How We Wound Up Back in the Box

And How Do We Get Out?

Here we are eight days till we choose the form of the Destructor and most of the electorate is locked into a black and white, binary mindset. It's an either or choice for Mr. and Mrs. (or Ms.) America, and few of us have the ability to think much beyond that. The idea that there might be something outside the box we are presented is too much of a strain on our brains in this busy world we inhabit. Anything outside the box just isn't worth the effort to think about. It doesn't matter that our "choices" are both the same.

I'm not going to talk about the election here, so hang with me for a bit.  I want to talk about choices. It's a depressing thought, but the current condition of our lives is the result, primarily, of a long series of choices we have made. Don't get me wrong here. I'm not ruling out tragedy. I've had my share of those and I know how tragedy can knock you off course. I'm not ruling out blind luck. That happens too. But even external factors have limited influence as to what kind of person you eventually become.

That does not mean that if all your choices are the right ones that you'll wind up wealthy and prosperous. Christ arguably made all the right choices and look where he wound up. His disciples didn't do any better. None of them wound up dying peacefully in their beds as old rich dudes. Almost to a man they died hard. The only one who died old was boiled in oil and spent his golden years breaking rocks on the Roman equivalent of Alcatraz Island.

That doesn't mean that Peter, James and John and the gang were failures or made wrong choices.. The Sanhedrin thought Jesus was a failure, but his followers became arguably the most influential religious group in the world. The Sanhedrin's followers wound up cycling through the gas ovens at Auschwitz and surviving as a tiny remnant fighting for their lives.

I'm not going to lament here about the good old days. They weren't all that good. Back then, most of the world worked themselves to an early grave in their 30s or 40s. If hard labor didn't kill them, disease, warfare, pestilence and famine did. Civilization remained pretty much the same from generation to generation. Nobody thought things would get any better. After all, everything had stayed the same with only incremental variation from Babylonian to Medieval times.  A few great thinkers tried to make choices outside the traditional boxes they grew up in. Most were quickly squashed by some thug who didn't want anything to get better because new technology and new ideas like Christianity's whole Golden Rule thing had the potential to mess up the deal that the big dogs had going for them. Serfs exercising free choice to the bosses seemed a very bad thing. So, as a way to keep everyone in line, they reduced their choices down to a simple either/or choice, neither of which actually changed anything.

Gruel with salt or gruel without salt?

The Founding Fathers had a great idea that dumbfounded the rest of the civilized world. It was the idea that we all are commoners and all are equal in the sight of God and therefore should all be equal in the sight of the law. The American ideal took decision-making out of the binary box where you had two choices, both of which were bad. In the beginning, the electoral system was all over the place and you wound up with things like John Adams as president and his arch-rival Thomas Jefferson as veep. In most cultures, there would likely have been an assassination with that arrangement, but instead there was a lifelong friendship between the two, despite their vast political differences. And the country got along pretty well.

Almost immediately, however, the folk who think they should run everything began trying to stuff us back into the binary boxes again. Within a hundred years our betters have whittled the scattering of political parties we once had down to two and only two parties. They have confidently proclaimed that we have a two-party system now, despite the fact that there's no provision for any such thing in the Constitution! Third parties it is agreed are unAmerican things and are unhelpful in decision-making for the good of all.

It's always about power isn't it?  People, thinking outside of the approved boxes, make it so hard for the rulers to rule. Out of the box thinkers have created all the innovation we've seen in the past 200 years. The world has changed. Communication, transportation, information sharing and processing, technology and art have blown up in recent years creating massive new tools for even more out of the box thinking.

Now look around and see who is trying to busily stuff us back in to those binary boxes again - you know the gruel with salt or gruel without salt kind of boxes. Those are they guys you want to watch out for. They need to reduce communication down to a manageable level. To many opinions lead to disruption after all. They want to limit transportation so we can't run around meddling in the social order without permission. They'll want to limit choices of all kinds and take over information sharing technologies like the Internet. They'll use fear, bullying and intimidation, over-regulation and meddling in your private lives. They'll call such liberty restricting collective efforts for the good of mankind and tell you that you are a bad person if you don't go along with it.

