I've come to see my efforts to escape the problems holding me back through the lens of slave narratives I've read. Those in chattel slavery plotting their escape faced far worse trouble than mine, but escape is escape, no matter the year or the people involved. An attitude that most of the successfully escaped slaves seemed to share was that of singled-minded determination to escape. Every ounce of energy they had that they could call their own seems to have been devoted to figuring out how to escape, or working on a skill that would be useful in freedom, or otherwise working towards that goal of getting out and away, permanently, for all the rest of their lives.
How can I apply that to my life? Why is my mind so often so very much all over the place? Do I have ADHD? Do I have that need for speed? What gives? I'm pretty sure I don't have ADHD. Instead, I just live in the USA in 2017, and it seems to me that the world and the devil distract us in three ways: 1) with things we hate that tempt us to concentrate on defending ourselves against things that really don't matter all that much; 2) with things we love that tempt us to concentrate on luxuriating in good things that really don't matter all that much; and, 3) with false hope that tempts us to stay and give a hopeless situation one more try.
It's hard precisely because defending yourself is a perfectly reasonable thing to do, and actually it is critically important to be able to tell right from wrong and to have enough sense to hate sin when you see it. But it is so easy to get bogged down in being righteously upset for the sake of enjoying our own upset, so easy to be distracted by upset when we should instead be working, plotting, and scheming over our escape from the things we reasonably should want to escape.
For example, I just deleted some draft posts because they were no more than more of my now standard ranting about how absurdly absurd the left is and how insanely insane the right is. Okay fine. Both sides have lost it. What else is new? There is no point in my belaboring this point any longer. Intelligent people know this. The time has come to move on because being outraged over these sad facts has come to take up way too much of my precious time. I have a life to live and blog posts to write.
If the prisoners in a prison were to all begin to get along, I am positive that the guards would grow extremely nervous. So nervous they'd then start something, as in some trouble.
Humans being what we are, it's the easiest thing in the world. All the guards have to do is tell a few lies, such as telling Fred that Sam said he was a sissy while telling Sam that Fred stole his cigarettes. And so forth. All it takes is one good feud, one good daily hate, and then -- oh! so much pressure is off the guards.
Obviously the guards don't want a riot, not most days anyway, but so long as most of the prisoners' rage is directed at other prisoners, then the guards have much less to worry about themselves.
The guards are using the prisoners' human nature against them. This kind of defensive paranoia is especially bad in prison, but the rest of us shouldn't think we're so smart that we don't need to watch out in this regard. Our bosses can and do use this against us.
My husband, who shall be known here as Dear Greasy, once worked as the staff mechanic for a landscaping firm where about half the workers were hispanic while the other half were native East Tennessee whites. The owner of the firm routinely spread tales about the whites to the Hispanics and about the hispanics to the whites. And it worked well to keep the workers at each others' throats instead of demanding better safety equipment and so forth. The owner figured out that it was Greasy pointing out what the owner was doing. The owner decided he didn't much like Greasy. After that, the owner paid more attention to giving Greasy hell.
Don't we all know from the movies that the prisoner who has the spiritual stuff to stay out of stupid drama is a dangerous prisoner, the kind who "thinks too much". Greasy had become that
When I see the left side of politics insisting that it's racism alone that's the problem with American police departments, while the more radical of them scream that all white people everywhere are personally to blame, well, it's just more distraction. Most black people have better sense than that. No one speaks for all black people, not any more than George Wallace spoke for all white people.
And a lot of white people have been outraged for years over all the brunt force the courts and the Congress have handed to cops. Why do cops do what they do? A lot of it is simply because they can in fact get away with it, because the courts and the Congress have legalized it, and they do in fact, treat an awful lot of white people like shit, mostly the poorest white people.
As long as the left is busily blaming white people in general for stupidities or conspiracies coming out of the federal government, that's as long as I will know that the left is playing this same divide and conquer game they like to pretend is only ever used by righties. They're just as guilty as the racist owner of the landscaping company with his little tricks to keep the whites and the hispanics at each others' throats. If the left were instead saying that we've seen 20 or 30 years of the feds handing police more "discretion" and raw power and a giant assortment of military equipment, and so it's really just kind of common sensical to observe that all this power has in fact resulted in a kajillion instances of corruption and abuse up to and including rape, torture, and murder. If they were saying that, then they'd be addressing the problem. But instead they're blaming white people pretty much just for being white people. And if you dispute it, then you're called a racist yourself. And so the division continues and, oddly enough, so does the police abuse. And so, therefore, I strongly suspect that continuing police abuse is on someone's agenda.
The police abuse will continue until we all realize that racism among cops and prosecutors is only one factor among many here. Rather than nurturing reasonable discussion about what is going on, instead the left at large has been busy further dividing us. And that's why I'm now doing my best to ignore them, to not let them distract me from my goals of overcoming what we need to overcome.
And so, I understand where the alt right is coming from. I understand so well that it kind of scares me. But reacting with a wave of hatred for anybody just feeds the devil more energy. Reacting with hatred distracts you from your goals. I don't care if it's hatred for the left or right, for white or black or brown, for Muslims or for Christians. Unless there is something to be defended right this red hot minute, hatred and rage are distractions, wastes of the time and energy we need for figuring out how to escape the mess we are in.
And so, my dear audience of white working class Christians, please don't get sucked into the new waves of hatred no matter what side you come from or what side may look attractive this month, that is, regardless of what Donald Trump or Black Lives Matter may do next. Doesn't matter. Let it go. Give it up. Keep your mind, heart, and attention on what you are going to do to further your own families' escape.
When our Lord told us to turn the other cheek, was He ordering us to not get tangled up in a dozen knots of hatred because we have better things to do? Or was He asking us to just let other people walk all over us? I'm pretty sure it was because He doesn't want us tied up in those knots when He knows, better than anyone else, that we have far more important things to do than to sit around feeling and processing and nurturing and cooing to our hatreds like Gollum crowing to that damned ring.
More on distraction next time.
