Blog 2374 – 04.25.2022

Monday, A Good Day To Change Your Mind

We change our clothes, we change our sheets, we change our address, we even change our partners, and our careers, but the hardest change for most of us is changing our minds. This is the very reason that many are so skeptical of rehab, conversion, and revolution. Can the tiger really change his stripes or the leopard her spots?

Some years ago I read that it only takes a matter of a few weeks to create a habit and that the best way to change an old habit is to replace it with a new one. I grew up in the southern United States where the dirtiest word you could ever call anyone was “a Yankee.” I was born in 1950, a little over eighty-five years after the American Civil War officially ended, but a still popular symbol was a sketch of an old confederate soldier holding a rebel battle flag with the caption, “Forget, Hell!” The line from the song Dixie was true for most southerners, “Old times there are not forgotten” and anyone looking for them to change their minds should indeed “Look away.”

Most change is slow, taking place over many years, but it all can be traced to a change of heart, a change of mind. I like the saying, “Change your mind and the rest will follow.” Be the change you want to see, say the words till you see them come true for you. “May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in my sight, O Lord, my strength, my rock, and my redeemer.”

Southern Democrats held political sway in the Deep South from shortly after reconstruction ended in 1877 till President Lyndon Johnson pushed through the land mark Civil Rights Legislation of the mid-nineteen sixties. The Voting Rights Act was a key part of that legislation, doing away with poll taxes, literacy tests, and other bogus legal state laws that hindered people of color from voting. Many southern Democrats became Republicans, oh they did not change their minds, just their party affiliation. The Republican Party, the party of Lincoln was then a big tent and took them in, and in fifteen years they changed the party, and by the nineteen eighties the ole Southern Democrats were almost all conservative Republicans, Reagan Republicans. I was once upon a time one of those, but some years later I changed my mind. My ole Christian and Republican friends think I backslid, apostatized, but I think that my thinking just evolved. Back then I did not believe in change, in choice, in evolution, but I do these days.

Your friend and fellow traveler,

David White

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1uIBN6KC4u0Ocj3IW1HqxvStytcMo90D4/view?usp=drivesdk

I’m Not Who I Was