Tag Archives: morality

Citadel

Citadel: (n) a fortress on high ground

How can you take the high ground without instinctively looking down on those beneath you?

It became an issue in the recent presidential campaign. Both candidates insisted they were taking the high ground, while simultaneously
using the concept to proclaim themselves superior.

Unfortunately, any insistence on superiority renders us weakened by the kryptonite of pride.

I need a citadel.

I need a place where I can climb a little higher in my consciousness–not to peer down at the infidel, but to have the chance to see things the way they are, and not the way they appear at ground zero.

My life requires a sweetness of morality, a gentleness of empathy and an awareness of my talent.

In order to mingle these factors, I must don the cloak of humility. For humility is not the absence of ability, but rather, the evidence of it without needing to overpower all comers.

Yes–America should be a citadel.

Our faith should be a citadel.

My life should be a citadel: a piece of higher ground that does not insist on being worshipped because of its elevation, but instead, uses the bird’s eye to consider all the sparrows.

 

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Censor

Censor: (v) to examine a book or movie and officially suppress unacceptable parts of it.

The human race is completely devoid of any cohesive code of behavior. This is why we hire people to censor everyday life, trying to bring it into a pleasing mode of operation.

Yet even though various commandments and ethical standards are touted from generation to generation, they are systematically either
ignored or replaced.

So I have decided what is valuable and truthful for my life. The reason? Many things I hold dear have been left for dead as arcane concepts or old-fashioned ideals.

Every time we carve out principles in stone, there are those who come with a sledge hammer and smash them to powder.

The whole thing would seem very bleak, and perhaps even sinister, unless you possessed the wisdom to understand that when it comes to morality, spirituality, ethics and values, each one of us takes a journey of our own, gathering what we hold dear and reaping the rewards for inspired behavior.

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Cadence

 

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Cadence: (n) the flow or rhythm of events

I remember the first time I heard the phrase. I was a young man sitting in a church with a white shirt collar that was too small for me, wearing a colorful tie which
 had to be tucked into my pants because it was perniciously uneven.

The phrase was “decency and order.”

The minister was pretty sure he knew understood. He preached a sermon offering a cadence of commitment to form and reason. He contended that Godly ways had to be morally correct and follow a sequence which left no doubt of the purity of the intention.

For instance: sin–but not too much, to where it leaves a lasting mark. Come to your senses, find God, repent, get a job, marry, have children and donate adequate sums to your local congregation.

I hated it.

It’s not that I favored immorality nor was an anarchist. Even though I had an immature young mind, I understood that this was not the true cadence of life. Life arrives in chaos and requires triage.

What do I take care of first? How can I keep this together? What can I seek out to keep from freaking out?

It just seemed to me that sometimes there isn’t enough time and space available to consider the ultimate morality or the best way to stack up possibilities.

I don’t know what the original author of these words was trying to convey, but human beings are rarely “decent” and never “in order.”

If God Almighty is waiting for us to transform into a dutiful and meticulous creation, He certainly failed to provide the raw material. We are erratic. We are uncertain. And our greatest mission in life is to make sure we’re not afraid of who we are.

Sometimes the best we can do is slow things down and use what we’ve got. I suppose that doesn’t sound quite as officious as “decency and order,” but it is more accurate.

Over the years I have tried to become more adept at organization and goodness–but when I fail, I have chosen to laugh at the frailty instead of weeping over my insufficiency.

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BS

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BS: (n) Bull shit

I think it’s wrong to blame bulls.

They eat and they secrete.

For us to tie all of our human foibles, inconsistencies and hypocrisies to their dung is flat-out insulting.Dictionary B

I’m not a lawyer and do not represent any bulls in particular, but I will tell you–the atrocities, stupidities and half-truths produced in our society are human shit.

It’s not like bull shit. It doesn’t come out in perfectly formed turds.

It’s dumped in varieties of personalized, steamy piles, often expressed with diarrhea of the mouth.

It is unique to our species because it is individualized by our diet of morality, spirituality and compassion.

Bulls have never done anything to us.

What I experience every day is human shit: the thought people have that they might be able to get by with what they say and do because everyone around them … is stupider than they are.

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Bastard

Bastard: (n) a person born of parents not married to each other.Dictionary B

Words of separation.

Perhaps our greatest mission during our Earth journey is to find terms, insults and references that separate us from one another, expose them for their prejudice and make them unpopular to use.

Without this, we begin to let the self-righteous and the domineering elite control the dialogue.

When I was eighteen years old, I got a girl pregnant. We loved each other. She got pregnant the same way people get pregnant who have marriage licenses. We just didn’t have the paper.

