I learned from my cats.
Also the more the merrier, in my mind, but that’s a personal preference. It’s not that I have a void to fill, it’s just that I think the more things you have to love, the better life is.
Well was it kooky or profound? You tell me. Maybe both.
Sorry, I had the busiest semester I’ve ever had, so blogging kind of got pushed to the back burner.
I’m not sure I’ll have a whole lot to say today, but I wanted to write about relationships again.
Mainly because I finally started dating.
Yay!!!!
Yeah in a culture where thousands of people are saying that dating and relationships are a waste of time, and a lot more are obsessed with calling people toxic, and just overall acting entitled…I’m trying to find someone I can actually get along with.
I think sometimes being “not crazy” can actually make it harder.
I guess that sounds kind of like being a pick-me, so maybe I’m wrong about that.
But the thing is, I don’t know what guys want…and honestly, I’m not sure they know either.
I’ve met a couple of them from a dating website, and got ghosted by a few already.
And the ones I have met up with who are still int ouch, it’s hard to gauge interest.
See everybody is different.
Is it a bad sign if they hardly text me between meet-ups, or is just normal guy stuff.
I mean all you get on the internet is other people’s opinions, right?
Being what I am, a not feminist, not woke, not liberal, 24 year old woman who just wants to find love and start a family–is surprisingly had to match, hard to define.
Because beyond principals, I don’t know what works with me.
I liked a guy for years only to realize he was stringing me along for attention, and didn’t actually like me back…and he was a Christian who was supposed to know better. Amazes me how selfish even Chrsitians can be.
I’m also the type of chick who thinks that sweating the little details is stupid. If I can get around a difficulty by adjusting myself to it, I will. I’d rather change my approach than give up on something if I’m interested in.
And that has made me good at doing anything that depends solely on me. I’ll find a way if I want to do it bad enough.
My siblings and parents like to agonize over details, I just roll with the punches.
I would think that would make dating a cinch for me. I never run out of conversation topics, I’m willing to listen to other people’s interests, and I’m not picky about where to eat or go for fun.
And in some ways, it is easy to do the basic parts of dating.
But the thing is, I still have no idea what I’m doing, right?
I’m coming to realize that most people don’t.
We’re all insecure, we all are under the pressure to be liked.
I think there’s truth in that it used to be easier. I mean, love has never been easy.
It’s a common theme of most tragedies and sad ballads for most of Time, it’s not easy. If it was easy, it wouldn’t be valuable.
But that said, I do think that we’ve made it harder to just get past the stage of being strangers, by being so isolated in our lives. I have the same problem with friends.
I mean, sine we rely on phones now, I get paranoid if I don’t hear from someone within 10 minutes of messaging or calling them.
Part of that is my abandonment complex, thanks Dad, and part of it is just me, being someone who’s quick to worry. I want to get better, but there’s just something about phones that makes it so hard to control your anxiety, ever notice that?
I don’t want to bring my baggage into a new relationship…but if I’m honest, I really can’t help it.
I mean, we all do it.
And let’s face it, when you’ve been mistreated, it’s hard not to look for it again. Like when you have a sore place on your body and you keep touching it to see if it still hurts…yeah it still does.
Before, I spent a lot of time being nice to people I wanted to be friends with. But apparently, that’s a turn off.
You seem too eager, and it’s like your friendship and respect is cheap.
And I think thanks to being both a tough woman with high standards, and ordinary girl who wants love, I ended up this odd mix of easygoing and also sensitive.
Many things don’t bother me, maybe some of you ladies can relate.
Maybe you don’t care about the toilet seat, the restaurant or the size of the rock, right?
But if you feel ignored, or used, it starts to feel so familiar.
And when nothing is wrong you look for something to be wrong.
I don’t like being this way, but I got addicted to it.
My father, being the manipulative person that he was, was the king of scaring you if you thought things were all right.
If I was having a good day, or we hadn’t fought in say, 5 days straight, he simply felt the need to start a fight so that his quota of tension could be met. He fed off of it.
I want to talk about antyi, and he bing up the unpelasnt isde of it.
He used to change our bedtime stories to psychotic tales of people yelling and hurting each other, no matter how innocent the story was.
I mean, it was funny, he had good delivery…but you always felt kind of icky for laughing.
One of my therapists was the first t point out that that’s kind of messed up…who knew?
I had no idea until she said it, how much my paranoia could be influenced by my father’s insistence on making everything dark, suspicious, or perverse. Or just gross.
I don’t mean to say everything is his fault…but the thing is, I can’t account for my personality quirks any other way.
I was fearless mostly when I was a very little child, but my father scared me. Overtime I developed other anxieties.
But now that most of those are gone, I still have the habit of being anxious in my mind.
And par of that is my father filled my head with the idea that things are always about to go wrong.
I actually handle stress well, usually. I stay calm, I know how to take a moment and just let it out…yet I feel this pressure to despair, to think “this is just how my life always goes” and blow things out of proportion.
Some of that I had long before I knew my father was like that…but kids do copy what they see.
And I find his voice in my head a lot, even now.
The thing is, I feel like I have to apologize for that to whoever I’m with.
Like: I‘m sorry, my father messed me up, and I really want to be better, but I don’t know if you’re safe yet…so can you bear with me wile I try to get past it?
Therapy was no help in this area. They just kept making me focus even more on what could go wrong.
Like do I really need to hear this again?
My last one was a real gem, he told me I had a lot of blame for people in my past.
This was after weeks of him not given me any constructive feedback, so I would just keep telling him different stories, hoping he’d figure out something helpful that I was missing. Apparently not…and hey, at any point he could have asked me why I focused n that so much and worked out a solution. Instead he got mad the first time I acted out a little bit because of my issues, and that was it for me.
I’m perfectly willing to admit, I’m not perfect. I do rude things sometimes…who doesn’t?
But that is no excuse to jump on me and make all kinds of claims about my character that you have no way to know from one thing I said.
I mean, I know I’m defensive…
You know why that is? I used to be open to feedback when I was younger, I did my best to embrace it…but it was never good enough.
I learned the hard way then that people don’t always care about helping you, they just want to control you. It’s not about who’s right, it’s about you not being exactly how they want.
Yes it’s hard for me to trust anyone who criticizes me, because so often I cannot please them even after taking their advice, so I gave up.
I literally stopped speaking to my father for years for most of the time I was around him because nothing I ever said to him got me anything but hatred, or was at all pleasant to being with.
I did the same to other adults I knew, and I never heard the end of it from him: “You offend people so much, why do you not answer them?”
You know what happened once my father moved out? And just once I was at a church he didn’t go to? I miraculously stopped doing that.
