Day: October 8, 2008

Tired of rhetoric

So I watched only a part of the Presidential debate last night, but it was enough to get me a little ticked off.  I didn’t see enough to form an opinion as to who may have won, but did see enough to realize I am good and tired of rhetoric.

I know there is a financial

                           housing

                           mortgage

                           gasoline

                           healthcare

                           welfare

                           employment                crisis.

What is to be done?

it was said someone would raise taxes.

                          Which ones?  How much? For whom?

it was said someone would lower taxes.

                           Which ones? How much? For whom?

It was said McCain spent wantonly.

                             On what?

It was said Obama did, too.

                            Same thing.

It was said CHANGE was needed (which was agreed on by both candidates).

                            Both promised to deliver, but Obama did not (to my knowledge) specify the nature of the change he promised to deliver, or how he would deliver it.

I’m no political scientist, but isn’t that a little bit like telling a bill collector the check is in the mail?  I’ll pay you, I will.  You should have it any day now.

How much is the check you sent?

–It will take care of my debt.

Then what?  What will ensure the same debt will not happen again?

I heard Obama said we should not have sent troops to a country that had nothing to do with what happened on 9/11.  Does that make what was happening in that country any less wrong?  And those people any less worthy of life without oppression, without being gassed, shot, and otherwise murdered by their own leader?

Apparently not.  Let them die, I guess.  Saddam Hussein did not fly a plane into the twin towers, nor tell anyone to.

I think that ticked me off more than anything.

Of course, I am not naive enough to believe that either of the candidates had (or have) all the answers.  Neither one of them answered with what seemed to be complete specificity.  Neither one of them is perfect.

But I have to say I do not support Obama.

A very good friend (as I mentioned before) described him as hollow.  I believe that to be true.  And after further reflection, how can I, as an American, support socialized medicine?  How can that be the answer to the healthcare crisis?

How can simply repeating the matra “CHANGE” and making vague promises about how to facilitate it solve ANYTHING?

the answer is it can’t….

and it makes my decision all that much easier.

Calico Dragon

I saw this cartoon when I was a kid, and it stuck in my head, for some reason. Every now and again, a picture from it will just sort of float up in my mind, like that little envelope that comes up on my office Outlook when I get an email.

I don’t remember if it was a Looney Tunes cartoon, or something else. I don’t remember if it was one of the musical variety, or the more traditional slapstick kind. I just remember this one character–it was a stuffed looking dragon made from many different colored fabrics, and rather haphazardly stitched together (that’s the way I remember it, anyway). In the cartoon, I think it was called a “calico dragon.”

I was thinking about that last night for some reason. I remember the tongue on the thing flicking out, and thinking the dragon was not frightening, or really even funny–just ridiculous looking. And it occurred to me that I sometimes feel like that stupid stitched together collection of fabric pieces, or at least see myself that way. The dragon in the cartoon did not really seem to fit together the way it was supposed to.

And that’s how I’ve felt in the past, up until fairly recently.

Like I was not stitched together the way I was supposed to be. Like the stitches I did have holding me together were not strong, and I never really felt like I could trust the thread.

Like the pieces of my fabric were too many and too varied to really even make sense together.

Like they could never really fit, not matter how I stitched them.

And I was right.

And that was the problem.

I had always done the stitching. I had always tried to sew up the tears and rents in my fabric. I had taken the thread from wherever I could find it.

But the truth was that I could never fix myself, no matter how much I tried. I could never stitch up the rents and tears in my fabric. I could never connect the pieces of my fabric together in a way that made sense to anyone, least of all myself.

I could not do it myself.

I don’t know if that dragon in the cartoon tried to patch himself together, but when I recall it in my mind, that’s how I see it.

And that’s how I saw myself. Many tattered pieces held together with fine, gossamer thread.

Weak thread.

I needed a thread that was stronger. I NEED a thread that is stronger. And the best part of it, the One doing the sewing will accept me whether or not my pieces are tightly knitted together. Yet He wants desperately to stitch me back up. And Once I accept him as Tailor, once I allow him to hold the pieces of my life separately, work them through his hands, and bind them together with the thread of life, then piece by piece, my mending will begin. That was, and sometimes remains, very hard for me to see, or remember.

And last night, when I heard the men in my group talking about parents, and some of the wounds they’d received from them (and the healing of those wounds for some), I thought of that calico dragon from my childhood. I could see him very clearly.

And remembered he was me. But slightly different. While some of the patches were still ragged, and barely held together, others were bound tightly, with bright shining thread. And while the colors still did not match, the way those pieces fit together made sense. And I was able to perceive with a little more clarity that my mending had indeed begun–had in fact been underway for some time, based on the amount of stitches.

none of this probably makes sense to anyone but me, but I suppose me is who I’m writing this for, anyway.

And God.

And to gather what remains of my thoughts….