I spent 40 minutes or so struggling to write an entry about my distaste for certain religious teachings common in all faiths – and then I scrapped the entry because I felt like I wasn’t doing it in a way that wouldn’t hurt the feelings of the believers in my life. FOURTY MINUTES WASTED. And now I’m writing an entry about wasted time and y’all? I DO NOT HAVE TIME TO WASTE.
But I did, I wrote for 40 minutes and then scrapped it because I was worried I didn’t have the angle or the language right and that the believers in my life would take offense.
AND THEN…I JUST NOW wrote ANOTHER entry talking about how sometimes I wished I didn’t care so much about hurting people’s feelings since someday Facebook hurts my feelings left and right and no one cares about MY feelings. But then THAT entry got scrapped because JEEZUS, KIM, GROW UP.
So now I’ve wasted more than an hour of time this morning from 2:15am to 3:15am and the only blog entry I have to show for it is this one talking about all of the entries I’ve scrapped this morning because GOD FORBID I ever say anything that upset anyone.
The basic point of both scrapped entries was this: We don’t need religion to save the world. We need empathy. We need to be able to feel what people different from us are feeling when we say the things we say on Twitter or on Facebook or on the bumper stickers of our car. Empathy. We need to understand that people who vote differently from us are not going to change their vote if we insult them. And even if they did, does anyone honestly believe that the right person as President will make the world better? Not if we’re still asshats to each other. It doesn’t matter who is in office if we still lack the ability to be kind to our neighbor who is different from us. It doesn’t matter who we elect as President if we still make judgements on those struggling with addiction or poverty. It doesn’t matter if the country is liberal or conservative if we still use insulting language that divides our local communities. It doesn’t matter who holds the highest title in our government if we hate and publicly insult the people who vote differently from how we do.
your time writing those other entries was not wasted. You needed to write those things and you probably will use them in the future for another entry. Your blog today reminds me of Rodney King’s statement, can’t we all just get along? I honestly don’t understand why we sometimes make it so complicated.