I now never go silent on people like that, at least, very very rarely, and only when it wasn’t a remark I was sure they wanted an answer to.
Great right?
But it freaks you out to realize how much one person can change your personality.
My sisters even confirmed it.
I used to have “freak outs” or as I called them “moments” when my ahter was around.
Not always to do with him, but I’d be so stressed, I’d just wig out for several minutes, talking too fast and almost crying and laughing at the same time. I twas weird, looking back, I can’t understand it.
But once he was gone, it just stopped. I no longer had the urge to do that.
I do think I project this image of being more together than I really am, but who doesn’t do that if they want to remain employed?
It’s not wrong to act professional…but at some point, with someone, you have to let your guard down.
We can only talk about impersonal things for so long, you know what I mean?
Also, you can’t just trauma dump, that’s not good either.
But really, other people don’t know what works for you.
I’ll say there are guidelines.
In my limited experience with men, I’ve worked out at least a few real red flags. And they aren’t the ones most women talk about.
A guy who makes you do all the work. You text first, you decide everything, he never disagrees with you.
I don’t mean that a guy who is easygoing is bad, I mean that he shows no interest whatsoever in getting to know you, but he craves your attention. I spent years hoping that both my dad, and other men I knew would change their minds about me…it doesn’t work.
2. Someone who never asks you about yourself.
This can also be social awkwardness, but if you’ve been talking for a while and you know more about them and they don’t ever ask about you, bad sign.
But those both are ones other people point out, what baffles me is how rarely anyone I know mentions this one:
3. The guy is just a jerk to you.
There was a really hot guy in my dance class who definitely knew he was hot, and my classmates seemed to think he was into me.
I think he would have if I was interested, but the guy would just be a jerk to me and to my friend in the class. Like he’d say things that seemed like they were to deliberately make me uncomfortable. It freaked me out. Also he was creepy in other ways.
I’m sure he thought it was smooth–and hey, in highschool, maybe it was. Girls have low self esteem in their teenage years. I’m sure being hot and cocky was all you needed back then.
But for a mature woman, who actually has thinks she looks for, like compassion and considerateness, it was unattractive. Canceled out the hot part.
I mean, was I attracted to him? Physically yes, but i was rep by his personality, and not in a “you get on my nerves but I still like you” kind of way.
Nothing ever happened between us, and I’m glad of that. But I was surprised later when one of the other guys I knew in class expressed surprise that I thought the hot one was a creep. This guy was on the uglier side, and said he thought I thought he was the creep.
Other than the obvious play for a compliment, I thought that was kind of a weird thing to say.
This guy didn’t hit on me or anything, really, like I know every one reading this is going to think, he just seemed to want female attention.
I enjoyed the male attention I got in the class, but I felt kind of like it was just about me being a girl, and not personality.
However, it’s worked the other way too, I’ve hit it off with guys over personality, who never asked me out.
I can’t explain it except that there must be some other reason they weren’t interested…and it wasn’t that they weren’t into dating, they were ones who went through multiple girlfriends.
Maybe I just give off the vibe too much of a girl who’s ride or die about love.
I do mange to get a rep for being feisty and opiniated everywhere I go.
Hey, at least I’m not forgettable.
But maybe it’s not me, or maybe it’s something I can’t guess. You know, I get sick of asking.
I impressed the guy I’m currently seeing by being able to tell him how I came to Christ…so that was new.
I can’t explain exactly why people don’t click these days.
But one thing I have learned is that it’s a waste of your time to go after anyone who has such wildly different views of life than you.
Even if they say they are in your religion, don’t believe it if it’s not in their actions.
I saw a man on YouTube say that we shouldn’t have low expectations, we should have realistic ones.
He’s right.
I can get the numbers of plenty of men if I want to, but it’s not worth it if they aren’t ones I’d want the heart of.
I know that’s chessy, but it’s true.
Love is not all magic and thrills, but it is about being entrusted with someone else’s well being, and we should take that seriously.
I’d rather feel safe with a man than feel thrilled for a short time only to feel empty later.
And I encourage men to think the same way, hopefully many of them already do.
Don’t settle for someone who has no respect for you.
And don’t dump someone for stupid reasons, there’s a lot of that going around too.
See, having the past I do makes me want something better, not the same old thing. I’m not comfortable with being mistreated, and I intend to stick to that.
So yeah, I haven’t worked out all the details yet, but I know that much..
“For it is in passing that we achieve immortality. Through this, we become a paragon of virtue and glory to rise above all. Infinite in distance and unbound by death, I release your soul, and by my shoulder, protect thee.“
Pyrrha Nkos
It’s no secret if you’ve followed me for a while that I was originally a big fan of RWBY.
And that I’m still a fan of the first 3 volumes, at least. Possibly the 4-5 ones also.
I’m also a fan of the Justice League Animated show (and recently I watched the Snyder cut of the live action movie, and holy cow was it like watching a different film! One I actually lied. I think we should burn the theatrical cut and pretend it never happened.)
So I was talking to my sister about both these things and comparing the characters, and she specifically requested I blog about this topic.
So here we go:
What is a Paragon?
Let’s look at the web’s definition, though most weebs already know what it is, sort of:
“A paragon means someone or something that is the very best. The English noun paragon comes from the Italian word paragone, which is a touchstone, a black stone that is used to tell the quality of gold. You rub the gold on the touchstone and you can find out how good the gold is.” (vocabulary.com)
Most people acknowledge that the main character of any given kids show or movie is supposed to be the paragon. And if I name names, you’ll see a pattern.
Anime has a paragon almost as a requirement, with a few exceptions, like the Shield Hero.
Midoriya (My Hero Academia)
Naruto (Naruto)
Tohru (Fruits Basket)
Natsu (Fairy Tale, Erza would also be one)
Hiro (Darling in the Franx)
Not all of these are perfect examples, the first two are the closest. But you know the characters who stand above the rest, who everyone wants to be like, who they trust to lead them, who they think has some moral insight that they don’t.
Outside of anime, the paragon is less worshiped, but still present.
Captain America (Avengers)
Xavier (X-men, often Logan also fulfills this role)
Mickey Mouse (any Micky Mouse media)
Aang (Avatar the Last Airbender)
So you see paragons are everywhere. That’s why it’s considered a trope.
For a better explanation of how it is used in a story and the pros and cons, I refer you to Overly Sarcastic Productions excellent video:
Love Red’s videos about tropes
So, of course, the two paragons I wanted to talk about are Ruby, from the show RWBY, and Superman, from the DC Universe. Particularly his recent shows and movie renditions.
I’m going to argue that neither of these characters are good paragons, though they are treated like paragons by their writers and fellow characters, and the fans, by and large.
But my unpopular opinion is that they both suck at fulfilling this role, and that is because people lack understanding of what makes a paragon really work.
