Good hate and good righteous

If a bunch of women barely dressed, essentially in lingerie, came to an American school to entertain the children with a vulgar, lewd display of prancing and grinding, we'd all (well, all of us who still possess at least an ounce of gray matter) call it sick, warped, practically child abuse. 

At the very least most sentient humans would ask, "WHY?" 

But if the bunch of "women" are men in drag, suddenly it's progressive enlightenment and to utter a word in protest is "hate." 

Yeah well, hate is good. There's lots of things we've got to hate. If we hated nothing our civilization would crumble to dust. There's plenty I hate, among them seeing children used as the pawns for a pathological sociopolitical agenda. That's definitely worth hating. 

Hate what's hateful. It's the loving thing to do. 

Not sure you're hating the right thing? Here's a test: if it's right to hate A, there is absolutely a B out there somewhere, the polar opposite of A, that's supremely worthy of loving attention and promulgation. Go love it and promulgate it. Do good. If your hate is right, then your love will be right. 

If your hate was skewed, your love will probably short-circuit as well. But that will be a good lesson. And so we keep on learning and growing. 

But don't hate hate. Hate hateful things. And... prove it. With more than words, certainly more than cheap memes. 

Prove it by living it.

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It's just criminal that "righteous" has been degraded to an epithet.  But this is just more of the general dumbed-down pop-culture-drone illiteracy at work. 

Real righteousness is beautiful and magnificent, not to mention beneficent (note: that last word is NOT "ben-uh-FISH-int," a word that doesn't actually exist; "beneficent" is "be-NEH-fi-sent" and means "well-doing"). 

Try to be righteous. 

And try not to be self-righteous. 

It's the trying that counts.

What Does Our "Gut" Owe A Facebook Post?

 Something that helps you cope with Facebook's more annoying characteristics: always remember that anything anybody posts, they're posting on THEIR page, first and foremost. 

Their page is like their house, they run it, they feel at home there. What matters most to them is that what they post  makes sense to THEM. They don't need anybody's permission (except for when Facebook butts in, of course) to express themselves there for whatever reason, whether or not it makes the least sense to you or anybody else. 99 times out of 100, when they posted it you were absolutely nowhere on their mental radar, they never ever pondered for a moment whether you would see it or not. 

That's really hard to get used to, especially for any of us who lived most of our lives pre-cyber-age, pre-Internet, pre-social media. We're just hard-wired to assume a message is waiting for our response. It takes a lot of deep re-wiring to learn how to scroll by and ignore. 

Imagine it's 1975 and you're sitting at home watching television, let's say it's The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Suddenly the show fades out and in its place there's a message from somebody in your extended family, say 100 miles away: THIS IS JUST THE WORST, DON'T KNOW HOW I'M GOING TO COPE. 

How on earth did they get their message onto your television screen? And why? What's wrong, what's going on? You'd dash to the phone, expecting all kinds of terrible things. 

Imagine you phoned them and spluttered the moment they picked up, "Are you okay? What's wrong? Do you need help?" and they said, "Well, I got my hair done today and the color came out all wrong and it's totally mortifying, I don't know how I can go out in public!" 

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A lot of us are still wired, when we see these things on Facebook, to react as we would have, had somebody in our lives mysteriously managed to make the message pop up on our television screens in 1975. 

We take it immediately in a personal way, instinctively feeling the responsibility, the onus, even the guilt, to do something about it--at the very least (and, actually, this is the WORST) to "perform" viscerally, emotionally, to conjure up the expected feelings that prove we're decent, caring people. And that is perfectly corrosive psycho-viscerally, just pernicious. 

Yes, indeed, this marvelous cyberage of ours requires us to learn a new kind of callousness, unresponsiveness, precisely because Facebook, social media generally and the Internet have ratcheted up the boy-who-cried-wolf dynamic to stratospheric proportions. 

It's one thing when the bad hair job makes you look in the mirror and whine, "This is the worst, I just wanna die," but it's quite another if you trumpet it to the world without any explanation, and with no context. 

So when somebody's FB post shows up on my feed, and  I haven't the vaguest shred of a notion what it means or what it relates to, I remind myself: 

"This person isn't writing this to ME, this person is writing on his/her page, maybe for somebody else who really is in the know, maybe for nobody at all. The post is showing up on my news feed essentially by accident, and if the post is vague, enigmatic, evasive, contextless or simply outright gibberish, then it's nothing I bear the least emotive or moral relationship, much less duty, towards. Keep scrolling." 

Anybody who really needs to tell you something will contact you personally. Everything else on social media, including anything I post, is, when it comes to emotive or intellectual response, optional. None of it's from God, certainly. Least of all the stuff that claims to be.