Blog 100 – 8.21.15

There is a verse I think of often that says, “Be not conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” It seems there is always someone who wants to tell you how and what to think. I am only offering my observations, opinions, and slightly skewed views to entertain, provoke you to think, and hopefully encourage. I think people do there best thinking when they think for themselves. I am skeptical of “group think” or “sheep think”, blindly following the will of a charismatic leader or even majority rule, Charismatic leaders can lead you astray i.e. Jim Jones (Don’t drink the Kool-aid) and Adolph Hitler ( Singling out one group to hate and persecute though a popular way to raise a crowd is not the way to build a thousand year movement or Reich.) And as for Majority Rule, the majority is often wrong i.e. lynch mobs, racial segregation, withholding the vote and equal rights from women, the killing and relocating of native populations to accommodate Western expansion etc.

Even the American Dream has sometimes been a nightmare for those pushed aside and left behind. And any thinking that says one person or group is “better” is just wrong headed in my opinion. You are entitled to your opinion but you are no more “entitled” than anyone else. Someone has said you are what you eat but more accurately you are what you think. We Americans got the name overseas of “Ugly Americans” because of the ugly way we sometimes think and act, like we are better than everyone else. It is the height of arrogance and stupidity to assume superiority. There is a great line in the song Every Day People:

I am no better and neither are you.
We are the same whatever we do.

We act like children crying out, “My daddy is stronger, smarter, more handsome than your daddy.” My country is better, my religion more true, my wife prettier …” Really folks don’t we know it is the sign of an inferiority complex to always be comparing and thinking we have to be bigger and better than everyone else. People in each of the fifty states all think their state is the best. I have been in them all and they each have much to commend them. Having lived in Texas thirty five years I got a pretty good dose of Texas bragging. To hear Texans tell it everything is bigger and better in Texas. I grew up in Tennessee where we studied Texas history because many of the Anglo-Americans responsible for the Texas Revolution were Tennessee boys like Davy Crockett and Sam Houston. Even so it was a joke in Tennessee that all Texans had brown eyes because they were full off…well nobody likes a bragger. Texans do like to brag about their state.

All these little boxes to limit our thinking and to keep us a part. Thoughts are powerful. Men used to think the earth was flat and that one would sail off the edge to their doom if they sailed too far. But some thought outside that silly box and sailed to a New World. Some think there are no new worlds to find. They are just as limited thinkers as the flat earth crowd. There are worlds yet to be discovered within and without.

Your friend and fellow traveler, explorer,
David White