I think it goes back to our culture’s lack of understanding of what makes a righteous person to begin with.
(I’ve argued that Gaara should be the protagonist of Naruto also, and a protagonist and paragon do not have to be the same thing but they usually are in anime, however I think Gaara fulfills both roles better.)
It’s easy to see why Superman would be considered the best of the best, who can be better than Superman?
Yet, it’s interesting that in every version of the Justice League that’s written where they turn to the dark side, Superman is the first to fall.
I now the premise is that he is the only one holding the league together, so if he falls, they all fall.
I’m going to argue now that that is actually one of the signs of a bad paragon.
1. Instead of people being inspired by the paragon, they instead rely on them, both intellectually and physically.
Ruby is the bigger offender here, but so is Superman.
Lazy thinking is the bane of every group in real life, but it’s also one of the main things that kills fictional teams.
The whole team relies on thsi one person to know what’s right and to know what to do.
Sample:
Yang from RWBY: “She (Ruby) always knows what to do, so I’m going to follow her.”
Flash from JL animated series: We don’t do that to our enemies.
Diana: Speak for yourself.
Flash: I was trying to speak for Superman.”
This is just one of many examples from the shows where the other characters rely on the example of the paragon…to a point where it seems they may not actually agree with them.
I’m against murder, of course, but Diana stopping herself only because Superman would say to, and not out of any mercy of her own, seems like a red flag.
And it’s made more poignant when we consider that both in the Justice Lords episode of this show, and in the video game and movie versions of the Dark Justice League, Diana goes dark once Superman has led the way. Implying she never had any root in herself and her own ideals to resist the pull of power.
Diana’s weakness is not thinking for herself. Flash, who we learn died before the League went full on power mad in the alternate world, would have been the only person to resist the corruption, and he is the only one to stop Diana in the regular timeline.
J’onn, the Maritian, also expresses how he wonders if they can still be a league, how many battles did they win just because Superman was there, he asks.
[I actually think he’s less necessary than they think based on the show at least, but not in the movies.]
On RWBY, Ruby is followed by her sister, Yang, but also by Ozpin, who insists that victory is in the simpler things. Even the theme song says ‘victory is in a simple soul.’
The problem is, Ruby is not a simple soul.
Actually she is full of insecurities, questions, and later on, she resorts to deception and misleading her allies, just because she’s not sure what they will do with the truth, even though she was angry at Ozpin for doing the same thing.
Whereas Oscar, a much better character, is against ding this, but gets ignored because no one respects him.
And Superman, despite Flash’s well meaning optimism, is not the paragon of mercy Flash thinks he is.
Flash didn’t witness the two times Superman tried to kill Darkseid, a villain who humiliated him more than even Lex Luthor, who he just barely holds himself back from killing as it is. But Superman actually had zero hesitation to try to kill Darkseid, and was only stopped, one by Supergirl using reason, and once by Batman, who used brute force (sort of, he got lucky with a boom tube.)
The issue I have with both Supes and Ruby isn’t that they make these mistakes, while being the leaders, but it’s actually my second point:
2. The paragon lacks humility.
A good paragon has flaws, that’s not the problem. The problem is when they pretend that they don’t.
Ruby makes a crap ton of mistakes, but notably, she never once admits it.
As far back as volume 1, Weiss goes off on Ruby for being reckless and a show-off, but then admits that she herself can be a little ‘demanding’ and offers to compromise.
I might be missing something, but I don’t recall Ruby ever owning up to Weiss having a point. She’s just blindly confident that she’ll impress everyone with her skills. Which she does, but that doesn’t make her a good leader.
Weiss also complains that Ruby is the leader of their team, and offers some valid reasons, which in my mind were proven entirely right by Ruby herself several times, and then some, and while Weiss is hardly perfect, Ruby never tries to amend her actions to give Weiss more confidence in her, or acknowledge Weiss might have a point.
“I’m not perfect! Not yet, but I’m still a hundred times better than you.” Weiss, volume one. (I may have paraphrased slightly)
All the way up to Volumes 6-8, which were all horrible train wrecks, including the actual train wreck that happened in volume 6, where Ruby actually says she never needed her uncle’s help, after he saved her butt like 3 times just since his reintroduction in vol 4, and the other times people bailed her out.
Ruby, much like Naruto and Deku on their shows, doesn’t one off win nay fights on her own after volume 2, and that was a draw. Yet she has the idea that she’s independent somehow…why?
Let’s look at Superman for a moment.
In one of the worst episodes of the first JL show (but still far better than the last season of the Unlimited follow up show) Secret Society, Superman pisses off Flash and Hawk Girl by saying:
“At the end of the day, I’m the invulnerable one. Every hit I take is one someone else doesn’t have to.”
While they get mad at this, no one makes the pretty obvious come back: “Sure, until someone has Kryptonite or Red Sun Radiation.”
Something multiple people have had access to, in the show alone, and on his own show.
Superman may be tough, but everyone knows his weaknesses! He’s not invulnerable or invincible. Plus, even Lois Lane has had to save him, not once, but at least 2 or 3 times on his show, and the others saved him many times on the Justice League show.
So where does he get off suggesting that he’s somehow less subject to peril than they are? If he was less reckless about his own safety, they’d actually win their fights faster because they might employ this thing called strategy.
And this leads into point number 3
3. A paragon that never learns
Because of people worshiping them, and their big head, often bad paragons never learn anything from their mistakes.
The entire show of RWBY is proof of that for Ruby, but Superman is a little less obvious.
However, if we consider what happens in the Justice League show, it’s kind of unnerving.
One episode, PatriotAct, points out that after the League got called into question for having a weapon that was worse than a bomb would have been in their watchtower, and Cadmus has issues with them, instead of losing power, the League gains a second base on the earth, but doesn’t’ dismantle their watchtower.
And the only group that was capable of competing with them has been so publicly shamed that they are no longer a threat. Meaning the League is freer from criticism than ever.
Yet the League is still caught off guard by the villains unifying, and almost loses yet again to Darkseid. Superman, rather than show more caution, seems to be overly confident, and has to be saved, ultimately, by Lex Luthor, the most humiliating choice yet.
I can’t blame Superman entirely for that, but he didn’t really back off after the Cadmus incident. I don’t see how getting more power is learning his lesson about hubris and controlling things too much.
What really stands in the way of the League becoming the Justice Lords by the end of the show? Only Flash, anything could still happen to him. How have they learned and become stronger?
This is a problem with the show overall, but especially with Superman. Everyone else changes and evolves over time at least a little, but he stays the same. The same pride and anger under the surface, and willingness to compromise what he claims he upholds.
