happy holidays or merry christmas?

Around the holidays the issue of people saying "Merry Christmas" versus "Happy holidays" seems to be s significant one for some folks.  It's been a cultural debate, or in some cases, and opportunity to mock those who believe that greater culture needs to align with Christian doctrine.  It seems like there would be two different perspectives that this can be viewed from.

In the one perspective, I can see how some Christians might expect other Christians to continue to say "Merry Christmas" if they believe that failing to do so is somehow denying the Incarnation of Christ.  I don't know how the act of saying, "Happy holidays," could do such a thing, but maybe there are very specific social situations where refusing to acknowledge Christmas is an act of denying Christ's humanity.  That is frankly the strongest argument I can make for getting worked up about someone not saying "Merry Christmas."

From a different perspective, does it make any sense for Christians to expect non-Christians to say, "Merry Christmas"?  Is acknowledging that there are other holidays around this season denying Christ, and even if it were would it matter if someone who doesn't put their faith in Christ for the forgiveness of their sins did so?

If this were part of some overarching cultural strategy to do away with Christians celebrating Christ's birth I could see this being a big deal.  However, that's a conspiracy I don't buy into.

I think this is a battle for people who want to devote their time and effort to cultural wars rather than devoting their lives to the Gospel as presented in Scripture.  When Paul wrote about the Devil's schemes, and that our struggle is not against flesh and blood (Eph 6:10-20), he was specifically arguing against earthly pursuits such as cultural warfare.  Satan's goal isn't to get people to be more politically correct.  It's to get them to spend their finite focus on the earthly things (like cultural warfare) rather than on teaching others about putting our full faith and trust in Christ's blood, and living a life that reflects that.

However, I do want to be open to arguments that I haven't articulated.  Is there something that I'm missing about what saying, "Happy holidays,"  really means?  Am I misunderstanding Paul, and cultural warfare is somehow Scripturally appropriate?

awkward endings

In my work I interact with a lot of people all over the country and the world through different means.  One constant that I've noticed is that, as someone who's a bit socially awkward, I struggle with closing out conversations a lot of the time.

I've noticed that I'm actually a lot more awkward in situations where I believe there is some social expectation on my side.  If I'm working with a customer who I don't have much of a connection with the expectation is to be businesslike, so no problems there.  However, when I have a more friendly relationship with individuals, or when I sense that someone believes we should have a more friendly relationship, I spend more than a reasonable amount of energy trying to determine how friendly is too friendly (or not friendly enough).  This is especially a problem when closing out a conversation.

My goal in the conversation is to have closed out the conversation without hurting feelings or sending an unwanted signal.  So, I struggle between the extremes of looking like I'm trying to shut down the communication and caring a little too much about what's going on with the person I'm chatting with.

Am I the only one?

toxic masculinity

I've heard the term "toxic masculinity" used a lot recently.  I don't think I had ever heard it before a year or two ago.  I've never been the most masculine of men, but I'm not by any stretch effeminate.  So, I think I can maintain some objectivity on this specific subject.  Rather than write specifically on this subject, though, what I would like to do is use it as an illustration as to why terms like this are particularly frustrating.  Specifically, labels like this are used by people on all sides of an issue to either label everything they don't like as evil or to portray themselves as being under attack.

A real, valid, and useful definition of "toxic masculinity" would probably be something to the effect of, "Socially reinforcing negative behaviors in boys and men by creating arbitrary standards that associate negative behaviors with masculinity and positive behaviors with femininity."  I've seen and fallen prey to that.  Boys need respect from their peers, and a lot of times doing the right thing is also doing the girly thing--or so I have felt.  I've been the boy/man left to feel less masculine for doing the right thing.  I've been the boy/man who did the wrong thing in order to feel or appear more masculine.  I've also negatively reinforced behavior among others.  As a society, in our smaller sub-cultures, and in our families, this is what we should be addressing.  There will be disagreement about how that's addressed, but I'd hope we could agree that this should be a priority.  This gets at the root of a lot of criminal activity and actions that leads to broken families.  It's a big deal.

All of this being said, there are those who would want to take advantage of the term to knock all things masculine.  These folks are not be in the majority by any stretch, but they can be vocal.  I've definitely heard plenty of opinions about how everything in the world would be better if it were run by women.

As a counterpoint, there are those who hear people taking advantage of the term and assume that "toxic masculinity" is part of a larger cultural attack on masculinity.  As a result, they do not take as seriously the crimes committed through "toxic masculinity" because they sense a danger in giving too much cultural sway to the anti-masculinists.  They also view any criticism on the things they deem masculine as an attack on manhood itself.

