I promise, this is my last thought about this week's scandal of stupidity. I know I write this only for myself, but years from now if I look at this and wonder why I spent three striaght days on this I will wonder if I had a brain aneurysm or something...
Got to thinking about Genesis 27 this morning. It's a long chapter and I won't tell the whole story here but you have a Bible so go and read it. Rebekah, who loved Jacob more than Esau, ensured that Jacob got the family blessing ahead of Esau, though he didn't deserve it. It was the 17th century BC's version of giving Jacob the answers on the SAT while locking Esau out of the room. Jacob was blessed, Esau was outraged and threatened to kill his brother (but not his mother, suprisingly, whose idea it was, though I wonder if he ever knew that), and it's years until the brothers ever see each other again. Rebekah did all these things knowing that she might never see her favorite son again...did she know that she might go to jail or incur Isaac or Esau's wrath?
The older my children get the more that I see that as parents we are often irrational when it comes to our children. On our own we nitpick at them and we hassle them on things that are unimportant and at our worst we drive them away from us even as we think that we are doing is being done in love. But should somebody stand in the way of them and their bright future? We will destroy these interlopers. In something as insignificant as a middle school basketball game we will harbor hateful thoughts towards the other team, the officials, and even their own teammates and coaches if something unfair happens to our child. We want what is best for others, and so often it blinds us towards anything else.
And since we are fallible, messed up human beings, we often don't even know what is righteous anymore, so obsessed are we to make things 'right' for our children. Sometimes, like Rebekah, we even blow up our entire family to ensure that one child is favored. I'm sure that as some pious mother is doing her Bible reading this morning she is outraged at Rebekah's behavior, even as she is plotting the easiest path for her youngest child to enter into Harvard.
Outrage was invented by the political left and has been perfected by the political right. I sometimes succumb to it, but I have made the choice to no longer be controlled by it. I have too much other stuff going on in real life to have the time for it.