And finally, one last point
4. A paragon who is only an example when everyone is looking or they have something to prove.
What I detest about both Ruby and Superman, not because I’d hate them as people if it was true, but because they are hailed as such paragons of virtue, is their lack of consideration for anyone else.
If no one is looking, Ruby never gives a crap about helping anyboyd but herself, if shes’ not playint he hor.
Ruby herself is helped both by Blake and Jaune just on her first day at Beacon Academy, but we see her help no one else, nor try to.
While others stand up to the racism against Faunus, Ruby does nothing.
And when Oscar gets beat on for unfair reasons later in the show, Ruby only steps in one time, and that’s when it’s someone who she’d not get much flack for calling out, but not when her uncle or sister also abuse Oscar.
Ruby is nice to Oscar, because she has a crush on him, and once or twice she is nice to Jaune. So she’s not the worst, but she never goes out of her way to help anybody. Nor is she ever more open-minded than anyone else in the team.
But Superman has to be even worse.
I was reading someone else’s post about Wonder Woman the other day, and they brought up a scene where Diana teaches a little girl how to fight to help her have confidence about playing with the boys. The author commented that she couldn’t see Superman or Batman doing this.
I think Batman actually does demonstrate compassion more often, in his own way, when he helps Ace, one of the villains Cadmus created, as well as Baby Doll, one of his sadder villains, and many others. Actually it’s why he and Diana are good together.
But I agree, I can’t see Superman doing it.
Superman is the type of guy who’d say he has to focus on the big problems, fly around and help people, and the little things aren’t ones he can afford to spend time on.
Yet those things are what make us the most human and help us to stay grounded. If you’d take time to help a kid, even if it’s just over something small, then you will remember what’s really important.
He keeps Lois, the closest relationship he has, at arm’s length. At the end of the show, she still doesn’t know his real identity, that we know of. She knows freaking Batman’s, but not his!
I’ve never seen Superman help a kid, outside of his old comics, and then it was to prove a point, that he was Superman…he still helped either way, and I’m not saying he wouldn’t have anyhow, but he got invested primarily for that reason.
Contrast it with Flash, who is a great guy on and off the job, based on how his coworkers treat him. And is a great guy even to the other League members.
Can you see Superman getting Hawk Girl a coffee and blanket? Or giving an old coot an actual fair chance to explain his magic crystal and have a job later? Or painting someone’s fence?
Me neither. The fact that I wouldn’t even imagine it says a lot.
Oh and RWBY has an example of this too. Pyrrha freaking Nikos!
And that’s the perfect cue for me to launch into why Pyrrha is a way better paragon than Ruby, and why many people would be a better one than Superman.
Ironically, almost any member of the 7 would be better than Superman, but most of them lack the leadership drive to be so.
Good Paragon traits
Basically just turn all the bad ones on thier head.
Let’s star twith the last one and work backwards.
Instead of only dong good when it’s beneficial for them also, good Paragons do good when no one thanks them for it.
On Naruto, Gaara sticks up for the rights of people to have life, and for the ideals of mercy, long before he gets made the leader of the army. He works for years to reform Sand Village, to the point where assassination attempt on him by the elders who think he’s crazy or wrong happen so often that his siblings no longer even react to having to save him and each other’s lives at any given moment.
On RWBY, Pyrrha sticks up for Faunus though it gets her little thanks from her classmates. She also helps Jaune with his problems, even when it would get her the opposite of what she wants, or when he gets mad at her.
But what I love is that she’s got bit of a temper too. When Jaune forsakes his team because Cardin blackmails him, instead of coming to them for help, she makes her sentiment clear until he finally apologizes, but she still bails him out of a tight spot.
Pyrrha helps Jaune for his own sake, even when she’s not getting anyth out of it.
She also is nice to team RWBY, paying for their meal and is generally kind and caring to everyone.
Jaune also is a decent paragon, he has more of the traits of pursuing excellence that they have in anime, but he also sticks up for his team and helps people even when he doesn’t have to, as I mentioned above.
Turning back to Justice League, Wonder Woman is far more compassionate than Superman, and Batman is less arrogant. Flash however is the best example, since he combines both those traits at the same time.
Often the traits of a good paragon would be better if they rested on two or three character’s instead of just one, since few people are that virtuous, but if we want to find who’d be a better starting point, those are our choices.
Hawk Girl has the most integrity of everyone in the League, but lacks the confidence to lead, or she might make the better choice.
Point number 2, all of these other characters learn more than the actual paragon characters do.
Granted, not that much, in Batman’s case.
But Batman has a healthy respect for people with different qualities than himself, whereas Superman doesn’t.
Pyrrha is not given the chance to learn much since she (SPOILER ALERT) dies before she really can. But based on her overall humility, it seems like she would have.
Jaune we see does learn from his mistakes and improve, becoming more of a peacemaker in the group and a protector.
And of course, that includes having humility.
One of my favorite things about Pyrrha’s character, as I got more mature about looking at her, was that she isn’t above improving. She has a power that makes it easy for her to win fights by hardly doing anything, but only uses it to give her a bit of an edge, she still trains like crazy to hone her skills. She still thinks she needs to practice. Shes’ willing to team up with less skilled people like Jaune just because she likes his attitude, and to take orders from him despite his lack of experience, unlike Weiss’s attitude towards Ruby.
Pyrrha could roll her eyes😒at Jaune, but instead she builds him up. And he becomes the kind of leader she believed in, as he even acknowledges in vole 5 when he said she told him something once, and he believed her.
Pyrrha and Jaune
Pyrrha could win more on a different team, or if she asserted herself over Juane, but she doesn’t. Instead she embraces being treated like a normal person by him, and doesn’t see herself as the invincible, untouchable warrior.
And last bu not least, back to point 1.
A good paragon is not worshiped, they are imitated and respected.
Perhaps this is where Pyrrha, Flash, and the others I mentioned shine most clearly beyond their competition of the canon paragons.
While people talk about imitating Ruby, or Superman, no one actually does it. Or when they do, it’s usually the worst parts of them. Because people always copy your underlying attitude more than your professed one.
Flash copies Superman’s reckless actions more than his selfless ones, the Flash is selfless on his own, that’s why he can take that out of Superman’s example, but Superman never really has any interaction with Flash about this, nor do we see any one moment where Flash is inspired by him to be selfless when he’s actually there.
In contrast, Batman is moved by Flash’es compassion towards his foe the Trickster, in the episode about Flash. And tells Orion that he does not understand him.
Batman actually never talks Flash down, notably, and hes’ shown to be a closet fan of the Flash even in other renditions of the League.
So Flash inspires respect from people it’s worthwhile to earn the respect of, and he is looked up to by kids and regular citizens also just for being so good hearted.
