We’re united in our division.
Someone has to be right,
so someone must be wrong.
Everything becomes a battle
too many are willing to fight.
We try to fill the gaps between us,
hoping one day we will learn,
but every time we build a bridge,
there’s always someone, somewhere,
who simply wants to watch it burn.
Yes, we say we are united
as we draw lines upon the sand.
We gather words as weapons,
forging them from facts we think we know,
then choose a side and firmly make our stand.
Self proclaimed, self -righteous warriors
charge forth with vitriolic indignation,
under the guise of what they believe is right,
without regard for who gets hurt,
their final victim will be our nation.
Us against them and them against us.
Arsenals filled with rhetoric, stats, and lies.
Angry accusations violently explode,
blinding everyone with shrapnel
till they’ve lost sight of why they fight.
It isn’t just about the politics,
It’s about how we think and what we speak.
It’s about how we parent and how we feel,
how we show our faith, and how we choose to live.
All this right and wrong only makes us weak.
What will be left, if it ever ends?
Why do we keep trying to build bridges,
if we’re just going to watch them burn?
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Stephen Hawking says artificial intelligence could end the human race. Seems to me most humans themselves are filled with their own version of artificial intelligence, commonly called ignorance, and it is most certainly a danger to the human race.
They pretend to be knowledgable while reciting recycled rhetoric as if they understand what they loudly proclaim to be fact from pedestals of phony or misplaced indignation and laughable morality.
The real thinkers, the real keepers of truth and wisdom are growing silent, tired of trying to be heard above the cacophony of noise surrounding them. Tired of being tormented and persecuted for interjecting ideas and solutions and thought which go against the tide of poisoned waters streaming freely through society.
I hope they do not grow to weary. We need them.
I’ll not apologize for swimming upstream, away from the stagnant pool awaiting to swallow those satisfied with going with the flow.
Crystal R. Cook
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How much of how we feel about our fellow man has been dictated by the prejudice of others? Resentments from the sins and sorrows of those who have come before us remain, festering and growing in their absence. We feed them, we nurture them and we pass them on to the next generation without wondering why.
We copy and paste them into our own psyche, we adopt them without question. Sheep following an unseen shepherd to the slaughter. I too often hear people trying to justify and defend their attitudes and opinions with false arguments and phony indignation. The thoughts they think are not their own, merely recycled resentments inherited from family, friends and foes of people they may have never known.
If we stopped to think for ourselves, would we see their experiences are not our own? Would we realize we have shaped our world based on the broken model of theirs? Would we notice we’ve damaged it even more in the name of progress and change? Would we see we can’t look at our own experiences through the tainted lenses of the past?
Our country is more divisive and separated and prejudice than ever, instead of eradicating these things we despise we seem to have inflated them. Since the beginning of mankind there have been the haves and the have nots, there has been social, economical and racial prejudice. Our society has managed to twist the dreams that once were, we have found new ways to undermine each other, to build walls of separation as we pretend to tear them down.
Sound bytes and sensationalistic headlines invade our minds from the left and from the right and we choose sides, ignoring the the good from the side we’ve not chosen and ignoring the bad from the side that we have.
We say we want equality in this country, but equality is just a concept, it can never be achieved, especially when everyone who cries out for it seems to want more than the rest. There can never be equality while there are those who have no means to even stand in line to receive it.
We use the word acceptance when what we really want is applause. We fight for what we call human rights when we have forgotten what human rights really are. We fight for freedom of expression but place restrictions upon it. We fight for freedom of religion but we really want everyone to agree with our own beliefs . . . at least that is what we accuse each other of, slowly molding it into a reality.
The needs of the some have become more important than the needs of the many. We champion the rights of criminals and forget their victims. We shout platitudes to placate the masses in a cacophony of false hopes and empty promises. The ones who fight for our country are now second in line to those who invade it.
Every cause and crusade has a mouthpiece, a puppet being manipulated an unseen hand. They herald their chosen truth, claiming to speak for the masses until the masses think they really are and begin to believe what they say. We are conditioned to follow, conditioned to believe. No need to form our own thoughts and opinions, the majority rules and those who do not follow their lead are considered radicals and extremists.