It's all really about simplifying how things work so that our choices are limited to what our betters think they should be. Nothing upsets folk in power like having the proletariat make choices that are outside the approved box o' choices. Too much choice makes the masses hard to control.

Can we break the cycle? Of course we can. Will we do it?  Probably not. And it's not just the leader class that make it hard to change. We are our own worst enemies in that respect. Out of the box choices are difficult to understand and often require hard work. Thinking independently may result in your separating yourself from the herd. But that makes us uncomfortable. There's security in the herd and just enough of the illusion of free choice to keep the cows content and to provide the bulls with plenty of amusement.

We are making the kind of choices that Dr. Jerry Harvey described in his brilliant paper "The Abilene Paradox". You should read it. It's a revelation. We Americans have wound up someplace we didn't want to wind up because our leaders have kept reducing things down to either/or choices and we've gone along with it.  The family in the "Trip to Abilene" story makes a miserable trip to Abilene to a restaurant in 105 degree summer temps in an un-air-conditioned truck after a series of either/or decisions based on false assumptions and in-the-box thinking.

We're there folks. Arguably the most important choice we Americans have to make has been reduced to a choice between the lesser of two evils. We've driven to Abilene and now we've got the whole long miserable drive back to look forward to. As for me and my house, I'm getting out of the truck and off the merry-go-round. It's time!

And I do want to apologize. I know I said I wouldn't, but I somehow I wound up back at the election. But it's not just about elections. It's about the choices we make in our lives. My wife and I chose a long time ago to go where God would have us go and do what He would have us do. It's kind of been a career like the disciples and the road has at times been hard, but one thing about letting God guide your choices. He keeps you out of boxes. This does not mean you'll be entirely comfortable. It does mean it's more likey that your decisions will actually be your decisions and not the decision of the herd.  The Truth will set you free of those boxes we were talking about.

I don't like boxes anyway, so that's okay with me.

© 2016 by Tom King

Run Me Up the Hill, Son - The Longest Day

Scaling the cliffs at Pointe du Hoc

I always do two things on the anniversary of D-Day. I watch President Reagans speech "The Boys of Pointe du Hoc" and I watch "The Longest Day". I want never to forget what our fathers did in that titanic struggle against unadulterated evil and these two things remind me of their courage.

The Longest Day is an amazing film and much under-rated against films like Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan. The movie is based on Cornelius Ryan's well-researched book about D-Day and many of its scenes is based on actual stories from D-Day - true stories.

One of my favorite scenes from Longest Day is the clip during the taking of Ouistreham when a convent full of nuns walked straight across the battlefield bullets flying overhead, carrying first aid kits. The scene begins at 5:26 into the clip. The walk in close formation clutching their cases of medical supplies till the reach the positions of the Free French soldiers pinned down by German guns. The mother superior takes charge and sends her trained nurses into the rubble to treat the wounded. While the incident never actually happened, it did serve as an homage to the courage of many French women who came to the aid of the Allied invasion forces. What they did was, as quickly as possible nuns, nurses and chaplains descended on the scene of battle. The ladies set up hospitals and aid stations within sight of the fighting in some instances, especially around Caen. Their courage in locating so close to the battle lines meant that allied soldiers reached serious medical help within minutes of being wounded rather than waiting sometimes days to be transferred to a surgical hospital. The effectiveness of these close to the front lines hospitals led the Army to later develop the Mobile Army Surgical Hospitals (MASH units). I have little or no doubt that had they been closer to the fighting, the sisters would have pitched in to treat wounded soldiers. As it was they got there as soon as possible and turned these front-line hospitals into amazingly efficient operations. Elise Rivet (Mother Elisabeth), a French saved hundreds of lives as a member of the resistance and in the end went to the gas chambers in the place of a pregnant Jewish mother. These ladies were extremely courageous.

The Longest Day gets a lot of criticism from modern film experts, especially for its giving credit to God for so many thing and for it's portrayal of religious persons in a heroic light. The critics would prefer a more bloody and violently gruesome portrayal war as being suitable for modern audiences. To portray war as noble or the soldiers who fight in it as heroic is somehow a disservice to modern sensibilities according to these experts. They don't want to see heroism, these children of post-modernism. They want to see something that says, "There's really no point to it all." The Longest Day shows audiences brave men and women doing the right thing because it means something. It must therefore be wrong somehow and be belittled by those who believe they know what is better for us than our silly forefathers with their belief in love, loyalty, faith, honor and other such claptrap.