Even if not everyone imitates Flash, they respect his heart.
Pyrrha on the other hand has admiration from her peers and superiors alike, but it’s interesting that in her closet ring of friends, she doesn’t inspire the hero worship that Ruby does.
People don’t look up to Pyrrha to lead them, they want to be like her, because she follows the right thing not just in her words, but in her actions.
Ruby and Superman tell people what the right thing is, Pyrrha and Flash show them what it is.
This doesn’t even mean that I’m arguing for Pyrrha and Flash to be the leader of their teams, I don’t think either of them are suited to that, in fact I thin paragons often don’t make good leaders because of their lack of putting themselves first. A leader ha to have some self confidence.
But like Jaune, and like Batman, the best leaders are the ones who are following the example of a paragon who isn’t the leader, but isn’t a blind follower either, who makes their own choices, but i willing to work with others also.
Pyrrha never turns down help, and Flash is the first to ask for it again after the League breaks up.
Every leader I know of who is also a paragon is the most boring and frustrating kind of protagonist, the most engaging leaders are the ones who learn from paragons as they go.
Like the show My Little Pony’s MC Twilight, who has to learn from all her friends in order to become the Princess of Friendship.
Pyrrha’s influence is felt in volume 4 and 6 especially when we see that Juane, as well as her other teammates, all want to be more like her, they do not say that about Ruby.
Ruby can lead, but she can not exemplify. That’s the problem.
Like Obi Wan Kenobi in Star Wars, Luke might be the leader, but he’s following Obi Wan’s example.
Once in a great while, a paragon may make a good protagonist, Twilight Sparkle sort of grows into being a paragon by the end of MLP, usually it’s done best when it’s like that, one character growing into being one over time.
Which is where Pyrrha having struggles and an arc in volume 3 made her much more like a protagonist than Ruby has ever been, fight me.
A paragon can also become a protagonist over time, it’s usually very satisfying to see that actually.
But the starting point has to be them working together, or it just doesn’t feel right, at least to me, it feels fake.
We are all protagonists in our own lives, but we all should want to be paragons, and if we find people looking up to us like ones, we should never forget to be protagonists also, always able to learn from others.
But when you divorce these two characters from helping each other, your story falls apart, because that’s not real life.
And with that, I think I’ll end this post, until next time–Natasha.
I watched a video this morning by a Christian Lady saying that this whole Trans craze is the reason she’s finally pulling her kids out of school and homeschooling them.
Hurray!
I was homeschooled all up till college. I do have trouble making friends, but it beats not having a brain.
Not that there aren’t some very smart kids in Public school, the problem is the systme istelf sucks the IQ out of these kids as fast as possible.
I learned something from this video that I should have realized before, I just never had gone to school enough to know it.
The schools slip this LGBT+ whatever stuff ito the curriculum because they clasify is as “anit-bullying” training
See, a very powerful lie because it’s mized with a small amount of truth, alwasy the most effective.
Sure, you can point to the whole pride community and say “They do get bullied”
True…but every community gets bullied. I don’t care who you are, you just have to live around jerks who are from a different circle, or be in the minority in your neighborhood.
The lady made an excellent point, that no other kind of bullying is the solution to pressure everyone else into being this thing.
Just about everyone mainstream had a label in the Pride community now, just because it makes them cool. Just ike everyone has a mental illness.
Humans are infamous for promoting trends that are unhealthy to ourselves, without knowing it. But I never thought I’d see the day, even in my short life, where promoting being unhealthy itself would be popular.
What the heck?
I have a cousin who’s already fallen under this spell, who was always a very normal girl before she got Tiktok. But, of course, she wants to fit in.
The kid is too young to drive, but according to the YouTube lady, that doesn’t mean she can’t get hormones and change her pronouns, without parental consent.
It’s bizarre and insane, you have to get parental consent to treat kids in the freaking Emergency room just in case you give them something they are allergic to, but you don’t have to get it to give them body altering hormones?
That’s nuts.
Even parents who support the rights of this community have an issue with this, but the kids are being taught to ignore their parents, to see them as the enemy if they don’t support this.
I see no real doubt about this being a cult, but I didn’t understand how it got slipped into school so fast until the anti-bullying connection was made for me, now I get it.
Because I hear kids defends this so vehemently, the way they’d say it’s not right to bully someone else, and they never stop to think that maybe it’s not the same thing, because a kid doesn’t understand the nuances between preventing bullying and pushing an agenda.
Hey, China did this once. They said everyone should stop being bullied by the oppressive landlords. Anyone who owned land and wealth had to be stropped of it.
So they made their whole population poor, and completely dependent on the government, which was pretty broke also, and just the most high ranking people had wealth. People turned on each other, because there was no need for proof, you just had to make an accusation. All the most spiteful people are in charge in a society like that.
It didn’t end well for China.
It’s not rocket science to most of us that all this is not going to end well, but how do we stop it?
I figure that in some ways, it can’t be stopped. AS long as parents are willing to allow it, some kids are bound to be victimes of it.
Homeschooling is the best option, to be sure, but not everyone can do it. Still one could pay for a tutor, or try a different kind of school.
But it’s not just schoool, it’s the internet.
No kid should have a tiktok, that’s just common sense. They don’t need to be exposing themselves on line to people when they can’t even legally sign an information release form yet, not that hard to figure out.
I didn’t start my YouTube channel till I was 17 or 18 I think, and I never gave personal information out on it.
I know I’m not saying anything new here, but we just need as many people to be saying it as possible. To do our best to have a counter movement.
But in answer to the guy who commented asking why people feel the need to prove themselves right, and they can’t just live and let live.
This is why, Sir. Thisfreakingcrapiswhy!
Because when we give up trying to prove ourselves right, you know who takes the hit? It’s not us, not right away, not the adults. It’s the kids. They don’t get a choice. They don’t know any better.
And if we adults who do are too lazy, cowardly, or indifferent to speak our piece to these other people and contest them, they will own our kids. Literally, before too long.
It won’t be long before even being an adult won’t be any protection anymore, at this rate. But let’s talk about htat.
I know people at my college who will applaud slipping this propaganda into everything, because they don’t think.
You see, if we thought about it, would we relaly beokay with this?
I know exaclty how it works.
People may call me transphobic for not agreeing with this, but I prefer to think of it as Pride-phobic. I am terrified by anyone exulting pride as something we all should be aiming for. Pride is deadly.
Hubris is the deadly Pride that says “I can do better than God/gods” depending on what religion you are, but it’s pride in oneself and their own wisdom above everything else.
Playing God, we call it.
I can’t think of any more blatant example of this than saying you can change the gender someone was born with, especially before they are old enough to understand what that truly means.
