Tag Archives: hypocrisy

Bellicose

Bellicose: (adj) demonstrating aggression and willingness to fight.

Dictionary B

I have seen this word in print a couple of times and had a general idea of what it meant, but am sitting here amazed at how well it describes our present social and political climate.

Somewhere along the line, we have allowed our pundits to convince us that people with a bellicose nature–a pushy, bullying, “picking-a-fight” profile–are the dominant voices, and that those who decide not to participate in such outlandish behavior are relegated to obscurity.

It is remarkable that we simultaneously have programs against bullying in our schools, while tolerating a bellicose attitude in our politicians and leaders.

Which one is it?

Is bullying really the ultimate costume, designed for the weak loser?

Or is bullying the necessary campaign used by those trying to achieve their purposes in order to win the day?

Of all the sins of mankind, the most heinous is hypocrisy.

I, for one, am tired of teaching my small children to be ladies and gentlemen … so they can grow up to be aggressive, adult sons-of-a bitches.

 

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Beetle

Beetle: (n) an insect of an order distinguished by forewingsDictionary B

It’s a language which I have affectionately, but sarcastically, dubbed “Marjorian.”

It was named in honor of a woman I once knew named Marjory.

Marjory had developed a way of speaking in which she would address any problem that ended up falling in her front yard with very gentle language, while summarizing the actions of others she did not like with more sinister terms.

Let me give you an example.

When Marjory’s daughter became pregnant in high school, she insisted they had planned on having the young girl marry her beau, but the pavilion they wanted to use was not available, so normally the pregnancy would have fallen after the marriage, but preceded it only because of a scheduling conflict.

Yet when the young girl next door found herself with an unwanted pregnancy at age seventeen, Marjory whispered to the neighbors that “the lass was a tramp” and that such declining morals were ruining our country.

She spoke Marjorian–a language generous to oneself while condemning to others.

I bring this up because one day I was sitting in Marjory’s home and a bug crawled across the floor. Instinctively I leaped to my feet and crushed it with my foot. I knew the insect to be a roach. When I identified the bug to Marjory, she immediately disagreed and said, “No, no. That’s a beetle.”

Apparently it was completely respectable to have a beetle crawl across your floor but not a roach.

Being in a playful mood, I picked up the remains of the bug and carried it over to Marjory, causing her to launch into a hissy fit.

I put it toward her face, showing her that this bug had no wings, and was therefore not a beetle.

Without missing a beat, Marjory countered by saying that “it was a Japanese beetle. They don’t have wings.”

I immediately realized that Marjory had no idea of the flight habits of the Japanese beetle. But it was not worth arguing about, so I tossed the carcass into the garbage can, finished my conversation and coffee and was on my way.

I have met many people who have their own dialect of “Marjorian” language, but it always amazes me that after all the claims are made, all the exaggerations espoused and all the false belief preached, that somehow or another… the truth still has a way of winning the day.

 

 

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Beat-up

Beat-up: (adj) a thing worn out by overuse; in a state of disrepair.Dictionary B

I found myself sharing a message that didn’t match my lifestyle.

I was moved to proclaim the idea “Life With Style” while I, myself, was somewhat impoverished.

It introduced the possibility of hypocrisy.

In an attempt to advertise my slogan, “Life With Style,” I had purchased magnetic signs, which I placed on the side of my old, beat-up car, towing a trailer which short months earlier had been rotting in a corn field.

It was what I could legitimately afford, and I did my best to bolster it with repair and frequent cleanings, but to the average onlooker who saw my vehicle and trailer pass by, the advertisement, “Life With Style,” was an enigma, if not a farce.

I became convicted that I was misrepresenting my own cause with my beat-up situation, bannered by such a positive, exuberant concept.

Because let’s be honest–we’re human.We can’t envision a life with style without a decent paint job. Life doesn’t have style unless we are visually passable.

So I learned that you can call people hypocritical, judgmental or mean-spirited for the conclusions they draw upon eyeballing your circumstance, or you can realize that since they are susceptible to hypocrisy, judgmentalism and a mean-spirited nature, it might be a good idea to give them as little evidence as possible … for a case against you.

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Banshee

Banshee: (n) in Irish legend, a female spirit whose wailing warns of an impending death in a house.Dictionary B

Although I am often surprised by Webster’s true definition of a word, this particular rendition really took my breath away.

It’s because when I was a child, I had an aunt who screamed at the children running in a room, telling us to settle down and stop acting like a “bunch of wild banshees.”