When good no longer rises up against evil, but accepts the lesser of one or more evils as the best we can do, this world is doomed. Reagan at the end of his speech turned on the platform and looked at the now elderly gentlemen who as Army Rangers, scaled the cliffs under the guns and asked "Why did you do it?"  He then answered the question. "It was faith, belief, loyalty and love." Silly old values our world is trying so hard to put aside. The critics call such beliefs foolish and out of date and unfashionable and anyone who says it's not earns their disdain.

When did we stop believing there is some ultimate good that is worth risking everything to preserve? As we approach the end of the great worldwide conflict between good and evil, is it not still important to do what is right because it is right? Should might and power not be used for good, rather than as a tool in the hands of the greedy and sinful to oppress the innocent and murder the harmless.

We stand at a crossroads in our world's history and have been presented a choice, not between good and evil, but between two kinds of greed - both evil. Sadly, the same nation which once did the hard thing because it was right to do so, now gropes about in confusion trying to decide which of the paths before us is the lesser evil. We admire greed. We choose sides hoping, not to do the right thing, but to do the expedient thing; the thing that gains us membership to the winning side.

God help us as we watch our nation sacrifice its soul on the altar of comfort and a sense of belonging to the right herd. But do not be discouraged. Not every one will accept second worst as their only option. Not every person will compromise his or her honor, integrity, and principles for 30 pieces of silver. Some will stand until the final D-Day; the one in which heaven empties itself and God's armies pour over the Earth, gathering up those who have been loyal, brave and true. 

As our father's stood firm against the withering fire of the German guns, so we must stand firm until that day which is soon to come, when we will be delivered. You do not have to choose between evils. There is always another way - if you trust that God will honor your faith in standing for the right. I believe he will grant us deliverance from evil, no matter how desperate things look; no matter how much our cause appears to be lost, for as Jesus taught, "His is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever." I do believe God can manage to make all things turn out for good to those who are called according to His purpose.

And, as the American general said at the end of the film, we will be able to say to the angels that fly to our sides on that great D-Day, "Run me up the hill. dear friend," and home we will go.

© 2016 by Tom King

 

The Importance of Complete Information

(c) 2010 by Tom King

A friend told me this story once. It illustrates how easily it is to change your opinion, especially if you come to know what Paul Harvey used to call "the resto of the story.


My friend was driving to the pharmacy to renew a prescription. It was snowing and slippery. Suddenly a big Cadillac bore down on him from behind, blasted his horn and swerved past him at an extremely unsafe speed.

"Blankety-blank rich people think they own the blankety-blank road. What a selfish pig!" my friend, a confirmed member of the proletariate, thought angrily.

After 10 more minutes of slogging through the snow, he arrived at the pharmacy and sure enough, there sat the big fancy Caddie, slewed across two parking spaces (one of them a handicapped space). My friend stomped up to the entrance muttering dark imprecations and with a mounting determination to give that self-centered, capitalist pig a piece of his mind if he were to run into the man inside.

As he approached the prescription counter he found a well-dressed man (obviously the Cadillac owner) who was pushing his way to the front of the line. My friend surged forward, intent on thrashing this arrogant jackass now standing at the counter with his arm around the shoulders of a frightened looking woman in a thin bathrobe holding a small child. The man shouted at the pharmacist, who quickly pulled a bottle down off the shelf and soon the woman was struggling to coax some of the medicine down the child.

It was syrup of Ipecac. My friend could see the label clearly.

As the crowd fell back, the well-dressed man explained the situation to the pharmacist. As he told the story, my friends emotional state changed almost instantly.

The woman had been on the way to the pharmacy in the snow when her small compact car had slid in the snow and run off into the ditch. Her son had broken into the refrigerator and drunk a large bottle of cold medication kept there. She called poison control and they recommended getting him some Ipecac to make him throw up as soon as possible and then to bring him on to the hospital which was some 30 minutes away. Ambulances were all out on emergencies in the snow and unavailable, so panicked, she set out on her own when the car went into the ditch in front of a large estate near the edge of town.