Some people say that doctors play God, to be sure, in some cases.
Yeah, that might be true…so change the laws there, but that doesn’t justify letting kids make these choices, or letting mentally unstable people make them either.
Now if a stable, grown adult wants to transition, I may disagree, but I wouldn’t stop them, because the y have the right to choose what they will do. They have the right to choose to do anything…and reap the consequences.
But that’s not the majority of cases here, that’s the problem.
I know why people take isue with sotpin it.
They say that whatever negative things happen it’s still important to promote this because these people need to feel accepted and loved.
That sounds good.
Until…
Think about it, what culture has ever had trure and complete acceptance of every kind of person?
That would be zero.
But the ones that got closest were the Nazis.
Yeah you could be from any background, if you join the nazi party you were in. You were the cool kids.
All you had to do was be willing to crush anyone outside the party who was in your way. Anyone who as not Germany,or anyone who was German but was loyal to the enemy, that is tot say, the people you were murdering enmasse.
Some people will say Gitler wasn’t evn worn now.
I heard the Whoopi Goldberg even said that the Holocaust wasn’t about Race.
I guess all those books the Germans wrote about superior genetics being in the German line, and all that propaganda they put out about black people (you know, ones like Whoopi Goldberg) and Jews was all about something other than race.
I can’t imagine what it would be, if not race, must be something only enlighten people like Goldberg know.
I remember the Rwanda Holocuast really united the country, as long as you weren’t Tutsi. And as long as you didn’t look Tutsi, even if you were Hutu, you were fine.
Yeah…you know mass acceptance comes at a price. Because when people are individuals, some of them will not fit in, they will not be accepted, so you have to sacrifice your individuality in order to be accepted.
Put on their label, dye your hair, wear the make up, wear your pride sticker. Now you’re cool.
But if you want to do anything for yourself, without putting that label on it you can’t get away from it.
Remember that gay ice skater in the Olympics a few yeas ago. The news couldn’t get enough of him, though he was not the best skater in the team, and the one who was didn’t get interview as much. (And I mean by the scores, he wasn’t the best, not my personal opinion).
I really would care if a gay man was the best ice skater, because to me being gay and having talent are two things that have nothing to do with each other, why would they? Does being straight give you talent? No? Does sex give you talent period? No.
But he gets attention just for that.
You know it kind of sucks even if you are gay, because you may have hobbies that you’d like to get acclaim for, and you’ll never know if people are just praising you because you’re gay, or because you’re talented. Since the general public really can’t recognize talent and skill that well to begin with, that makes it even worse. Charisma goes a long way with the masses, but if you say you’re gay, that’s an automatic win.
A lot of people are milking it on purpose to get famous, or more famous, Like Demi Lovato.
But if you genuinely do feel gay, you may not really want that to be all there is to you. I read an article by someone like that once in college.
And it’s sad. Really. Talent is talent, whoever has it, shouldn’t it be acknowledged as such?
I’ve watched a gay youtuber for years now, because he has talent. But sadly, he has leaned more and more into using his gay label to make content, instead of actually using his creative talents to do it. He used to be real clever, but he doesn’t need to be now. He’s got talent still…but he no longer needs to use it, so he doesn’t.
That’s going to happen to kids right and left at this rate. Why be a scientist if you can get famous by being a sexual orientation, it’s not like that takes work.
I saw this ad for a new show where this Trans person is saying that they hate it when people say they are brave for transition so young, and someone replies “its not brave to be who you are.”
While I wholly disagree with the premise of that sentiment, it’s interesting in one way.
By their own logic, why is this anything to applaud? If it’s just who they are, that’s like applauding someone for liking the color blue. What does my merits as a person have to do with it? Nothing.
Some of them will say t his.
The thing is, the people who are getting into this because it’s popular are really the ones who will ignore that.
Nevermind if it actually hurts the exact people you’re trying to help.
A gay person might like to write a play about something other than being gay, you know, just for once. But they aren’t allowed to, are they? Name one, I’ll wait.
Anyway, I need to wrap this up.
In short, I think pushing this agenda is hurting the gay and whatever else is in the spectrum people just as much as anyone else, and it’s hurting kids too.
And before we decide to ride this train because everyone else is doing it, we should ask if we want to be responsible for that kind of damage.
… But if you close your eyes Does it almost feel like nothing changed at all? And if you close your eyes Does it almost feel like you’ve been here before? How am I gonna be an optimist about this? How am I gonna be an optimist about this?
We were caught up and lost in all of our vices In your pose as the dust settled around us
The rough draft of this post got erased somehow…I guess I shouldn’t leave things on this site…
So starting over from scratch, what would be a good thing to write about?
I know that my original point was how well this song describes us now. I mean us in the Western World.
You know it’s funny how much depression runs rampant in our cultures, considering we have more benefits than we ever have.
But that’s actually something we have in common with animals.
A study was done on rats, where they were given everything they needed, all the time, never had to work for it.
The rats developed depression, as well as other unhealthy habits, for rats…and for humans.
But you might see the same thing with dogs. They’re bred for work, and when they’re kept as pets but not exercised properly or given any tasks to do, they will also get depressed.
And so do humans.
This life of staring at screens and working from home, and not getting outside and having to really work to solve problems that many of us have is making us depressed. We feel like we have no meaning, because there is no effort.
We don’t have to be fighting for survival, to feel accomplished, any creative goal can help, but most especially if it’s necessary.
I know each generation has its issues with how the younger one has it easier and isn’t disciplined.
I do think there’s some truth in that, though. Even I feel less invested in homework assignments since I had to do them digitally, and it’s just a little too easy now. I know it doesn’t prove I’m smart now, if I succeed, it just proves I knew what the teacher wanted. Many times I could have done way more if left to my own devices.
But the education system encourages me not to be creative, because my grade will suffer if I don’t meet the exact requirements of the assignment. Ever get in trouble for going over the page limit? Yeah…
But anyway, my point is, we don’t have to really work. There are people who do, but the ones who are the face and voice of our culture don’t.
And that is every race, gender, and whatever else.
i think that’s part of the reason we spend so much time fighting each other, really. While history shows people would fight each other no matter what, it doesn’t help that we really have all the time in the world to do it now, instead of having to set aside time to go to war.
All this has got me to thinking.
About how few people under 30 even know history now, they really don’t know that much period. Not science, or religion, or how people work.
You have your outliers, like my cousin, who like to do their own research, but they’re not the majority.
Not that this is unusual, in pampered societies, it’s pretty normal, actually…and then they crumble.
That’s what the song Pompeii is about, really. How when we’re left to ourselves, to follow our own whims, we get buried in our sins, until disaster strikes, and freezes us that way forever.
