Mothers and Daughters Forever?

My Facebook buds post stuff like this (above) all the time. And there's a kind of truth to it, but they leave out the tough bits. A daughter is always her daddy's little princess (unless he's some kind of psychopath or a complete jerk). Her relationship with her mom is always somewhat problematic. Beginning sometime around puberty, mothers and daughters find themselves at cross-purposes. It's biological. God put this "I have to get out of here" gene into all children so that a kind of madness descends in adolescence that drives them out of your house before they realize what a swell deal they've got going and wind up at 45 living in your basement and expecting you to do their laundry.

The first corrective measure God ever took with mankind was to throw them out of the Garden of Eden and to give them homework.

"Go forth, be fruitful and multiply!" God said as He gave them the bum's rush out of the Garden. Remember too, God was unhappy with us when He said it. 

It works much like that with our own children. God wanted us to have kids so we'd understand in a very real way, what He experienced in trying to raise us to be decent, hardworking, kindly people. God wanted us to experience rebellion, ingratitude and distrust as manifest in our own offspring.

The above meme represents a condition that exists beyond a certain point in the mother/daughter relationship. It only happens after your daughter gets over being mad at her Mom for all the supposed motherly atrocities mom committed during her adolescence. Things like making them tell the parents where they are at, where they are going to be and when they are coming home. Horrors of that sort. In adolescence, the youngsters feel this terrible constriction when their parents demonstrate their love for them by demanding they not do things that are dangerous, self-destructive or generally bad for them

There is a strange transformation of the mother-daughter relationship that occurs during a daughter's twenties or thirties. It usually happens at about 2 am some morning after she's had a couple of kids of her own. The daughter-now-mother-herself is sitting up all night with one of her babies that is sick. It may happen the day she drops that first one off at school for the first time and cries about the loss of her "baby" all the way home. It can happen in Walmart when the two year old demands candy in the checkout line and when Mom says "no", the precious child screams "NO" right back in her face and the throws himself down on the floor and has a right old tantrum there in front of the cashier, the manager and 40 or 50 Walmart customers.

It is during or shortly after one of those magic moments, when the daughter is unburdening herself to her mother, that Mom magically becomes her daughter's hero. And it's usually around about this time that Mom offers to take the grandbabies off her hands so she can have  "a couple of hours to herself" and seals the deal.

God, it turns out, is a terrific educator. We just have to get the kids to do their homework is all.

© 2017 by Tom King

A Broken Record....

Shoes left behind at Auschwitz.

Humans want so badly to believe that we are basically good and perfectible if we just have the right laws, the right leaders and the right government. The fallacy of this was clearly demonstrated in the Old Testament. God meant it as a history lesson. The Children of Israel were given a promised land flowing with milk and honey, located right on all the best trade routes to insure prosperity. They were given perfect laws to govern their behavior. Had everyone obeyed those laws Israel would have been as close to Utopia as could be had. They asked God for stronger and stronger, more perfect leaders and a stronger centralized government like their neighbors had. God finally relented and gave them what they asked for. And the people waited for their nation to become strong and peaceful and perfect as it surely must under such a perfect system.

But God had warned them about kings and governments. He warned them that the king would take their sons for soldiers, their daughters for his wives and their earnings for his great palaces and his wars. Eventually, the Children of Israel sank so low that they killed the very Son of God.

But we want so badly to seize the power for ourselves as Satan promised Eve when he told her she would be like a god. So we ignore any evidence that we aren't going to be able to do the same thing we've tried over and over through thousands of years of human history. We avert our eyes from injustice or blame it on someone else. We forget the lessons of Auschwitz, the Soviet Gulags, the Killing Fields of Cambodia, the millions of peasants starved to death in the Ukraine and China, the slaughter in Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Chad, the Sudan, Somalia, Cuba and the Japanese Army's Unit 731. We keep repeating to ourselves, "We can be like gods." and we keep becoming devils instead. Instead of leading us to a Paradise on Earth, those who promise us human perfection through law, government and dear leaders keep giving us gulags, death camps and wholesale slaughter.

More horrors are coming again. I can smell the copper scent of blood as black-masked thugs beat up people to silence their opinions and to prevent them from hearing other voices than their own. I can hear it echoing through riot-torn streets. I can taste the bitter gun smoke in the aftermath of another mass shooting. Fresh horrors are coming but I am not afraid, for even if the liars and the thugs and the great men (ah, but I repeat myself); if the premiers, potentates and dear leaders do score a victory, it will be a hollow one, for they will soon receive oblivion as their reward. The Children of the Living God cannot lose no matter what the outcome of the war might be. That makes us mighty.

This makes it possible for me to smile, even as the clouds roll over our heads and the lightning barks its angry warning.

© 2017 by Tom King

 

I Hate Digital Tyranny

YOU HEARD ME GOOGLE

So apparently Youtube has joined forces with Google and Microsoft in a plot to make videos unwatchable from my beloved Firefox Browser. In the past week, Youtube went from requiring extra clicks to watch its videos to simply refusing to play videos at all unless I switched to Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge. This does not make me love either Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge and it carves one more negative notch on my list o' gripes I have with Windows 10. I don't like either Chrome or Edge's interface - especially Chrome. Apparently the uber-geek coders at Microsoft and Google believe that we all want to learn a new browser interface every year or so, just because we are bored and have nothing else to do. At this point they totally ignore the druthers of anyone over 55 years of age.

While Windows 10 has some nice features, they also like to confuse you by hiding things you need in new less obvious places. And now a whole bunch of my tried and true software doesn't work anymore and they want me to buy or rent new software with money they want and which I do not have lying around to donate to Mr. Gates or the antifa thugs at Google. This is why Apple, despite being a socialist dictatorship of a computer system, keeps drawing adherents. People buy Apple stuff in the faint hope that they won't have to learn a new interface every year. There is a kind of pathetic hope that Apple will at least be consistent.

Don't bet on it people. Geeks is geeks and they have no clue how normal people work. Check out Scott Adams' Dilbert comic strip for a peek inside the disordered brains of software designers. It's all true. I'm just surprised Google hasn't developed an app that drinks your coffee for you.

It's not Artificial Intelligence that's going to kill us all. It's Artificial Ignorance that'll do it. One day someone's going to find some deeply buried Easter Egg in some updated version of Microsoft Office 22, and quite by accident, when the robot voice asks, "Do you want to play global thermonuclear war?" the dimbulb who found this "special" feature of Office 22 (and who never saw the movie War Games) will say, "Yes."

Of course, by then, all he'll have to do is nod his head and the software will pick it up on his webcam, send nuclear launch codes to Cheyenne Mountain, and launch an all out attack on someplace like Terlingua cause the programmer hates chili or on Salt Lake City because he was once frightened by a Mormon missionary.

Our lives hang by such a thin thread.

© by Tom King

What Love Is Not

Love is not, in and of itself, immortal, nor is it some self-existent feeling, that lodges inside you; that is something you either "have," as in, "I have love for you," or that you do not have, as in "You've lost that lovin' feelin'." Love is something you create through committing relentless acts of love. It is not something you can suddenly acquire, like a headache, a cold or a new pair of shoes. That sort of acquired love is more like the song that goes, "I've got the hots for you!"  That is not love at all.

Love is something you create. Love is the greatest of the action verbs. To be shure there are feelings that come when you commit acts of love, but those feelings are an artifact of the act of love and not the thing itself.

Feelings of love help us know when we are doing acts of love. They remind us of our determination long ago that we shall love, honor, and cherish another until death forces us to stop loving, if only till we one day, "in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye" take up immortality and resume what turns out to have been an eternal love after all.

© 2017 by Tom King