PureX
Veteran Member
Here's a story from a friend of mine ...
So let's just stop falling for it! Let's just ignore the lies and hyperbole and agree that we all want basically the same things in life. And fighting with each other is not one of them.
When my father built his house in the suburbs when I was a kid - I don't know why they called it the suburbs, there were no urbs, we were five miles from the little college town where he taught - I had to go to the public elementary school in the country. I'd gone to a private elementary school in town when we lived there before that. At Meriwether Lewis Elementary School in the county I went to school with all the people who rampaged through the capital last week when they were eight. After I'd been there awhile the older boys used to come to me and say, "Jim (another boy my size, I was a little guy) says you are a *****. He wants to meet you behind the school when school is over before the buses come and fight you." I'd tell them I'd be there, and all day long I'd fume over some other kid I didn't know calling me names. At the end of the school day I ran around to the back of the big white plantation-looking building with white columns and everything that was the school and there I found a circle of older boys with the guy who insulted me in the middle. We'd fight. I'd always win. I had three fights. Before the third fight I'd seen Jim West on the TV Show The Wild Wild West punch a guy in the face with a right cross. Little boys fight by putting their heads down and furiously punching each other in the gut until one quits. At this last fight I got tired of doing that and I punched the other kid in the face with a right cross. He went down immediately and I jumped on him and kept hitting him until the older boys pulled me off and the fight was over and I had to run for the bus to get the ride home. I'd been shocked at how effective hitting someone in the face was but the real reason it was my last fight is I talked to the other kid later and asked him why he had called me a *****. He said, "I didn't call you a *****. They said you called me a *****." And that's when I realized I'd been set up. The older boys were setting up younger boys to fight behind the school. I never fell for it again.
Fast forward to forty years later. My mother had died and my father remarried a year later. He married a nice women. Friends put them together. Her husband had died three years before. The way they did the wedding is they married at the courthouse with the justice of the peace and then had a party at their country club where they announced it to all their friends. We went. Me, my wife, and son. While everyone else went to the country club to greet people coming to the party, I sat with my dad and his best man at his best man's house across the street from the club waiting for the all-clear signal that everyone was there. I was sitting in the basement of a nice house with my father and this other man. We were all in our suits. Dad was very nervous. When we came in we walked by a little room with a french horn, a music stand, and a chair in it. His best man said, "My wife only lets me play my french horn down here." It is kind of cute the way these poor men who fought the Nazis and then came home to make successes of themselves deferred to their wives. Where I grew up the house is always the wife's house. As we sat waiting, my dad sitting in his chair crouched over in concern with his hands clasped between his knees waiting for the appointed hour, I told them the story of having to fight behind the school when I was a boy. When I was done, to my astonishment my dad said, "Yep, they did that to me when I was a boy too."
All we need to do is realize that we're being set up. The "big boys" want to see us fighting with each other for their own amusement and profit. And they are using the media to spread insults and slander between and among us, to get us all "fuming" at each other. Fast forward to forty years later. My mother had died and my father remarried a year later. He married a nice women. Friends put them together. Her husband had died three years before. The way they did the wedding is they married at the courthouse with the justice of the peace and then had a party at their country club where they announced it to all their friends. We went. Me, my wife, and son. While everyone else went to the country club to greet people coming to the party, I sat with my dad and his best man at his best man's house across the street from the club waiting for the all-clear signal that everyone was there. I was sitting in the basement of a nice house with my father and this other man. We were all in our suits. Dad was very nervous. When we came in we walked by a little room with a french horn, a music stand, and a chair in it. His best man said, "My wife only lets me play my french horn down here." It is kind of cute the way these poor men who fought the Nazis and then came home to make successes of themselves deferred to their wives. Where I grew up the house is always the wife's house. As we sat waiting, my dad sitting in his chair crouched over in concern with his hands clasped between his knees waiting for the appointed hour, I told them the story of having to fight behind the school when I was a boy. When I was done, to my astonishment my dad said, "Yep, they did that to me when I was a boy too."
So let's just stop falling for it! Let's just ignore the lies and hyperbole and agree that we all want basically the same things in life. And fighting with each other is not one of them.