The man in the Cadillac had answered the door when she pounded on it.  She told the man what was happening and without another word, he pulled on a coat and loaded the mother and child in his big Caddie.  They roared off toward the nearest pharmacy, honking at couple of slow moving cars along the way to warn them as they rushed past.

As the story became clear, my friend's opinion changed instantly. By then the crowd around the counter was watching the child anxiously.

"You better take him to the restroom," the pharmacist pointed toward the back of the store. "He should be about to....."

About then the kid threw up on my friend's shoes. Somehow, my friend didn't mind even that. Tears formed in his eyes as the child, his mother and their rescuer rushed out the front door on their way to the hospital.

The pharmacist looked down at the empty bottle of Ipecac on his counter, realizing suddenly that it had not been paid for in the rush. My friend reached into his wallet and laid a ten dollar bill on the counter.

"My treat," he grinned at the druggist.

"Paper towel?" the man grinned back pointing at his shoes.

It's a good idea, before you form an opinion of someone, to get the whole story.

Tom

Isn't God On Our Side?

At the Restoring Honor Rally in Washington Saturday, Glenn Beck said that God is not on your side. Instead, he challenged his audience to "Put yourself in a position where you are on His side." This confused some folks.  After all, isn't God on our side if we are doing right?

I think Glenn Beck was absolutely right. I know what he meant.  God doesn't pick sides. He loves everyone equally.  He is "no respecter of persons".  God wants to be on everyone's side.

The question really is not whether God selects your side to favor. The question is whether you choose to be on God's side and give up the idea that your side even belongs to you.  It doesn't, you know. The great issue of our day comes down to good versus evil?  Do we follow God's leading? Do we hand our lives over to him to mold us and make us into decent, kind and free people or do we rebel?  Obedience or rebellion to God are the only two choices. There is no neutral third choice.

In fact, if you have a "side" that you think belongs to you, then it's not very likely that that side is God's side is it? Mine or God's? That's the real choice isn't it?  Am I on God's side or my side? After all, when you think about it, the devil's side is the penultimate "MY SIDE".  It's the side of self-interest, self-promotion, self-first. If you are on "My Side", then the Devil is on your side.  Good luck with that. You may want to reconsider who your allies are there.

I'm just telling you what I think.

Tom King - Tyler, TX

*Image (c) Yahoo News

The "Aha!" experience.

I once did therapy sessions and served as program director at the  Odyssey Harbor Ranch campus while I was in grad school studying Rehab Counseling Psychology. Odyssey Harbor was a residential treatment center for children and youth with multiple psychiatric and physical diagnoses.  I was responsible for the Bear's Den, a dorm for kids ages 6 to 10.

PH was one of the more interesting kids I treated. I had started a self-government in the Bears Den where the kids elected a dorm captain every week. It was a popular vote thing and you couldn't be on any kind of restriction to be dorm captain. The kids met on Fridays to determine consequences for some transgressions where that was appropriate. The dorm captain was the dorm's representative with me and he was the guy that got them special activities, privileges or treats. PH wanted to be dorm captain so badly that it hurt.

The kids didn't like him and he knew it. He complained to me in therapy one day, "I don't know why they don't like me," he shook his head in bewilderment. "I done beat up every kid in that dorm and still they won't pick me for dorm captain."

I was beginning to see a little distorted thinking going on. I tried to help him see that beating people up probably wasn't the best way to win a popular election, but the idea was totally outside his cultural paradigm. In PH's world, if you want to be the boss and be respected, you intimidate everyone else. Unfortunately for his popularity, the world we had constructed in the Bear's Den was ruled by law. It was a democracy and the citizens of that little world could exert power over their world with their secret ballot vote.  No matter how small they were, staff would protect their right to vote. No one could effectively control by bullying as PH had discovered.

That week PH was caught in the Bear's Den restroom doing some experimenting he shouldn't have been doing with another boy. Since it was on their turf, the kids voted to restrict both boys to campus for two weeks. I had to invoke a supreme court decision to prevent them from voting to take a more Mohammedan approach to punishment that involved amputation of offending parts. I explained that that according to our constitution, that punishment was not on the list of acceptable consequences. They relented at last (there was a lot of pent up anger at both boys because of their bullying).  They finally chose to issue both boys a one-and-one sentence that allowed for a pardon/parole the second week, but only if the dorm voted unanimously to let them off with 1 week time served. This was a very powerful teaching tool and often worked well, especially with kids who had any cognitive ability whatever. They were pretty fair about it since any one of them might face a jury of his peers at any time.

