One of the things you learn in therapy, in working as a therapist, is that no one can stand too much honesty. The defences we build up around us are made of myth and lies, and are broken easily. We think we have our nightmares held in chains of iron, when they are as fragile as gossamer.
Yes, I have done too many clinical hours this week.
To have everything I was laid bare before me, to be mocked and jeered at for every mistake, secret and wrong took away so many fears I’d kept as mine. I no longer needed them.
But I paid a heavy price for the wisdom I gained. Such is reality when it finds us ignoring the Truth we knew by heart once. We think we understand ourselves, that we know a little something about the world around us.
We simply do not.
….
I can’t imagine it’s easy for him to tell the world his story. But his heart for the broken gives him courage to not care. To love and reach out, and not care about himself or what people think of him. This is what it means to daily die to yourself.
When I began this blog, I had a heart for the broken, but it’s gotten lost. I know the people who read it, and I know it’s not “appropriate” to talk about the difficult stuff. I don’t want my calling, it’s not pretty. It won’t make my family proud of me. But Christ, calls us not to care. to love so passionately, that only He matters. We must point the broken to Christ, we have to be so full of compassion that we tell our stories.
Instead we lie to each other. We set up regulations about what can and cannot be said. And if someone say the wrong thing: the offensive tweet, the pile on his horrendous. I need to thank Grant for finding this: it is from the NY Times and getting into that can be hard, but here is the consequence of one joke tweet from a woman probably mocking the bubble mentality of White Upper Class people that was taken as Raycist. It is worth noting, however, that the ANC see the lives of Afrikaners as of little value, and are just as genocidal, or more so, that the Boers ever were.
Her extended family in South Africa were African National Congress supporters — the party of Nelson Mandela. They were longtime activists for racial equality. When Justine arrived at the family home from the airport, one of the first things her aunt said to her was: “This is not what our family stands for. And now, by association, you’ve almost tarnished the family.”
As she told me this, Sacco started to cry. I sat looking at her for a moment. Then I tried to improve the mood. I told her that “sometimes, things need to reach a brutal nadir before people see sense.”
“Wow,” she said. She dried her eyes. “Of all the things I could have been in society’s collective consciousness, it never struck me that I’d end up a brutal nadir.”
She glanced at her watch. It was nearly 6 p.m. The reason she wanted to meet me at this restaurant, and that she was wearing her work clothes, was that it was only a few blocks away from her office. At 6, she was due in there to clean out her desk.
“All of a sudden you don’t know what you’re supposed to do,” she said. “If I don’t start making steps to reclaim my identity and remind myself of who I am on a daily basis, then I might lose myself.”
The restaurant’s manager approached our table. She sat down next to Sacco, fixed her with a look and said something in such a low volume I couldn’t hear it, only Sacco’s reply: “Oh, you think I’m going to be grateful for this?”
Political correctness is poisoning our society. We have become too sensitive to offence. We have forgotten who we are, and we no longer recall our faults, pretending the false pride we have is increase self esteem and righteousness. We finely chop the words in social media, parsing for any triggers that can cause another outrage campaign, but ignore the great injustices in this world.
There are a lot of positive things going on, and many things we can share. There is a place for social media, and finely graded media at that. Many of us have photos to share which have no meaning outside our circle of friends. Many of us want to campaign, want to discuss things.
But if we get offended about sarcasm — particularly on Twitter, where brevity encourages both wit and misunderstanding — people will go elsewhere. They will start using systems that remove pictures within minutes, like snapchat, or make texts and emails ephemeral.
For not all conversations are measured, official and indeed about work. The current tendency to make everything a witch hunt is held back outside the USA by employment law — for only in the US can you fire at will. I would rather deal with trolls and haters than have some Pharisaical SJW monitoring our conversations for whatever metric of hate they chose to use today.
Let speech be free: for it is only in telling people they are wrong, and this is a better way, can correction occur. And if we do not argue with words, there is a risk we will argue with bullets, for the dark remains within us.
Thank you, Chris. May God be glorified here.