Yet there were people in my home town who had the audacity to refer to my unborn son as a “bastard.”

A little smile came across their face as they said it. It was reassuring to them that they found a way to be superior to me without needing to blame themselves for pridefulness, but instead, claiming to be advocates for morality.

About four months before my son was born, my girlfriend and I got married and have remained so for forty-five years.

Yet I will tell you, if I were to go back to my hometown and any of those judgmental people were still alive, they probably would recall that brief season when they were able to belittle me and relegate my child to insignificance.

What are the buzz words of bigotry? They are everywhere.

  • Hunt them down.
  • Mock them.
  • Kill them.

And bury them as quickly as you can in the cemetery of ignorance.

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Ancestor

dictionary with letter A

Ancestor: (n) — a person, typically one more remote than a grandparent, from whom one is descended.

I certainly am glad that all my ancestors decided to have sex, so they would set in motion the possibility of my existence.

After all, it’s pretty miraculous. After working twelve-hour days in the fields, planting, cultivating and harvesting, they were exhausted after sunset, and must have had pretty good libidos to have worked up the energy to culminate the day with hanky-panky.

So for that I am grateful.

I know there are people who are very sentimental about their lineage and pay good money to acquire information on their family tree. But honestly, if I had known my ancestors, I would be very disappointed because they probably wouldn’t like me.

  • Their work ethic was stronger than mine–mainly because they had to survive. And I talk about words like “success.”
  • They died much younger than me from exhaustion and lack of healthy choices and medical care. During that shortened life span, they probably suffered more pain due to overexertion.
  • They had bigotries and prejudices which I would have found annoying or ignorant, which they might have misinterpreted as rude behavior.
  • Their spirituality was peppered with superstition instead of salted with knowledge and faith.
  • They controlled their lives through morality, which was regionally defined, and also locally monitored and enforced.
  • They weren’t in favor of new-fangled gadgets, often resisting them until such discoveries were forced on them by city councils or national laws.
  • My ancestors revered ignorance as a badge of honor and the symbol of their faithfulness to a God they truly did not understand.

There was much good about them. Their hard-headed, strong-willed and determined natures made it possible for them to survive the wilderness, which I now call a freeway.

But the disregard for the progress of history and the rights of people would have rendered me a radical and a renegade in their midst.

I believe it’s possible to be grateful and at the same time, fully aware that I was born in the right time and the right place to do the right thing–so that my descendants will not have to look back and giggle too much … at my stupidity. 

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Amoral

dictionary with letter A

Amoral: (n)  lacking a moral sense of right and wrong.

What is morality?

It has changed so many times in my lifespan that if I did not have a sense of humor, I would risk becoming jaded.

I have watched the Moral Majority peak and decline, becoming the minority.

I desire some stability. I think morality orbits a single shining sun of promise:

Don’t kill.

  • Don’t kill yourself.
  • Don’t kill others.
  • Don ‘t kill faith.
  • Don’t kill hope.
  • Don’t kill love.

There you go.

What kills me is dependence and addiction.

What kills others is alienation and gossip.

What kills faith is cynicism.

What kills hope is a lack of support.

And what kills love is fear.

So morality, to me, is living a life free of addiction, without judging others, refusing to become cynical, lending a hand to those who are hopeful, and casting out my fear.

Perhaps that will last longer than the latest critical attack against some hapless minority.

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ACLU

by J. R. Practix

dictionary with letter A

ACLU: (abbr.) American Civil Liberties Union

I’ve got it figured out. (Well, I probably don’t, but I thought I would begin this article without using the passive voice.)

EVERYONE is conservative.

That’s right. Everyone is trying to conserve something. And everybody who disagrees with what the other guy is trying to conserve believes that the other party is either a hick, an ignoramus, a pseudo-intellectual or a hippie.

All you have to do is mention the American Civil Liberties Union in a positive light, and you are already labeled a liberal. There is no such thing as a Republican who is an advocate of this organization. But if you read their charter, all the ACLU wants to conserve is the liberty and individual rights of every American citizen, with an emphasis toward honoring the sanctity of the freedom of minorities.

THEY want to conserve liberty.

Now, you find some organization down the road called the Family Research Center, or something of that ilk, and they are just as deeply convinced that they are divinely ordained to conserve morality. Now, the ACLU may not be nearly as concerned about morality as they are liberty, but quite honestly, the Family Research people are not nearly as concerned about liberty as they are morality.