We are being broken by the choices we’ve made . . . Soon, there won’t be enough to mend.
Crystal R. Cook
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Our country is in trouble. Our youth, our future, their future, is at risk. Every generation paves the way for the next, today’s parents and educators are shaping tomorrow’s leaders, or are we letting the government and society shape them for us?
The decline of morality, educational values, and accountability in this nation is setting a frightening precedent for what will come. The recently released 2013 Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance from the CDC highlights this decline with startling statistics.
If this report does not convince you the youth of our nation are at risk, that parents and educators need to step up and return to the basics, you are deluding yourself. Kids are kids, they don’t always make the right choices, the key word here is choice. This is something they must be TAUGHT to do.
I realize there is a lot to sift through, but even scanning the text is enough to show where we are heading and it’s a downhill spiral if the kinder, gentler, politically correct, everybody wins, no consequences or accountability parenting continues.
Say no. Make rules. Enforce them. Discipline . . . Kids from toddlers to teens are growing up feeling entitled, they are told they have the right to do and have what they please. What they do have, is the right to be loved. They have the right to be cared for, nourished, sheltered, clothed, and educated, the rest of it they need to learn to earn.
Children need to learn respect from the beginning, they need to know right from wrong, they need to have consequences . . .
Elementary school children know more about political rhetoric and alternative lifestyles than they do about compassion and responsibility. They are conditioned to accept the unacceptable. They are no longer required to strive to be their best, just enough is good enough. Make them read, write, study, speak properly. Stop numbing them to reality by allowing violent games, movies and television to invade their minds.
Backseat parenting is destroying their future.
Teachers are no longer allowed to teach the individual, they now teach to achieve tests score high enough to keep their positions. Many are dissolutioned with the profession they entered because they had a passion to teach and help shape the future and they have now been stifled.
Parents are no longer allowed to parent, or no longer know how to. Something simply has to change.
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4HIM released this song in 1992. I remember thinking how much we desperately needed to heed the message they were sharing, no one did. Our world has not changed for the better, so many things have simply not changed for the better.
This message is as relevant today as it was 22 years ago . . . Perhaps more so.
We’ve Turned the Page, For a New Day Has Dawned
We’ve Re-arranged What Is Right and What’s Wrong
Somehow We’ve Drifted So Far From the Truth
That We Can’t Get Back Home
Where Are the Virtues That Once Gave Us Light
Where Are the Morals That Governed Our Lives
Someday We All Will Awake and Look Back
Just to Find What We’ve Lost
We Need to Get Back
To the Basics of Life
A Heart That Is Pure
And a Love That Is Blind
A Faith That Is Fervently
Grounded in Christ
The Hope That Endures For All Times
These Are the Basics,
We Need to Get Back
To the Basics of Life
The Newest Rage Is to Reason It Out
Just Meditate and You Can Overcome Every Doubt
After All Man Is a God, They Say
God Is no Longer Alive
But I Still Believe in the Old Rugged Cross
And I Still Believe There Is Hope For the Lost
And I Know the Rock of All Ages Will Stand
Through Changes of Time
We Need to Get Back
To the Basics of Life
A Heart That Is Pure
And a Love That Is Blind
A Faith That Is Fervently
Grounded in Christ
The Hope That Endures For All Times
These Are the Basics,
We Need to Get Back
To the Basics of Life
Bridge
We’ve Let the Darkness Invade Us Too Long
We’ve Got to Turn the Tide
Oh and We Need the Passion That Burned Long Ago
To Come and Open Our Eyes
There’s no Room For Compromise
We Need to Get Back
To the Basics of Life
A Heart That Is Pure
And a Love That Is Blind
We Need to Get Back
To the Basics of Life
A Heart That Is Pure
The Hope That Endures For All Times
These Are the Basics,
We Need to Get Back
To the Basics of Life
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The blog is dedicated to the people which care about their goals, dreams , actions including the ones that have paused , slow down or even stopped moving forward.
The Qwiet Muse 