Blog 1839 – 10.06.2020

Elizabeth Who Is NOT a Saint

https://drive.google.com/file/d/17VFLqLN5GVlBe_0TwHGZqIg8qHmhqDBD/view?usp=drivesdk

Elizabeth Who is NOT a Saint

There is something so appealing and liberating about today’s children’s story.

Trying to be a perfectionist is like trying to live in the tiniest, tightest, little box imaginable. I happen to believe that the spirit that lives in all of us is bigger than our bodies, bigger even than the world, and that we were never intended to live in either or any box for very long.

Many of us have dreams of flying and I think that someday we will. We all of us feel at times like birds forced to walk when our wings would allow us to fly high and above all the petty expectations of others and even those of ourselves. Elizabeth is NOT a Saint and neither are any of us and a close examination of those who have been so named would reveal feet of clay and cracks in those polished images as well.

Often in those mythical saint stories, important details are left out like the names in the old Dragnet detective TV show and not just to protect the innocent but to disguise the equally guilty in this case. In a misguided, I think, effort to create heroes for our children and ourselves to emulate we lift people up and brag on them for their best outstanding characteristics while minimizing or completely dismissing their lesser ones. Case in point, the first American President, George Washington supposedly even as a boy never told a lie. That is such an obvious editing job for little boys and even grown men often play fast and loose with the truth, girls and grown up ladies too, some like our current President, famously and habitually so. And for all the good George Washington did and the good examples he set, he did marry for money, position, and prestige, and he did own slaves, not a very shining examples those.

But, then he was just a President and not a Saint, huh Elizabeth? Heaven knows like many of you I have spent a good share of my life trying to always be right.

I do not even care so much about being right anymore as being happy. Are you happy all bound up with a multitude of rules, regulations, and politically correct recommendations that few if any could keep straight or ever keep all of them all the time? Some of us who have been around the block a few times see all this Law and Order talk as just a dog whistle for trying to maintain a status quo that has only and always benefited mostly just a privileged few and not promoted the greater good of the many especially the economical and power challenged among us.

I do not believe in respecting the privileges of a few above the rights of all to a slice of the pie. It was Jefferson not Washington and George not Thomas who said, “We finally got a piece of the pie.” And it is high time everybody did. We are all sinners in the truest sense of the word, “missing the mark.” It is a very human thing and human is what we all are and not saints. Is that a good excuse for not trying to do our best? Probably not. But then as Whitney Houston sang so sexily, “When I’m bad I am better.” Like Elizabeth we have all felt like that a time or thousand. Focus on happy and leave that saint stuff to the football team. Even they know that nobody gets it right all of the time and no one expects you to, so why should you. “Chillax” and enjoy the game.

Your friend and fellow traveler,

David White

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jeJWENi351fHPRsJkt1gfPG2qHleNKJe/view?usp=drivesdk

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