Blog 323 – 06.23.2016

The story goes there are two great wolves, Bitter and Better. Which one grows? The one you feed. Today’s title comes from a seventies beer commercial. I never acquired a taste for beer. For that I thank my father as I also do for my never having smoked. If you drink beer and smoke that is no problem for me. I say to each his or her own. My daddy never preached to me the evils of smoking and drinking. I learned that clap trap in church later and often from people who had worse habits like judging and hating others. When I was a boy my dad both drank and smoked and all the second hand smoke he shared was more than enough for me. He told me that once in a time before I remember that I was sitting in his lap while he was having a beer and ask him for a sip. He let me have a sip (Bad daddy, not so, for he knew if he said no I’d want it more but was confident I would not like the taste.) He was right. I spit it out and gagged. I tasted another beer on a trip to Germany when I was almost forty, same result. Thanks Dad for not forcing your tastes on me.

One of those wolves unlike my dad will force his tastes on you. Ole Bitter if you feed him will soon have you singing the old song from Hee Haw: “Gloom, despair, and agony on me. Deep dark depression, excessive misery. If it weren’t for bad luck I’d have no luck at all. Gloom, despair, and agony on me.”

When I was a small boy before I started school I remember the evening news on TV was thirty minutes long with fifteen minutes for local news and fifteen for national news. In the nineteen eighties we got CNN, the first of the twenty four hour news channels. Today there are many – Fox News, MSNBC, and on and on. The news is almost always disturbing, negative, and discouraging so which wolf are we feeding to our own hurt? That’s right. Ole Bitter. Any more that fifteen minutes exposure daily to that crap trap is harmful to your mental and emotional health. You might begin to think things are so bad we need to throw all reason to the wind and elect a Mad Man President. Oh, Dave, you’ve quit preaching and gone to meddling. I am not a preacher but I do like to meddle with what I think is silly thinking. Just because you tell a lie over and over and over that does not make it true. Donald Trump likes to label people. He called Ted Cruz “Lying Ted.” Dogmatic and unyielding maybe but Ted is no more deserving of the lying Ted moniker than any other politician. Donald Trump said Barak Obama was born in Africa not the U.S., a proven falsehood he has never retracted. In spite of the facts people still believe that lie. Why, because they would rather feed Bitter than Better. One day Bitter will consume us if we don’t stop feeding him.

If we really want to make ourselves and our country better we have to stop feeding Bitter and feed Better instead. The choice is not and never has been between the lesser of two evils. It is and has always been between Bitter and Better. You not Fate get to choose. Choose the one that is for you.

Your friend and fellow traveler,
David White