I did not know what a banshee was, nor did I care to ask her to explain. I just assumed that banshees were children who were having fun, which for some reason or another, drove this old lady crazy.

  • I knew “banshee” was not good.
  • I knew it was an insult.
  • Just like I privately knew, in my young spirit, that when my aunt used the words hillbilly, worthless slut, wetback and nigger, that she probably wasn’t being complimentary.

So in a sense, banshee became associated to me with the word nigger. In other words, I knew it was bad and I knew I didn’t want to be one, since it made my aunt so pissed off.

Oh, yes, did I fail to mention? She thought that the black people in America–the niggers–were just as uncontrolled as we banshees.

So I grew up a confused young man who was offered a lexicon of terms, which if I accidentally used in public, my parents–and aunt–would quickly silence me, expressing their displeasure over my timing.

I was a child of Middle America, instructed in “public talk” and “private talk” … cautioned to never mix the two.

 

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Bad-mouth

Bad-mouth: (v) to criticize (someone or something); speak disloyally of.Dictionary B

  • Tongue-in-cheek
  • Satire
  • Sarcasm
  • Cynical
  • Jaded

Now, each one of these words is probably considered to be its own entity, but I would contend that what we have here is a descending process toward losing one’s faith.

Because somewhere along the line, joking about the need for change and beginning to just bad-mouth humanity because you’ve abandoned all passion for the race are two quite different things.

Maybe in my own simple way, I could clarify my meaning by giving you definitions for each of these steps in this decline:

  1. Tongue-in-cheek: humorously pointing out a contradiction in our philosophy which shows a need for change.
  2. Satire: comparing that little piece of hypocrisy to previous hypocrisies in a jocular way.
  3. Sarcasm: similar to satire, except accompanied by more of a sneer, a jeer or even a leer.
  4. Cynical: sharing an angry humor over the futility of human effort to achieve anything of quality, while portraying a nasty edge
  5. Jaded: a loss of love for fellow-humans, which also causes one to feel unloved.

When you live in the monkey cage, it is alright to joke about the odor or maybe even the over-dependence on bananas–as long as you freely admit that you are contributing to the stink, and certainly possess the same addiction to the fruit.

 

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Arbitrary

dictionary with letter A

Arbitrary: (adj) based on random choice or personal whim, rather than any reason or system.

When everything is considered important, nothing truly has value.

Half the time I don’t know whether to burst out laughing or cry as I watch the entanglement of emotions in our society, giving place to things, feelings and problems that really just don’t matter.

I am going to give you a list of those things which I find to be arbitrary, and therefore annoying and useless, generating a traffic jams in our human flow:

1. I don’t care if you’re Republican or Democrat. Pass a damn law.

2. I do not care that Kim Kardashian has a large butt. Perhaps some of it should be transferred to her cranium.

3. I do not care, on The Voice, if you have a family, children, a mother with cancer or are going through a financial hard time. I thought you wanted to be a singer, not a hard case. Shut up and sing.

4. I do not care about church doctrine. I want you to tell me better ways to “love my neighbor as myself.”

5. I certainly am appalled at the views some folks have of women, using religion to punish them, which creates a self-defeating environment where you soon will have nobody to romance.

6. I do not care to hear about every time a celebrity is in a bad mood. After all, since they have financial security, they should probably pursue a traditional form of gratitude to rectify their surly nature.

7. I don’t care if you’re black, white, red, yellow, brown, tan, rose, pink or any particular hue. I would just like you to be nicer.

8. I would like people who are caught in hypocrisy to admit that they were hit by a dumb stick instead of hitting me with a stick and acting like I am dumb for challenging them.

9. I would like to live in a world where truth is still honored and lying is considered to be a negative thing instead of a “natural” thing.

10. I would like the 24-hour news cycle to at least take a daily nap so they don’t have to embellish every little stupid thing that comes along.

And even though I am supposed to end at #10, I will do an 11th, which is:

11. I am tired of the spiritual, political and social correctness which promises the right of free speech, but only as long as you agree with the majority.

If we remain determined to make everything a story … there will soon be no true stories to tell.

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Appalling

dictionary with letter A

Appalling: (adj) greatly dismaying or horrifying

What is appalling?

I would think that our value and service to humankind is based upon our ability to discover what is truly appalling instead of what we promote as appalling.

