Tag Archives: tyrants

Con

Con: (n) the negative position

In evaluating the pros and cons of any situation, no one is ever yelled at for coming up with too many pros.

There is not some formal rebuke which proclaims, “You’re just being too positive!”

But if you come up with too many “cons”–reasons that something might not work, you could easily be decried “too negative.”funny wisdom on words that begin with a C

The question has to cross our minds: is it more dangerous to be too pro or too con? Trying to find the balance is impossible.

Basically, in life you have two positions:

Pursue with wisdom.

Or abstain with intelligence.

And to gain the wisdom and acquire the intelligence does mean that one has to be able to isolate the “cons”–the negatives–in any given situation.

Being too positive has caused tyrants to become dictators and murderers because no one wanted to believe that anyone could actually be that evil.

It has also caused parents to find themselves being interviewed on 24-hour news networks, attempting to explain why their teenage son walked into a school and killed as many innocents as possible.

After all, they just wanted to love their kid and be positive.

When the obvious signs of danger show their ugly faces, it is time to allow ourselves to be a wee bit negative. And those signs of danger are:

  • killing
  • stealing
  • destroying

Whenever this trio–or just one of them–shows up on the horizon, it is a good idea to pose the simple question, “Hold on a second! Now what in the hell is this all about?”

 

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Aground

Words from Dic(tionary)

dictionary with letter AAground: (adj & adv) in reference to a ship running on or onto the bottom in shallow water.

Shallow.

There you go. Thus the problem.

We used to believe that “still waters run deep,” until we realized that the adage doesn’t apply to a generation of people who refuse to speak because of the vacuous nature of their thoughts.

I am not cynical of our time or particularly gloomy about our future. Yet I do not think it is the job of people who write articles or who are creatively bent toward sharing wisdom to always kiss the rear end of the person in front of them.

We just need to realize that we have created so much shallowness that we have run aground–and as you well know, when a boat runs aground, it can neither float nor can it sail from its perch.

So where have we run aground?

  1. By telling everybody they’re great, we’ve eliminated the word “great.”
  2. By electronically connecting ourselves to the world, we have emotionally disconnected ourselves from one another.
  3. We have replaced actions with speeches, thinking that merely stating our intentions is sufficient to prove our willingness.
  4. We foster the present bigotry as intelligent study, even though historically, every rejected piece of prejudice took a similar profile.
  5. We promote a war between men and women while simultaneously using sex to sell everything.
  6. We foolishly think there is a permanent solution to problems rather than a gradual revelation in our everyday reality.
  7. We value critique–one of the more useless human endeavors.
  8. We accept mediocrity, hoping that others will accept our rendition.
  9. We want to believe we are exceptional, even though every nationality that has pursued that particular philosophy has ended up being declared tyrants.
  10.  We think that problems can be solved corporately, when nothing ever happens in the human family without individuals repenting.

It’s really quite simple. When you take away personal responsibility, the need for humility and you add in the arrogance of uniqueness, you get people who have a common spiel–which they use to promote a nasty disdain.

Here’s the good news: for each one of these ten that we address and change, we can double our potential.

God is good because He doesn’t demand much change from human beings … for mountains to move.