You can see the problem. They’re all conservative, without realizing that they need each other. That’s right:

  • Liberty without morality is a train wreck right outside your front door.
  • Morality without liberty is a decision to build a dungeon in your basement for all the people you have decided are evil.

If we could learn to respect one another and listen to each other’s core belief, we might be able to meld into a strong unit for justice.

But it’s much easier to throw rocks across the fence–because you have the great joy of tossing them without ever knowing who they hit on the other side.

I would not want to live in a country that does not have the American Civil Liberties Union. They remind me of people I might forget about–if it weren’t for their presence.

I also would not want to live in a country that does not have the Family Research Center, which informs us when we begin to take good health for granted–be it emotional, spiritual, mental or physical.

Since we’re all conservatives in our own way, we might want to conserve our energy by not fighting–and expend some of it in an attempt to become reasonable.

But since that won’t happen, the ACLU should probably not do a lot of traveling south of Louisville, Kentucky.

And the Family Research Center people might want to avoid taking the big tour of Hollywood.

Absentee Ballot

by J. R. Practix

dictionary with letter A

Absentee ballot: n.  a ballot completed and typically mailed in advance of an election by a voter who is unable to be present at the polls.

I was just a little kid. (Little kid–that may be a bit of redundancy, except truthfully, I wasn’t really little.)

My parents were staunch Republicans. Every election season, they would brag about walking into the booth and voting a “straight Republican ticket.” Since they were my parents, I assumed that was another piece of nobility to be revered, and only later discovered that it was a proclamation of a bit of preconceived ignorance.

Matter of fact, that particular mindset is so prevalent in our society today that the action of voting may be all absentee–not just ballots sent in from some far-away land by traveling citizens.

No, it appears to me that at times all the American people are absentee during their balloting.

  • They seem to be absentee of allowing their minds to be changed by reason, and instead wave the flag over their particular party of choice.
  • There seems to be an absentee nature in understand the expansive needs of a multi-cultural America, which is mushrooming much faster than its willingness to contemplate.
  • There seems to be an absentee of respect given between candidates campaigning for the same office–a disrespect for the ability of the other person to have gotten that far in the process.
  • There seems to be an absentee of understanding that merely possessing a morality of your own choice does not make it superior to another person’s interpretation.
  • And certainly we are absentee of following through on a conclusion to our political theories, determining whether they actually produce a government “of the people, for the people and by the

people.”

Even though I think voting can be a very good thing, I find it neither regal, virtuous or heavenly when it can be so easily “bedeviled” by stubborn loyalty instead of common sense.
Perhaps THAT’S the problem in America. Like my mother and father so many years ago, all the votes being cast seem to be absentee of the deliberation necessary to honor the traditions that have made this country rich with potential.

For let us be frank. The greatest leaders in our history–George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and any others you might conjure in your mind–if deposited into our time, would all be completely uncomfortable associating themselves with either political party.

Because change is not a party.

It is often a lonely trip in the middle of the night to the local convenience store to pay too much for supplies, desperately needed.

Abominable

by J. R. Practix

dictionary with letter A

Abominable: adj. causing moral revulsion.

What did the Snowman ever do to you?

Why did he end up being Abominable?

Did I miss some news story on Inside Edition? Was the big Snowman caught in bed with Madonna or Pink? Is he doing cocaine in the snow? Is he killing off people in the woods?

Why is the Abominable Snowman considered abominable? What breach in morality causes us to find him revolting?

This is not fair. Just because you’re nine feet tall, are covered with hair in the frigid Yukon, growling at strangers, does not mean you lack the moral fiber to be a damned good Republican.

Is it just that everybody who does not fit the “normal” size, look or social presentation have to be scrutinized until we discover some hidden sin yet uncovered?

I, for one, think it’s time that we stop calling him, her or it abominable. I think “big and ugly” would be better than abominable, don’t you?

I am concerned that moral judgments are being made about a creature we actually know very little about. For that matter, we’re not even sure he exists.

Of course, in our present political climate, we seem to be very good at creating problems out of nothing. So who knows? Maybe there’s a reporter somewhere from some sort of tell-it-all rag who has been following this monstrous creature around and knows that he has nasty inclinations.

Yet that doesn’t stop us from having priests in the Catholic Church. It doesn’t eliminate politicians cavorting with prostitutes. We don’t call THEM abominable.

No, it is a word reserved for the Snowman.

And speaking of that, it reminds me of the reporter who once caught up with the self-assesssed, famous adventurer, Scarsland de Barkel, winner of the First Annual Coveted Explorer’s Award, and asked him, “Mr. de Barkel, have you found the Abominable Snowman?”

Scarsland replied, “Not Yeti.”