For example:

  • It is not appalling that young people want to have sex with each other. It is a healthy situation demanding wisdom.
  • It is not appalling that people make mistakes. What we should be teaching in our schools is gracious repentance instead of clumsy denial.
  • It is not appalling that people don’t believe in God. God knows He’s hard to understand–that’s why He keeps sending people to simplify Him to the masses.
  • It is not appalling that politics has degraded itself to a mockery. What is appalling is that we don’t seem to be able to have any statesmen step out of the shadows to represent the common good anymore.
  • It is not appalling that men and women, and people of different races have some natural conflicts. What is appalling is the idea that this is irreversible and should be accepted rather than addressed.
  • It is not appalling that businesses cheat and sell inferior products. No need to get your ire up, just hire more competent laborers.
  • It is not appalling that people want to do away with unwanted pregnancies. What is appalling is the hypocrisy that allows for one form of termination of life while promoting another.
  • It is not appalling that the Jews and the Arabs are at each other’s throats. It is a family squabble, and only appalling if we think we can resolve it.
  • It is not appalling that in the long run we do need a savior to rescue us from our inconsistencies and sins. What is appalling is keeping people weak to constantly remind them of those inconsistencies and sins.

If you’re going to use the word “appalling,” you should shrink it to cover less and less variety of subjects.

For after all, the only thing that’s truly appalling is that after all these years, we still don’t understand that if we’re going to survive as a species, it is a necessity that we “love our neighbor as ourselves.”

 

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Anti-racism

dictionary with letter AAnti-racism: (n) the policy of opposing racism and promoting racial tolerance.

It is cruel, insane and useless to walk up to a man having a heart attack, lying on a gurney and proffer, “You shouldn’t have eaten so much bacon.”

Warnings have to come at the right time, or they are either petty bitchiness or meaningless babble.

Anti-racism is similar to this. We all grew up in households where preferences were promoted. So it is ridiculous to think that we’re going to ease our way into a world where color doesn’t matter.

We must stop arresting the neighbors who live next door to the Bodega that was vandalized and start looking for the actual perpetrators.

What causes racism?

1. Too much emphasis on culture.

Matter of fact, I’m not comfortable with any emphasis on culture. When I begin to believe that the Chinese, the Africans, the Jews, the Arabs and the Europeans have different ways of looking at life, I am setting myself up to feel arrogant over my rendition.

2. Take away the stigma of loving who you want to love.

Even though we are willing to accept that the chimpanzee or ape is our ancestor, we are not able to procreate with one. Yet there is no human being of any color or ethnic origin who cannot pair off and make a baby. What a piece of hypocrisy.

Many people would be more willing to accept a gorilla as a neighbor than they are an Hispanic.

3. Be clean.

Start off on the basis that all of us were taught a certain amount of prejudice, which can explode into full-fledged bigotry.

The misconception in America is the belief that we have racism under control because we elected a black President.

First of all, President Obama may not be any more black than I am, since he had a white mother.

Secondly, what we choose to do publicly does not determine our soul. It is the truth that lies on our inward parts–our private notions–which carry the heart of our true beliefs.

When we realize that racism is just another piece of our immature nature which needs to be addressed and abandoned, we will actually go forward.

As the great writer once said, “When I was a child, I spake as a child, but now that I’ve become a man, I have put away childish things.”

 

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Abort

by J. R. Practix

dictionary with letter A

Abort: 1.(v.) Carry out or undergo the abortion of a fetus  2. bring to a premature end because of a problem or fault: the pilot aborted his landing.

No young girl dreams of growing up and being abused by a man.

No little lady talks about how wonderful it will be someday … when she is a prostitute.

No lass with any intellectual bearing breathlessly awaits the day when she can put a mask over her face to disguise her femininity.

No studious teenage girl burns the midnight oil, hoping that someday she can smack her head on the glass ceiling and make 72% of the salary of her male counterpart.

No young woman anxiously envisions a life where she is romantically involved with a man who not only is insensitive to her sexual needs, but insists that his appetites drive him beyond their mutually agreed upon bedroom.

No flourishing young lady aspires to be considered less than the males around her and incapable of sharing spiritual thoughts because she was born with a vagina.

And …

No precious members of the female of our species look up at their mommies with eyes of wonder … and dream of the day that they can have an abortion.

You see? What is absent from our dialogue nowadays is common sense. It is because folks have “pet issues” and allow similar ones to remain strays.

If we had more education, dialogue, intelligence and opportunity made readily available, we would not have to debate prostitution or abortion.

There are only two things I would like to see aborted: ignorance and hypocrisy.