How Should We Think?
There are those times when the world seems to be a nightmare, a fictional story gone wrong or something extraterrestrial that I am no part of. Here’s a couple of the latest offerings from inhabitants of planet earth that make me feel only distantly related to fellow man.
I don’t see a lot of TV news, but I catch little chunks of it now and then. This is what I think I saw and heard a couple nights ago, but I really only caught a little bit and am filling in the gaps. A group of mothers in a separate room were watching their children on a screen as the kids were brought to a table and shown various candies on a plate. The little ones were asked to pick out which candies were most appealing to them. They all picked out the candies that had marijuana as an ingredient. [I didn’t know until marijuana became legal in Colorado that it could be consumed as food.] After watching their children, the mothers were then asked for their reactions. To the mom, they were very worried and upset by what they saw. One mother summed up this worry, “I thought I wouldn’t have to have the marijuana talk with my children until they were in junior high. I now see I will have to have it much earlier.”
Any time I have seen the local news, it seems there has been something about pot. I think this segment with the moms watching their kids follows from a proposed piece of legislation that would require marijuana candy makers to make their candies as unappealing to children as possible – like a brown blob. The candy makers claim this is unconstitutional, an infringement on their creativity and could prove to be economically disastrous for them.
Colorado’s marijuana laws are much more liberal than the Netherlands, which clearly shows how advanced Coloradoans have become. The state coffers are brimming with sales tax from legal marijuana sales, so there you have the silver lining. Cars with Colorado license plates that cross the border are being carefully watched by other states’ patrol officers. My nephew recently drove across the border into Nebraska and was stopped for going less than five miles over the speed limit. My sister said that his car looks like a drug car, whatever that means. His car, an old something or another, [never was good at makes and models of cars and am not even sure which is the make and which is the model] on a previous trip to Nebraska hit a deer which tore part of the fender off and cracked the windshield. Nothing was repaired before the trip when he was stopped. I guess that’s what a drug car looks like.
Yesterday morning I saw a little bit of a segment on some Sunday morning show. Two guys were talking about thinking like a freak. They contend that the guy who smashed the world record for # of hot dogs eaten in a short amount of time had thought like a freak to achieve this most important goal. Then thinking like a freak led to a more serious topic. The drop in crime rate from such and such a date to now (I didn’t know that we are less criminal today as a society) has nothing to do with improved police tactics. It is actually due, if one thinks like a freak, to legalized abortion which has eliminated a lot of unwanted children who would be of criminal age by now. Though I don’t think I could eat 50 hot dogs even on a good day, I think I might be learning how to think like a freak. If we legalize all types of murder, I bet the crime rates would drop even more. It would be a very effective way of getting rid of the “unwanted” by having them gun down each other with no jail time in between to slow down the elimination rate. It does seem statistically likely that if we continue looking for other criminal activity that gets rid of people and legalize it, that our reduced population will produce fewer crimes and that the fewer number of activities that we consider criminal will also make for fewer crimes. Call me freaky, but I think I am on to something. And Colorado will probably be able to claim a great decrease in crime with the elimination of all marijuana charges. Freaky! To be fair to the “think like a freak duo”, I didn’t hear if they were advocating abortion as a means to a better, more crime free society – they might have been simply pointing out a conclusion that they reached that others, less freaky, might have missed.
All this makes me think of that Carpenters’ song with one change in capitalization: “I can take all the madness the world has to give, but I won’t last a day without You.”
Others may want to think like a freak. I say that we should try to think like Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta and St. John Paul II. We should think with the Church which is always refreshing, innovative and grounded in the One Who knows all there is to know about hot dogs, drug cars and edible plants.
Our Lord is truly risen! He is risen indeed! Continued Easter blessings!
Jezu, ufam Tobie.