Halloween

Halloween is the first of the great American candy holidays.  My kids have been excited about it for weeks, and they came home tonight with two buttloads of candy...seriously, the biggest bowl we had only held half of it.  Our three biggest bowls are now filled to the brim.  I have no idea how we will eat this much...I think I got about a tenth of this much candy when I was a kid and it made me fat.  Good thing we parcel it out a bit more than was the case when I was a kid.  If we can keep them (and me) from sneaking it, this candy might last us six months.

As for me, though...I'm done with Halloween.  The cheap superhero costumes, the diabetic-inducing excess, the endless parties that waste yet another day of the kids' schoolyear (and then destroy any sense of discipline for a few weeks as the kids come down from a sugar high)...I really don't want to do this anymore.  What on earth turned a day in honor of the dead into raving children banging on doors demanding candy?  It's not cute, it's Trumpian in its deplorability.  I'm ready for it to go away completely.  It won't, of course.  Nor will the pounds that are put on again from all the high fructose corn syrup.

Forget taxing cigarettes or banning drugs...why aren't we doing more about this health nightmare?  I really would love to hear Michelle Obama talking about the virtues of giving out celery sticks and apples, but then I would also have to sit through endless fat pasty white Republicans talking about how unAmerican she is, even as they moan and gripe about how terrible our country has become.  And then I'd want to go and drive my car into a tree.

Now excuse me as I grumpily go and swipe a Kit Kat.

Ferris Bueller, revisited...

Today the kids were out of school so I pulled up on Netflix the great movie from my teenage years, Ferris Bueller's Day Off.  It was one of the most important movies of my younger days, and even today it still holds up, though it wouldn't be nearly as hard to get Sloan out of school and Principal Rooney would simply GPS track Ferris' cell phone.  Technology ruins movies!

But today I recruited my son, who will turn nine next month, to watch this movie with me.  It's the first time I had seen this movie in awhile, and while I still enjoyed it (and he enjoyed it, too), I think I now see it more through the eyes of a parent.  Not only was I thinking throughout the movie that I'm likely giving my son some bad ideas that will germinate when he gets into high school (or even junior high), but I also started realizing that the heroes were likely people who had been traumatized to a dangerous level (Cameron, who not only hated his father for his abusive upbringing but also had found somebody in Ferris who was just as bad and just as controlling as his father) or who were really just kinda jerky.

I mean, Sloan is great, and remains the pure center of the movie.  Sloan may be the reason most guys loved this movie.  She's hot, she's up for anything, and she even likes his nerdy friend. 

But Ferris?  Here's a kid who has been pegged correctly by both Cameron and his sister...he always wins, he always gets what he wants, he always flies through life on his charm.  Most of us knew somebody like Ferris, and he might have been well-known by every social clique at the school, but likely he wasn't well-liked in reality.  Here's a guy who lets people raise money for his imaginary kidney condition, who skips school Nine Times a semester just because he doesn't like to go, and who twists his parents around his finger through his lies and deceptions.  When finally stood up to by the heroic principal, he destroys that man's life.  I mean, the question we ought to ask should be, is Ferris really just a jerk? 

Yep, we all know guys like Ferris Bueller.  They skate through life and treat people as disposable objects even as most people try to play fair.  Maybe we shouldn't celebrate people like him, but turn him into a cautionary tale of what a wasted life really looks like. 

OK, this was mostly sarcasm.  But not all of it...

The Three Unforgivable Curses

I have been reading again the Harry Potter series, which I am increasingly convinced may be the best series of books written since the Bible.  In the wizarding world there are three unforgivable curses, for which a wizard will go to Azkaban: the Imperius curse, in which one controls another person; the Cruciatus curse, in which one causes another person unspeakable pain; and finally the Killing curse (Avada Kedavra), in which one kills another.

I am starting to wonder whether our country is living within this wizarding world and whether or not Voldemort has taken over.  Consider: the people who are excited about either candidate, Trump especially, must be under the Imperius curse...is there any other explanation for the behavior that people have in supporting these candidates?  Their actions and the actions of the candidates is casting upon the rest of us the Cruciatus curse...it's really painful to watch; we are all scarred by what is happening.  And if Trump should happen to win, dare we say that we will all be under the Killing curse?  I really fear that if Trump wins this country will be irrevocably broken, and if he loses his supporters will soon break it.  Death to America seems to no longer be the chant of Muslim extremists.

Fortunately those books and those curses are not real, are they?  Yet right now they certainly feel real.

Baskets upon baskets of deplorables

It's a pretty safe bet at this point to say that Donald Trump will NOT be our next president.  Despite Hilary Clinton being the second-most hated person in America, despite the cowardice of the American population to not even consider looking at third party candidates...he's simply not going to win.  He's shot himself in the foot so many times that his unfavorable ratings are 63%; the sense is that he has a ceiling of about 38-40%, and no more.  He can't win. 

