brotherhood – Sillyfrog's Blog

Your Friday prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday is “collect.” Use the word “collect” any way you’d like.

If I could wave a magic wand and turn every kind word or deed in this world into a delicate butterfly, the sky would be alive with beauty. That collection would be far larger than any other!
Why has this absolute real humanity and beauty become so hard to notice?
Affluent people (not those scraping for daily survival) are currently far more interested in collecting (and carrying the weight of) outrage than just looking around. That’s why.
The media has us collecting problems and despair, and those are rocks!
Rocks are useful for building but you must look down to see them. Have you ever watched people who never lift their heads as they walk? They seem focused but they’re prone to missing out on things, such as, many beautiful sights, and some might even be changed by lifting their eyes, once in awhile, avoiding a fall. (Of course we must not only look up or we would stumble too.)
We would do well to get back to a balance, don’t you think? Let’s start collecting many of our impressions directly from our ‘fellow man’ and from what we actually experience while noting that ‘reporting’ and ‘headlines’ are snippets of information that are most often out of context. And media opinion? Well, we’re capable of creating our own, thank-you, so let’s respect that diversity for change.

My heart is sad when I hear so much outrage, vitriol, and condescension from people across political divides. The stench of constant outrage has them looking at their feet and holding their noses. The 24/7 media is most culpable for creating imaginary monsters out of our human brothers and sisters by grouping and defining them in the most shallow and unimportant terms. We aren’t going to make the manipulation of the media stop but we can lift our heads and notice the butterflies… they’re everywhere!

See the source image — Kindness and goodness are everywhere

Happy Saturday friends.
To my United States brothers and sisters, Happy Memorial Day Weekend.

The Friday Reminder and Prompt for #SoCS May 29, 2021 | (lindaghill.com)

It occurred to me this morning that being an apologist is a frustrating endeavor. In fact, I didn’t know the meaning of apologist, until my mother labeled me one, and I had to look it up.

apol·o·gist

noun \ə-ˈpä-lə-jist\

: a person who defends or supports something (such as a religion, cause, or organization) that is being criticized or attacked by other people

I’m often making arguments on Facebook about political issues. Seems many of our country’s core values and institutions have been under fire these days. Mostly, I endeavor to use humor and “tongue-in-cheek” phrases to point things out but, once in a while, I just say it.

I don’t consider that I am anti anything. I am pro on lots of things, though. It’s no coincidence, in my mind, that protect, starts with pro.

I’m not going to alienate, or bore you, with my causes. I want to point out that there’s a recurring theme that arises in the comments from others whom, insist upon, defining me as an alarmist.

My status, today, reads:

That moment when you perceive a “train wreck” event on the horizon…shout a warning… and are told you are paranoid. It’s befuddling, at the least, because you want to avoid the tragedy and also hope, on another level, that it can’t happen. Makes a lot of sense, to me now, why no one wants to talk about our national debt and the bankruptcy of our country.

This is the trouble with sounding alarms about difficult subjects. The people, one wants to “wake up”, often don’t want to know AND the ones, pointing things out, really hope they are not true.

Now I ask you, the reader, how will any of our “issues” be resolved if we let those who have a “blind eye”, when it comes to trouble, shut us up or call our ideas (dismissively) paranoid?

Seems to me, the labeling of arguments, people, even sources, as wrong, is at the core of everything stagnating our country’s progress. Fear of labels has brought discussion and brotherhood to a standstill!

Our media, in my opinion, is the biggest troublemaker in all of this. The second biggest, are the busy, “sound bite”, consumers of the news.

My alarm today is a “wake-up call” in order to protect and produce active problem-solving which will foster our country’s progress.