Month: December 2021

Here I am in my fave pajama bottoms. The Grinch is one of my fave fictional characters. I generally like villains in stories, especially if they eventually see the error of their ways and decide to try to make bigly changes in themselves accordingly. When I read fiction or watch movies, or just watch actual human beings live, I am usually drawn to shady characters with struggling souls. They are the ultimate underdogs. They are usually trouble incarnate. They certainly aren’t boring. I secretly cheer for them to gain enough scraps of insight to make a choice to rise above their tendencies to self-destruct. Whether causing harm to themselves and/or others, the fight is on to define what higher/lower principles the character is—or is not—made of. Causing harm to the self or causing harm to others are, inevitably, the same thing. In the end, everybody involved with a villain is somehow injured. Everybody gets “schooled,” as they say. Which means everybody involved gets taught a valuable lesson. We read it. We see it. We can tell someone else what the lesson of a story is.

But do we apply the lesson to ourselves? Do we benefit from it and learn it deeply, for use in the fight for our own souls? I’d like to say that we do. And sometimes, some people do take a lesson or two to heart. They incorporate lessons learned by others into their lives—moving seemingly easily from one wise choice to the next. But so often, we like to read these stories and watch these stories on tv or at the movies—then leave any valuable lessons the story might conveniently offer us right where we found them.

A lot of us are kinda dopey in this respect: We seem to prefer to make our own mistakes, despite any lessons we’ve watched other people—fictional or human—make and learn from, throughout all of history. In fact, as I’m thinking more about it right at this moment, it seems to me that many of us are downright very, very, very dopey. Hopelessly dopey, in fact. We make the same dang mistakes over and over even in our own lives, as if human beings are brand new here on the planet and haven’t learned a bloody thing. We’re ridiculous. We’re so ridiculous that writers and artists continue to look at us and see even more stories to write about the absurdity of our continual refusal to learn from our mistakes. They write books and tv shows and movies about us making bad choices—stories which we pay bigly bucks to read, watch, and NOT LEARN FROM. This evidence suggests we are addicts, hooked on our mistakes. We must like our mistakes. We’d rather make monstrous mistakes than learn something from anybody who has already learned the lessons from experience. We bark out: “Ain’t nobody gonna show me how to make wise choices!” Perhaps we should reconsider that impulse. Perhaps we should learn. But we’re very dopey dopes—so we won’t.🤠

And that’s the end of my TIE O’ THE DAY’s cynical sermon. 🤓