Yet this number that he has a 63% disapproval rating tells us something else: there are still 37% of Americans who either have their heads in the grounds or have decided that yeah, they still really like Donald Trump.  After all the allegations of shady business dealings (Trump University, condo deals gone bad, unpaid creditors), all the racist and hateful things he has said to offend anybody who is not an older white male, and now after the recordings of him laughing about groping and even assaulting women, they still look at him and think that everything bad about him is a mainstream media/Clinton Foundation/globalistic plot to keep the true Friend of the Working Man from becoming president. 

How do people become so deluded?  I get it...there are at least a few of his voters who will vote for him because they think that any Clinton is worse.  I can relate to that, as I've considered it myself a few times.  And sure, he is unlike any politician on this stage that we have seen since probably Henry Wallace.  In a way it's kind of refreshing to have somebody who is not so guarded and measured in their words. 

But c'mon.  It's still Trump.  How can anybody with any kind of conscience, any kind of Christian value system, look at him and still approve at this point?  What does that say about a small and loud minority of Americans that somebody will  still think that he is our last best hope?  Have we really sunk that low?

Yes, yes we have. 

Unavoidable

Four weeks ago I was sick of the election, not just the candidates but the social media crapfest in which we heard nothing but the very worst about two of the worst candidates of all time.  And so I decided to jump off Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, to take an eight week 'fast'.  Perhaps it was also a recognition that I was looking at these things too much.  I had thought it would be a total social media fast, but of course I am still blogging and checking email and reading the news.  A mini-fast, I suppose.

Of course, I have found out that my plans were naive.  Nowhere can I get away from this election...waiting around hospital surgical waiting room C-Span feeds from political rallies were on the TV.  Every news story is about the most recent abomination that Trump has spouted, or about some new potential scandal of the Clintons.  A friend of mine was telling me about therir vacation cabin having new TV and I was at first envious, before I recognized that I get most of my news from elsewhere. 

I used to have this dream back in my single days ending up in some unelectrified cabin and living out my days as a hermit...maybe that still should still be a future bucket list goal.  As it is now, I'm just as annoyed as I was a month ago.  Let it be over.

The Four Great Candy Holidays

We are entering into the first of the four great candy holiday seasons in our country: Halloween, Christmas, Valentine's Day, and Easter.  We wonder why we have an issue with obesity in this country, and we might look no further than these cold weather holidays in which candy is a great part of them all.  Halloween, of course, is the easiest one, but Christmas is gaining speed, Valentine's day is the crappiest of all the candy holidays (those little chalk hearts combined with the worst of the boxed candies), and finally one last blast of chocolate eggs that is supposed to last us through the summer. 

Made up holidays are nothing new...Valentine's Day really is nothing more than a ploy begun by giftmakers to a)make men feel bad for not doing enough and b)make women feel bad if they aren't loved enough.  I'm convinced that many of our national holidays (including tomorrow's Columbus Day) are meaningless, though of course Christmas and Easter have some real meanings. 

And it's not a bad thing to think about candy for four days if it was limited to those days; total abstinence from such things for us non-diabetics is perhaps too much to ask.  But it's the long season that really gets me.  It used to be that only Christmas decorations took over for weeks and months at a time, but now it seems that Halloween candy displays appear the first week of September...and who is really buying candy on Labor Day to hold up in their cupboard for eight weeks, thinking that there won't be any left by the middle of October?  Don't they remember that this is America, the land of the free and good and plenty (thankfully a fading brand of candy)?

Self-righteousness and me

In my daily reading today I read this: "Do not take to heart all the things that people say, lest you hear your servant cursing you.  Your heart knows that many times you have yourself cursed others."  (Ecclesiastes 7:21-22 ESV)

I know I have read this many times, and even have taught it a few times over the year, but wow...this really hit me hard.  Just as Jesus told his followers in the golden rule to treat others as they would want to be treated (Matthew 7:12), so here we are reminded about the power of cutting others some slack.  Do people treat us and say bad things once in a while?  Sure...but don't take it to heart.  You yourself say terrible things and treat others bad also!

There are so many applications here:
-When I am driving and somebody cuts me off, I want to flip them the bird and pound on the steering wheel.  But when I (mistakenly) do this, do I expect them to give me the benefit of the doubt?
-When I hear a bad sermon that seems to play fast and loose with God's word, I may condemn and hate the preacher.  But when I (mistakenly) do this, do I say that people shouldn't judge me too harshly?
-When after a long day my wife is not in a good mood I get frustrated that she is so cranky.  But when I (not-so-mistakenly) do this, am I hoping that others will cut me some slack?

So often these days I hear somebody talking about how badly they have been treated by others...but then they think nothing about treating others badly.  Why are we so hypocritical?  Why do we think we are exempt from the rules of social behavior?

The Teacher knew about this many years ago.  May I finally learn it from him.