And how can you be an optimist about this? When there is only one outcome ever to societies in moral decay like that.
“In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes.” (Judges 21:25, 17:6)
Both those instance talk about someone doing something pretty stupid and wrong. And also it says:
“Be not wise in your own eyes: fear the LORD, and depart from evil.” (Proverbs 3:7)
We are wise in our own eyes now aren’t we?
Like all this prattle about not getting married and staying single that I wrote about before. What is that but being wise in our own eyes.
And we don’t seem to care what generations of humans before us said or thought. We’ve got it figued out now.
I mean because with zero experience, zero study, and only the corrupt examples of current culture to go by, clearly we’re well informed on these issues.
But the depression of this age has gone so far now, that a lot of kids don’t even care anymore if they’re right.
Case in point, just yesterday, I was in YT comment thread with someone who said that truth doesn’t matter tot ehm.
I was asking them why they bothered to watch the whole video of a debate if they didn’t care about the truth or what was right.
I got no answer to that so far. I probably never will.
At this point, admitting you hunger for a definitive truth is like a weakness to our relativistic young people–and some older people also.
Of course the dismissive attitude of older people isn’t helping.
I mean, who let the kids watch PBS and Disney Channel and Cartoon network? I noticed the bad messages of those channels when I was a kid. I’m not surprised the people who never questioned it have now swallowed it hook line and sinker.
I mean, you take a whole show like Dora the Explorer, and you go on a quest through a fake map, looking fora fake item, learn a few Spanish words…and you call that exploring?
Nothing against Dora personally, it’s an okay show for entertainment–but it’s not really educational. And it’s not even the worst one.
It’s hard to blame the young, they’re just doing what they were taught to do, and by the time they realize it wasn’t right, they’ll have a lot of regrets.
Still we have our own responsibility. And they do choose not to think, not to try, not to explore for real. And that’s on them.
I bring all this up, but do I have a solution?
I think the solution is the same as it’s always been.
Person by person, the only thing to do is try to get people to understand the condition they’er in.
Debate isn’t always the best way to do that, I admit. Though it works for some.
I’ve had most people just duck out of arguments when they realized I was going to win because I was better informed than them, or just straight up insult me.
But people can’t always be so quick to dismiss if you touch them on a personal level.
We need both.
But it’s hard, there’s so few people fighting these battles compared to the people who are casualties in them.
But that’s how it usually goes. We preserve a remnant of the people. The majority of them don’t want to be helped.
Some will literally say so, I have grandparents who would say that.
We love our sin so much.
We love being able to do what we wnat.
And now it’s not a secret, you’d even hear it hailed from the streets and the theaters and political campaigns that we’d rather die doing what we’d prefer to do, right or wrong, then live submitting to God’s will.
I saw this comment today, it was like this: I don’t believe in God because there’s nothing about same sex relationship in the bible and He’s not okay with them.
First: There’s actually plenty about homosexuality in the Bible, Sodom and Gomorrah, the books of the Law, and Romans 1 all talk about it. (It’s called Sodomy in the old Testament)
Second: I find that these types of objections completely misunderstand the nature of God’s existence.
You see, if God exists does not depend on our personal preferences. He either does, or He doesn’t.
If He does exist, He is the final say on what is right and wrong. You, as His creation, don’t get an opinion.
Sure, against other humans, you do. But not against God. If God was in front of you and He told you, that would be the last word. And if you saw God, in His Glory, the last thing you would dream of doing is arguing with Him.
See, the point of contention is not if God supports what we feel is right.
If God is the Reality, then that is the reality we have to deal with. Even if He was the bloodthirsty God of many religions, cruel and spiteful, which would be bad for us. But it would be Reality, there’d be nothing we can do about it.
Thankfully, God is not like that. But He’s still unchangeable. Your preferences donesn’t come into it.
You may not like it….and God has never said we have to like doing what He says…but He does say we need to do it.
As a Christian, I do find that the rewards of serving God is that if you do it long enough, you will start to like it, and then eventually, you won’t be able to do without it. But that’s sort of an insider bonus. The bible promises that one day everyone will have to submit to God’s will, whether they like it or not.
It’s a bit like Gravity. Many of us wish we could fly, and though we can sort of, using machines, we have to borrow that from things God made that can defy gravity, we ourselves can’t defy gravity more than a few feet in the air before it yanks us back down.
In the same way, we can’t defy God’s design for very far in our moral lives. Maybe if we had the “help” from the devil, we can go farther…gross.
But that’s short lived, and on our own, the consequences of our actions will always pull us back down to the ground eventually.
Christians believe that one day God will set us free form the law of Gravity, just as one day, we don’t need the Law of morality anymore…because we’ll become things that don’t need gravity, and things that don’t need law. We’ll have a new nature.
Like a caterpillar turns into a butterfly.
But until then, this is what we’ve got. We have to work with it.
I’m not an optimist about Mans’ ability to fix this world. I think we’re as doomed as Pompeii.
But I always knew that.
But I still have hope. I hope in God’s ability to always save some people, as He promises to do. And in that hope, we keep trying to be a part of that.
Well my last post seems to have gone over well, so I trust I’m striking a chord with some people at least.
I talked a lot about being arrogant in that post.
What I don’t want to do is come off like I’m blaming Gen Z and Millennials for this.
While I do blame them in some capacity for making their own decision to embrace all this insanity, I can’t say they’re particularly stupid or evil compared to the rest of humanity.
It’s been pointed out by smarter people than me that the age of Moral Standards we’ve lived in for the last 200 years in the West, give or take a few decades or centuries depending on the country, was not a usual thing for humans. It’s the anomaly.
From the Middle Ages to the Renaissance to the Revolution era, it was a very unusual period in history compared to before, especially the pre-Christian era.
Up till then, the general consensus from all people’s was that everyone else was corrupt, and only their culture stood out, and some of them didn’t even go that far.
If you read what the Bible describes people doing, it would shock you how sick it was. Even now, we haven’t gone that far–as a whole–though some of us have.
And God somehow still had hope for those people. It boggles my mind. But He was always looking for the Remnant.
What big movement preachers tend to overlook, though they mean well, and I wish what they talked about was more frequent than it is–is that Positive Change, as well as Ethics being Preserved, is usually the work of small amounts of people.
A few thousand out of many thousands, is usually the biggest amount of people who work together on it.
It can be as few as 8, like the story of Noah (the legend is found in almost every culture in the world by the way, often with the same number of people surviving as the Bible says.)
God has His eyes always on the few.
Jesus even told us “Straight is the gate and narrow is the way to Life, and few will there be that find it.” (Matthew 7:14)
Which seems harsh…but Jesus is just telling us how this works.