In two weeks the group was going to a baseball game and PH wanted desperately to go. He was an angel for that first week. He was helpful to the younger boys, respectful to staff and amazingly well-behaved. He told me in therapy that he was "trying real hard" to be good so the other boys would vote to give him that second week pardon. Fortunately for PH, the Bears Den boys had pretty short memories.

He came to me in therapy the next week almost giddy with excitement and it wasn't just over the upcoming baseball outing. The kids had not only voted him a pardon for the second week of his punishment so he could go to the game, but in the same session they also voted him Dorm Captain. The other boy had been awful that week and wound up serving the second week of his punishment and missing the ball game.

PH told me the whole story and then cocked his head as though a new thought had struck him. "You know," he said with the air of someone imparting a great truth, "If you are nice to people they like you!"

Following that revelation, PH's behavior improved so dramatically that he went home for good just 4 months later.

It was the most profound success I ever had doing cognitive behavioral therapy. 

Romans 8:28 promises that all things work together for good to them that love God.  I wonder if that's also true for those whom God loves, which is basically everybody.

I suspect that's true. No matter how we finally choose in the great "As for me and my house, we shall follow...."  decision, I think God gives us every opportunity to have that great "Aha" moment in our lives. I think everyone comes to it and either embraces the light or chooses the dark. George Lucas was on the right track with the cave scene in Star Wars. We face the dark and light throughout our lives, but in one moment of startling clarity, we all see two paths stretching before us.  There is a narrow, less well-trodden path uphill toward the light and a wide, easy glittering road sloping down toward a place deliberately kept obscured beyond broad twists and bends by those who keep the path well greased.

And at that moment we choose.

And at that moment we are forever changed. 

As Robert Frost so eloquently put it, "I chose the road less traveled and that has made all the difference."

Tom King

 

Doing It To Ourselves - Misdirection and Road to the Apocalypse

The massive political upheaval that is taking place in America these days reminds me of a David Copperfield magic show. Our eyes are drawn from one illusion to another - a flash here, a flourish there while all the real action happens behind false walls and below trap doors. The news media trumpets the triumphs of the Obama administration. The leftists wail that it's not enough while the fringe right yammers on about conspiracies.  Now the fringies are saying Ronald Reagan was a big conspirator and Abraham Lincoln, a socialist and a bad man.

Apparently, since pundits like Glenn Beck have finally convinced people that the president and the Congress are up to something underhanded, the kook fringe feels the need to attack traditional conservative icons too. What is it with these people?  Whatever it is they think they are doing, they really only aid the real deception by drawing our attention eleswhere.  The irony is that both tree-huggers and gun nuts are helping disguise the real threat taking place in broad daylight in front of their noses.

The progressives have told us plainly that they want to turn the U.S. into a communist worker's paradise complete with massive government and an elite cadre of privileged "leaders" we all look up to and adore.  (Obama - mmmmm, mmmmmm, mmmmmmm!)

Confusion has always been Satan's most powerful tool and even more so as the Apocalypse.  The battle lines are drawn, but the lines may not be where you think they are. They aren't between lassez-faire capitalism and progressive socialism as some would have us believe, nor between Christian and Muslim, Jew and Gentile or Catholic and Protestant.  They are drawn between good and evil; between those who seek the light and those who cherish darkness; between those for whom lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, envy, wrath and pride are a way of life and those who embrace chastity, temperance, charity, diligence, patience, kindness and humility.

Quick, which list made you to smile?  Which list caused you to curl up your lip in a sneer of derision?  If one of those lists of character attributes either appeals to you or disgusts you, you may have already chosen sides.  If you are like most of us, you probably halt between two opinions.  It's amazing, though, how often the great philosophical debates of the times have been between two evil choices rather than between good and evil - between sloth and greed rather than between sloth and diligence.  The devil likes to conduct those kinds of battles; the ones that, whichever side you choose, you lose!

But as for me and my house.......