Skip to main content

Sticks & Stones (Revisited)

Sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me. 

We've all heard this. At what point did people forget about it? Yes...words can hurt feelings. But remember, they're YOUR feelings. Own them. If someone says something to you or about you that upsets you...don't blow your brains out over it. In so doing, you have completely empowered the person using the language that you don't like. In short, the more fuss you make about it, the more power you give that person and their words.

Instead, try calmly explaining the fallacy of the word(s) intended to hurt you. If you can't do that...you need to work on yourself first. Learn to be comfortable in your own skin. Learn to not only love yourself...but LIKE yourself!

Sometimes in life we have to educate people. If your response to that is "I'm no teacher!" then you're already failing as a human being. We all teach each other, every day. We teach our children, and those around us, by our actions. We give context to the things we say. Guess what...like it or not, you're a teacher. You just might have to educate someone that you'd rather not speak with. Suck it up, buttercup. None of us were ever guaranteed an easy life. If something is troubling you, fix it. That fix might be as easy as speaking to one person. If that person doesn't listen, the next one might. It's a slow process. Deal with it. No house was ever built by throwing a pile of bricks at one spot. Each brick had to be carefully placed, in the most efficient way possible.

Don't be a "blank".

Too many people see themselves as a minority. I'm not sure when this concept became so damned fashionable, but it's time to end it. Every time that someone thinks or says "I'm a ______", that person has just self-segregated him/herself from society. This will make the person, and society as a whole, uncomfortable. This is the exact moment that the problem starts. Don't do it. Don't be a _______. Be a human. Be a person. Spend less time looking for differences and more time looking for similarities. You might be amazed at the results.

We are each unique. Every one of us. Therefore, being unique is simply part of the human condition. Being unique loses it's uniqueness because everyone of us is. Just be yourself. Be a good person. Be a part of your community. Be a positive member of society. You can still dress how you want, wear your hair how you want, love who you want, etc.

Don't divide. Unite. The more that we all come together, the fewer people there are to try to separate us.

I'll leave you with the wisdom taught to my great aunt back around 1910, and had apparently been handed down for many generations prior: Do right because it IS right. If you have to question whether it's right - it probably isn't.  

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Trembling Hand

He had a deep-rooted fear of the sky. Wind scared him. Trees terrified him. A thunderstorm could practically paralyze him. He wasn't always like this.  Age often brings with it odd phobias. As the years pass, one witnesses many things, and makes a quiet mental note of all of them.  In time, those horrors from the past take root and blossom into full-fledged anxiety and panic.  Wind, storms, and even the trees - these made sense. One good storm could bring a tree down on his house. Or his neighbor's. He no longer had the strength to remove the trees, and didn't have the funds to pay a professional to do the job.  But the sky?  Even on a clear, sunny day - looking up at the sky caused dread. He noticed the deepening blue knowing that just beyond was the void of space.  Nothing was coming from there - was it? He wasn't concerned with aliens or meteors. He doubted a species advanced enough to reach us would want anything to do with us. A meteor large enough to ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Last Rick Roll

 Aging sucks. He found that out the hard way.  The beer and liquor no longer flowed. The pills didn't do the trick anymore. A lifetime of crafting tales that thrilled a generation - gone. The well ran dry.  It's the fear of every writer. What happens when the ideas stop coming? No mere 'writer's block' - the reality outside his door was more terrifying than any fictional fear or foe he could cobble together from his own neuroses and phobias.  The government had come clean. It didn't give a damn about the people, the laws, or anything else it was supposed to. It came down to two things: money and power. Enough of either one assured the other. The people could live or die, it didn't matter. There would always be someone to take their place. Someone who had no choice, no say.  The Constitution had all but been abolished. Decades of embedding partisan plants in the judiciary had guaranteed it. The media, before it was forced into piracy, claimed that it all happ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Blank Page

He'd been trapped in his house for five years.  Not imprisoned exactly. No court had ordered it. No chains held him there. His own body had simply staged a quiet rebellion and won. A series of health problems had reduced his world to a few safe pathways through a three-bedroom house in a respectable neighborhood with a respectable yard. He had once traveled the world. He had stood on foreign streets where he could not read the signs or understand the language, and somehow had felt less lost there than he did now standing at the bottom of his own staircase. The stairs terrified him. They waited every morning like a dare. Go ahead, old man. Climb. One wrong step and they would finish what time had started. So his life became measured in reachable things. The bathroom. The kitchen. The chair beside the window. The distance from the couch to the front door on bad days. The slow geography of decline. His wife still worked. Still moved through the world with purpose. They loved each othe...
Post a Comment
Read more