Perspective
I’ve found I’ve lost my interest in Facebook
recently. I’ve told myself I’ve had some great times with Facebook sharing my
thoughts, commenting on others posts and sharing posts that sometimes I agreed
with, sometimes I didn’t but was always interested in responses to. However
recently I’ve found myself putting some distance between Facebook and myself.
In part I know it’s had to do with the current presidential race but there’s
been more. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it until this morning as I was
reading another comment by someone who shared their experience of shopping in a
store and seeing someone else shopping there and carrying a holstered handgun.
The person posting said they talked to the manager of the store and was told
the company policy permits such a practice. The person then stated they would
no longer shop at that store which of course is their right. For those with
tender constitutions I apologize ahead of time but for me reading that post was
the trigger that finally assaulted my sensibilities beyond recovery.
Now before you jump to the conclusion that this is all about
gun control please know that it isn’t. It’s about more than that for me. It's about the
way Facebook has come to shape my view of the world around me. I suppose it’s
about perspective in my case and feeling that there appears to be a lack of it
these days pretty much anywhere and yes I admit that it’s my perspective from
an extremely minuscule sampling source. And still it is how I’ve found myself
reacting to much of what I read on my Facebook page.
What has prompted something of a reset within me this
morning comes from a lifetime of trying to believe in much of anything but I
suppose as much as anything trying to believe in people I have found myself
surrounded by through the years. You see I want to believe in “people” more
than most anything in my world. I’ve held “people” on pedestals pretty much all
my life. The thing is I just don’t seem to see much of anything for a return on
my investment and that demoralizes me more and more by the day. When I look
around there just doesn’t seem to be a point of light to lock my sights on and
aim for and so I find myself feeling that I am drifting even more than I am
comfortable with.
This morning I was reminded of a time when I honestly
thought that Rush Limbaugh was the next coming and I wasn’t alone. In those
days you would have found me on the job site with headphones on and listening to
what he had to say by the hour, soaking up his “wisdom” as if I were sitting at
the feet of some great prophet sent to save us all. Interestingly enough that
period of my life was also when I was doing my damnedest to find God and in a
way I was pretty sure the two were somehow connected. In my mind God and Rush
would make it all better but in the end, for me at least, neither ever did and
so there came a day when I took off the headphones and put down the bible.
It seems to me that at this point in time extreme is the new
moderation, knee jerk reactions to any and all incidents is the new norm and
I’m feeling a really ugly undercurrent that if you’re not with me you’re against me. A
middle ground is now looked upon as perhaps the most dangerous place one can
find themselves far more often than was ever before the standard.
My reset this morning has to do with guns only because it
was the thing that seemed to finally congeal so many topics that I’ve followed
over past months and years through so many different sources. It could just as
easily have been politics or religion or which bathroom a person can use. For
whatever reason the subject was guns and I found myself insulted because I
could have been the person wearing that gun and someone would have assumed that
because of my legal action another person found themselves somehow at risk.
Perspective is something isn’t it? Had that person wearing
that holstered gun instead been someone wearing a three piece suit and carrying
a handgun inside the briefcase they were legally carrying because of their
concealed carry permit the poster would still be shopping at the store they are
now so traumatized by.
I put down my headphones and my bible a long time ago
because I came to believe that there is more than simply this right or that
wrong and nothing in-between attitude. Yes there is right and there is wrong but there
really is a middle ground that societies need to strive toward rather than
childishly stomping their feet and saying this is the only way. In my world,
for me, Rush Limbaugh eventually became a joke even though I was listening to
him every day and maybe even twice on Sunday. There came a moment when
something caused me to hit my own reset button so to speak. There was something
about all of it that no longer made sense to me and so I stepped back and to
this day I’ve yet to take that step forward again. And just to make myself
clear it isn’t only about a radio talk show but about several things that today
I feel I drank the Kool Aide on.
Perspective never comes from what we focus on but rather
from what we are willing to step away from for a moment so that we can see more
of what there is to see. That can be a scary thing for untold reasons unique to
each individual. The truth is we all like our own comfort zone and stepping
beyond that brings about feelings of insecurity that we don’t much care for. So
when we see someone doing something that we’d never consider doing we find it
easiest to proclaim their actions wrong and ultimately in some instances
intolerable.
When it comes right down to it these days I’m not sure that
perspective is something that most people understand because in the end it
takes a bit of thinking and I don’t think folks like having to think for
themselves all that much. Back when I was wearing my headphones I’d listen to
Rush but I’d also listen to NPR news and wanted to tell myself that for the
most part somewhere in the middle there was something close to the truth. I
guess in those days it was my version of watching both CNN and Fox and then
trying to find a middle ground. Whether I was coming close to “the truth” or
not I have no way of knowing but I guess I did come to find my truth which
ultimately really is the more important thing. The rest of that is that I’m
willing to admit that I’m not sure I know the truth nor that I ever will but in
certain select situations I know my truth which seems to help from time to
time. With that being said I know that my truth influences my perspective and
in the instances when I believe “my truth” is affecting it I do my level best
to step back away even further from myself to examine what’s going on. And so it was
with the post that prompted all of this.
I can imagine that feeling the need to wear a gun in public
can be defined as a type of paranoia by some while others might just as likely
call it simple prudence. Likewise I can imagine that feeling the need to no
longer frequent a store because a customer at that store has been seen wearing
a gun could be called a form of paranoia as well by some and prudence by others.
In the end the person who was seen doing nothing illegal will continue to shop
at that store and think nothing of it while at the same time the person who saw
the law abiding citizen walking through the store now feels compelled to no
longer shop at that store and must now find another store to shop at.
And all the
while my mind wanders back to the motorcyclist wearing the gun that passed me
on I-17 as I headed north to Flagstaff; I’d sure hate for that person who
decided to no longer shop in that store to be my navigator on what would have
to be their new route from here to there.
But it never really works that way does it?
There’s no way for me to determine whether I’ve lost
perspective or the rest of the world has. How do I know that I’m the only sane
person in an insane world? The truth is I don’t know, still, knowing that I
don’t know counts for something.
For me I’ve realized that the faith I always wanted to put
in humanity was misplaced. That’s not to say that there aren’t individuals well
worth believing in but for the most part humanity may well be a lost cause
whether anyone wants to hear that or not. The dogmatic adherence to this belief
or that belief will be the downfall of us all. Whether there is a way for all
of us to take off our headphones or not I can’t guess but I do know that if we
don’t we will ultimately find ourselves trying to find another store to shop in
and another route to where we want to get to and neither will be what we
thought we wanted in the first place.
We can each of us
choose to stay in our nice little comfortable world and view the outside world
through our own set of prescription rose colored glasses or we can step back
and take a second look, a look that we were convinced would show us nothing new
or different, and simply try another perspective.
And with that being said this writer will likely reset any time now so be aware and
don’t forget to use a little perspective when you can.
