Blog 3027 – 02.13.2024

Follow Your Arrow

I grew up in a conservative, repressive, and narrow-minded part of this country. Why, backward looking and thinking were the area’s theme song, “Where old times there are not forgotten, look away, look away, look away, Dixieland.” To make matters even worse in that already stunted environment my mother chose to take my brother and I to a little church that was even more conservative than the Southern Baptist Church that most of her family started attended after her brother Richard tragically drowned while fishing with two of his brothers when their boat capsized in the early spring of nineteen sixty-one.

Twenty five years later it took some very difficult and stressful circumstances to help me to see my way out of that tiny suffocating box that I was trapped in, but when I did finally see my clear of it, I sang the words of an old gospel song that Martin Luther King, Jr. quoted in a famous speech, “Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, I am free at last.”

Today’s song expresses some truths about the hypocrisy of the guilt religions attempts to tell everyone else how they should think and live. I believe that we all have an inner compass that points the way for us and that we should follow our arrow wherever it points.

The founding documents of this country state that all men (women too) are endowed with certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Before our new Constitution could ever be ratified a Bill of Rights listing others of those rights had to be attached. Old backward ideas die hard and often progress seems like two steps forward and three steps back, but I believe there is yet reason to hope.

Follow your arrow wherever it points.

Your friend and fellow traveler,

David White

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hYOaCELpDu5v01wKfC7SGikpvLJsEItU/view?usp=drivesdk

Follow Your Arrow