The Masses of people are not concerned with morality that much, and if they ever are concerned about a few things in general, it was the phenomenon of the past thousand years to see that, it wasn’t common before.
That’s why some historians have the idea that Man’s Consciousness is evolving. They look at our moving toward higher and higher ethical standards, and or at least more discussion about them, and they say we improved.
But if you look at the bare facts of history, you’ll see each age has its own problems, and they repeat. We’re not smarter as a whole, it’s isl that those of us in each generation that do See Clearly, see a little more, because wise men learn form history and they build off of it, but foolish ones ignore it and they always have.
That was part of the thought that’s been rolling around in my head for several months, which is just this:
Things that people predict will happen if a country doesn’t change it’s course always do actually happen.
And no one listens because no one ever has listened.
You see, a lot of social commentators say that the problem is people just don’t realize what is happening.
But that is not true.
Sure there’s secrete scandals still, there probably always will be as long as mankind is in power.
But the problems that are eating away at us are ones people predicted and called to attention for years, and decades, and even centuries.
Just like in the Bible the Prophets told the Israelites what was happening. And the Israelites didn’t listen.
It’s so hard for us to admit this, isn’t it? That we do what we do, knowing exactly what will happen, and we do it anyway.
Example:
If you got any person to answer you honestly on the subject of depicting violent in movies directed at kids as much as we do, they’d have to acknowledge that statistics do point to violence in entertainment having a bad effect on kids and their development.
But would they stop promoting that stuff by watching it, talking about it, reviewing it, and in many cases, showing it to their own kids.
My father did, and he’d be one of the ones to say it was a problem.
You see? We know…we just don’t care.
That’s always the way.
I’m glad that my faith was never in humanity to begin with, because living in a world where everyone’s corruption is exposed so much via internet would kill anyone’s faith in humanity.
We hope for the best from people, but we cannot depend on it, unless we know them very well.
But that’s not really mean to be a depressing thought. The Bible has said that for years. All these angsty pop culture hot take people are just agreeing with an old teaching, that’s all.
It’s like G. K. Chesterton said, if we try to hit on anything original an good, we’ll only find it was Orthodoxy the entire time.
Even the idea of Self Worth is Christian, though it’s been taken way, way out of it’s proper context, as always.
I don’t know if there’s a better or worse thing to worship other than God. One could make the case for it, but it’s kind of a matter of opinion whether the worship of success and domination of a few hundred years ago is really better or worse than the worship of tribalism and self fulfillment is now. Often both at the same time.
Humans are not better or worse than we’ve been in the past.
But we are regressing out of the progress the last centuries brought us in at least realizing how messed up we were.
People used to admit that there was a lot wrong with human nature, even if they didn’t see it in themselves.
But now we’re really trying to deny that Human Nature is corrupt.
Telling people to “Be themselves” no matter what.
Yes,the message to be genuine is a good one.
But predictably, since other messages were neglected, it’s become “be yourself even if that you is a terrible person.”
Women will admit to be aggressive b—-s publicly now. Like ti’s something to brag about.
“I’m so mean, yay!”
Or “so evil” I hear that one a lot.
“I have no soul” guys say that one too.
“no heart.”
Wow, so brave of all of you to admit to being inhuman. Hip hip hurrah.
I think actual people who are jerks have always been proud of it, if they weren’t arrogant, they probably would be jerks.
But at least it wasn’t approved of by the entire culture before, not for a long time, but we’re swinging back that direction.
Let’s just remember that in Greek Culture, which is where we get a lot of our ideas, rape and kidnapping were normalized parts of their mythology that no one thought twice about. It’s possible to be completely blind to the obvious.
Actually we’re blind to the obvious most often, because we just don’t want to see it.
2 Timothy 3 says this about it:
“But know this, that in the last days perilous times will come: 2 For men will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, 3 unloving, unforgiving, slanderers, without self-control, brutal, despisers of good, 4 traitors, headstrong, haughty, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, 5 having a form of godliness but denying its power.”
Even if we ignore the ones I didn’t emphasize, though they are still prevalent, look at how much those words sum up not just our complaints at a culture, but the things we actually praise.
Romans 1 says that people, known such thins are wrong, not only practice them but approve of those who do.
In 2000 years, nothing has changed.
Ecclesiastes says there is “nothing new under the sun.”
It’s been dawning on me that while I appeal to people’s desire for morality when I debate them, I am assuming they care at all.
But I think less and less of them do.
Aside from the SJW crap that they are programmed to react to, without understanding it at all, they really don’t care about higher thought.
These things have no value to them. They live for entertainment and pleasure. For Self. And no one tells them this is unacceptable.
It’s not a mystery why the Media promotes this. Selfish people buy more things, and care less if you exploit others to provide them with those things.
But it’s sad how the schools and churches have promoted it so much also.
They have us so much under their spell, the Overlords’, that we can be told this point blank, even by our own commercials on TV, and we simply don’t care. Just keep distracting me. The world is a dark place.
Well in Quasimodo’s words to Frollo “Well now I see the only thing that’s dark about it is people like you!”
See, the people who tell us to stay away form the world because of its evil are the same ones making it evil. They don’t want us to catch on, do they? Called Gaslighting.
Because if we did catch on, we might stop them, and evil men fear having their deeds exposed, don’t they?
They hate and fear those of us who know better and have pure hearts. And like Fagan from OliverTwist, they want to make sure anyone who does is corrupted.
A lot of anime has this theme also. What is Japan trying to tell us, huh? That people who are naturally more inclined to do good than the rest of us are feared the most.
Don’t you fear someone who seems like a better person than you, sometimes? I know I have.
I’ve mostly given up thinking of it that way, we’re all human. But I can do that because I have grace, the people who don’t are still afraid, we remind them of their own death the Bible says.
People have accused Christians of that ever since they first appeared.
I have to recognize as I write this that a lot of people may not even be ready to hear what I’m saying.
They may not even be to where they see a piot ot all this.
I can hope it resonates with someone who is ready, who needs it.
Like “wow I’m not crazy!”
My advice, if i’m qualified to give it, is if you have found yourself noticing all these problems, don’t waste time being chocked by them.
Try to find that remnant of people who still believe in the old values, and stick with them.
And reach who you can. There’s always some wheat among the tares of each generation, perhaps more than we realize, since many of us give up trying to reach them.
It’s not our job to decide who can receive truth and salvation, we are supposed to shoot our shot, and let God choose how it lands.
I don’t know what all our fates will be, and I ‘m not suppose dot know, but I know that we can’t control destiny, only how much we want to take an active role in it. There are still things that will happen no matter what, but there’s a lot we can change also. So we are still supposed to try.
That said, for now I’m done, so until next time, stay honest–Natasha
drybonestruth 