This situation leads to the pitched battles we see today in society where people dig in and fight each other rather than understanding each other.

Perhaps the real antidote to the current situation is for discussion to move beyond blaming toxic masculinity, and to focus on what real positive masculinity is.  It can't be just what women want it to be, or what men want it to be, or what "the man" wants it to be.  It needs to be naturally masculine, but having a positive effect on society.  A lot of the traits I consider to be masculine do that already, and so the challenge is not changing everything about men but rather identifying the places where they go astray and focusing on those.  I'm sure this could be done for women too, but I haven't heard the term "toxic femininity" referenced in the media yet so I haven't given that angle much thought.

I think these sorts of issues come up with a lot of terms we use today, and have potentially been issues in the past as well.  I've heard tens of definitions of "feminism."  By some definitions I'd be a feminist.  By most I would not.  But the ambiguity around the term allows people to throw the word around in an argument and seem like they have a well-formulated position when they don't understand the basics of what their "opponent" believes.  I'd bet that if people to get beyond the term and focus on the issues the term represents that a lot of our arguments would melt away into societal compromises and solutions that almost everyone could agree with.

Labels should be short-hand ways for us to shorten the description of something we already understand rather than tools we use to keep from learning about what we don't fully understand yet.

texting woes

It's amazing that in the last ten years smart phones have gone from something only early-adopters use to something that basically every adult uses and understands.  This has had almost as great a fundamental shift in my everyday life as gaining regular access to the Internet in the mid to late nineties.  I have run up against a couple of personal limitations in using mobile devices to text that I'd like to present.

First, I've been slow to adopt emojis.  This isn't because I think I'm above using emojis.  I like how you can distill a much larger thought into a simple image.  The problem is that I'm not always adept at identifying what emotion or idea a specific emoji is supposed to convey.  I brought this up with a friend a while ago, and took a look at the emojis I have used on my personal phone at that time.  As you can see from the image below, it's not a lot.  I just frequently figure it's safer not to guess on what a specific emoji is supposed to mean.

Second, the combination of auto-correct and my clumsy thumbs has conspired to make me look like an illiterate dunderhead to those I am texting or messaging.  I'm constantly seeing misspellings or entirely wrong words in the messages I send out after they're sent.  Some of this is that I need an editor for my communications on a good day.  At least some of it has to be that my phone enjoys making me look like an idiot, however.

I know a lot of people typo things on their phones.  I seem to be far worse than the average, however.  It's to the point where I'm sure I've lost a few notches of respect from a handful of people who have to think, "That's the wrong 'their' for the third time in a row!"

The trade-offs of emojis creating an ambiguous message and me making me sound like a toddler mashing keys on a keyboard are worth the benefits I get from my phone.  It's just not all cupcakes and unicorns.

it can't happen here

Sorry, heavy topic alert.

I've been thinking about the Holocaust a bit lately because I recently listened to the audio version of Anne Frank's Diary, and also because I recently did some reading about Kristallnacht in memory of its eightieth anniversary.  I used to be confused about how Nazism took hold, how Hitler was able to come into power, and how people could rationalize supporting a government that sent people to concentration camps.  I've thought many times that it couldn't happen here.  While it would be much harder for something like that to happen in the United States with the separated powers we enjoy in this country, in the last few years I've come to the conclusion that it can happen here.  People are people, and they're prone to demonizing others if doing so supports their preconceived worldview.

That Internet conversations and debates frequently devolve into one side comparing the other to Hitler or the Nazis is so well established that it has its own informal law. The real shame of this tendency is that comparing everyone to Hitler and the Nazis makes it so that few really take it seriously when someone actually does things like Hitler would.  If a real Hitler appears, anyone pointing it out would be seen as a crazy person triggering Godwin's Law.

My views on identifying nascent Nazism have changed some over the years.  I used to think of it as a workers movement because this is the vibe that the Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will gives, and I in turn thought that was what I needed to be wary of.  However, workers movements elsewhere haven't had that same destructive tinge.  Certainly, some have.  The destructive ones are noteworthy because they're the exceptions, though.  Most have not.  Therefore, it has to be something deeper.

It could be that the key is that Nazism, like Fascism, was Nationalist.  I know that belief is getting airtime nowadays more than in the past.  It could also be that a deeper dig could reveal that this is unfair to some Nationalist movements which are not so destructive, if such movements exist.  I simply don't know at this time.

I'm not calling anyone on the world stage a Hitler today.  Even if I did, who would take it seriously?  These are now the sort of accusations crazy people make, and so they are a red flag to most that the speaker wants to decry everyone who disagrees with his as a Nazi.  I do see tendencies of what I do know about Hitler and Nazism in general in some modern political figures and movements that give me pause, though.  Some of those figures are in other countries and some are in the United States.  Since I'm no true expert, it would be unfair for me to call out someone as a Hitler based on a partial observation.  I have to believe though, that it would also be right for me to be cautious about their statements and actions, and refuse to support or endorse those individuals and movements, wittingly or otherwise.

It is easy to see how an individual with similarities to Hitler could take power, and how horrible things could be justified in the name of whatever that man portrayed as the ideal.  In 1930s Germany the ideal was a form of Eugenics supported by a host of conspiracy theories about Zionists.  I'm certain that a lot of Germans figured the Jews were simply being sent to a camp where they couldn't harm anyone else, and whatever happened to them they had coming.  Modern societies aren't immune to that sort of thinking.  Someone today can mix a weird political philosophy with conspiracy theories about some other group of people and do the same thing.  As long as a vocal minority (or even majority) believes the conspiracy theory, what's to stop them from doing horrible things?  Those people probably won't even ever realize the negative things they enabled.

History can be scary when you stop thinking that it can't happen here.

no news is good news

One memory I have of my maternal grandfather came from an instance when we were watching the local news together.  They usually made time in their house to watch the evening and nightly news, though I don't recall him frequently commenting on the details of what was on the news.  At the beginning of that particular newscast he encouraged me to count the number of negative stories and compare it to the number of positive stories that were being reported.  As you would expect the ratio was somewhere in the 8:1 to 10:1 range.  He never let me know if there was a specific lesson that he wanted me to get from the exercise, but the experience did stick with me.  I've wrestled with myself over the years regarding what the exercise proved.

One thing I am certain it proved is that the media makes the world far more scary than it really should be.  To allow a newscast to define your understanding of the world is to imagine a world that is far more terrifying than the reality for the average person.  There aren't murderers lurking around every corner.  Most people want to do good, or at least be thought of as someone who does good.  Those good things don't get reported, though.  I am not saying that most people are good.  People are sinners--the whole lot of them, including myself--but people also have humanity and by and large want to do good.

Another thing I think it proved is that the things that are noteworthy sort of establish the opposite about what society is like.  Things that happen all of the time aren't considered newsworthy.  As an example, a news crew could conceivably go to a city rescue mission seven days out of the week and find positive things that people do for others in need, but if someone is stabbed at that rescue mission one day out of the year that bad thing is the newsworthy event largely because it is both abnormal and consequential.

Something that I've given a lot of thought to is what positive news would look like.  Usually when I see a positive story on the news it comes across as either a puff piece or mildly propagandistic.  I don't know how you'd report on positive stories in a better way, though.  Maybe I'm so cynical I can't properly process a good, positive news story.  Is the problem me?

I've also given some recent thought to the news that my grandfather had been exposed to in his lifetime.  I've been watching a documentary on the Vietnam War over the past few months, and I'm coming to understand that the sixties were as much a time of upheaval as the current day.  This is to say nothing of time of the Great Depression and World War II.  So, when he was discussing the news with me he had a perspective I did not have regarding how scary news could be.  Maybe he was preparing me for a time period like the current one when there's a lot in the news to discourage a person.  If so, I think it worked.

ten years

It's extremely hard to believe, but our daughter CD was born ten years ago this coming weekend.  I haven't spoken about her much on this site.  This is because most of my early parenting epiphanies were with NJ, and most of the things I could have said in the last few years would be stepping a bit on her privacy.

She is special to Golden and I in a way that she won't ever really understand.  I frequently think about the fact that our family needs her.  She is the most outgoing in our family (which is an admittedly low bar), but also has a wit about her that amazes me.  She is smart and funny, and there are few people I enjoy talking with quite as much, if I can direct her away from talking about toys or boys.

I think society in general is built in a way that convinces a lot of people, and especially elementary and middle school girls, that they are worth less than they really are.  CD is the most socially adept person in our family, but we do sometimes see her dealing with that. It's a bit discouraging because we can see how valuable and valued she is, but she doesn't always believe it when we try to relay that to her.  Some lessons are only learned with age and consistent love and encouragement.

Ten years ago I couldn't fathom having a ten-year-old daughter.  Now that I'm about to, I can't fathom that the next ten years will see her going from a child to a teenager to a young adult(!).  The years are far too short.