The first stone

                                          

This whole social media phenomenon sometimes overwhelms.  It has accelerated the pace of hate in the world.  It is a Petri dish for anger and discord.  It gives us the perfect vehicle for our inherent divisiveness.

Some good does emerge.  For example, I will post this blog on Facebook and a couple of hundred of you will read it.  Some will enjoy it, some will not.  Some couldn't care less.  But I can at least share, on occasion,  my meager thoughts.

But this isn't a blog about social media.  This is a blog about that "first stone" that we've always heard about and how it sits there waiting for someone to grab it and cast it.  It's always been there.  Smug, complacent.  Calmly anticipating a blameless hand.  Confident it's not going to get chucked anytime soon.

Because, to cast it, you must be without sin. And just because it's unlikely that anyone stands a snowball's chance of grabbing that sucker and slinging it like Ernest T. Bass doesn't mean that you can't attempt to live and behave in such a way that you can at least contemplate its power.  That you can't imagine it sitting there in a glass case atop a fancy dais in all its rocky ordinariness.  About the size of a baseball, imperfectly round, worn smooth by centuries of time and inertia.  Centuries spent awaiting a sin free hand.

But to even have the privilege of contemplating it, I think you have to at least direct your  life in a positive direction.

I'll give you a couple of examples.

The world reels today from the murder and mayhem in Las Vegas.  Facebook is already speculating that the shooter may have been spotted at a certain political rally, may have just converted to Islam, may have been just one in a group of people plotting this massacre.

Guess what?  I don't care.  Sorry, but as I sit here at this very moment, I can't recall his name and I have no desire to do so.  He is a non-entity to me.  That's how we should regard innate hate.  As a non-entity.

What I do care about are all those lives cut short in the blink of an eye.  Ripped from this earth and their families and loved ones as suddenly as a muzzle flash.  I care about those fellow human beings who this day are suffocating in a bottomless pit of grief,  reeling from what they can only describe as a hellish nightmare.  I care about the mothers, the fathers, the sons and daughters, the husbands and wives of all of these people who have lost a huge piece of their heart and move about their days as if they are underwater.

I hurt for those who had bullets or shrapnel rip through them but still hang onto life.  I know that there is for them now a brief flash of time that will forever haunt the days, months, and years to come.  I regret the pain - mental, physical, and emotional - that they suffer.  I pray for their full recovery and that sometime, somehow, they will be able to delegate this nightmare to an unreachable corner of their brain and never allow it to see the light of day.

I don't care how Mr. Evil obtained his weapons, whether they were automatic or semi-automatic, who he voted for, what church or mosque he prayed at, or what his family or next door neighbors think of him.  I have no room in my existence to give the slightest of a damn about him.  So don't bother sharing with me any of the plethora of social media facts, fictions, or opinions around him and his life.  Don't yell at me from atop your gun- issue soapbox, regardless of your leanings.  Do not make me a party to your decision to politicize this tragedy.  At times like these, I choose to empathize, not socialize.

Getting mired up in speculation gets me no closer to being able to run my fingers across that unique stone.  None of that allows me to imagine the heft of that stone in my hands, maybe even tossing it back and forth just to feel its weight and texture.  In fact, it inspires to spin me in the opposite direction.

Which leads me to my other issue.  Listen, I love football.  I manage to tolerate the other sports while waiting for spring training or early drills or pre-season.  Baseball may still be America's pastime, but football is my pastime.  And guess what?

I don't care whether the patriotism of the professional players matches my patriotism or not.  Many of you think that there is no such thing as degrees of patriotism.  You're either a patriot or you aren't.  Well, thank God we're free to think that way.  And, so far, we don't need a constitutional amendment to think.  Do I respect your personal views around patriotism?  Absolutely.  In fact, we may be pretty much aligned there.

But that doesn't mean that I have to care how a football player or anyone else chooses to show his patriotism.  Whether it's a wide-open, standing at attention, helmet in one hand and the other over his heart, lip-syncing the words to the National Anthem with tears in his eyes.  Or standing with his arms linked with his team, or kneeling on the artificial turf, or sitting out The Star Spangled Banner in the sweaty, littered confines of the locker room.  His job, in my world, is to run, throw, kick, catch, and block like a professional.  It's to go out onto that field and give 110% for the game.  To earn his keep.  And like Mr. Evil, I don't care where he goes to church, who he voted for, whether he believes in concealed carry, or how he chooses to demonstrate his national pride.  And if he is breaching a clause in his work contract, then that's between him and his employer.

I do care about whether he is a good person, whether he is charitable, whether he sets a strong positive example as a husband, father, brother or son, and if he believes in obeying the law.  I would like to think that he has a solid personal relationship with his Creator.  I care about whether he conducts himself in such a way as to move closer to being able to cast that first stone.

So spare me the pundits.

Social media is rampant with modern day scribes and Pharisees.  Always just dying to discredit you, to tempt you into saying something that they can capitalize on, to lure you to their political and social webs, to insult or outrage you into a senseless, endless argument, and to stick their feet out so you trip and fall square on your butt.  The scribes and Pharisees of social media are sometimes your friends.  That's usually when their shenanigans hurt the worst. Sometimes they are total strangers who you believe you just have to confront and counter. You know them.  You "chat" with them everyday.  They're usually sitting with their fingers hovering over their keyboards or their thumbs at ready on their smartphones.

You know, I've vowed to temper my social media behavior before.  But I've always underestimated the power of the scribes and Pharisees.  I don't have the DNA of The Man.  I don't have the ability to squat, draw my finger through the dust, and quietly contemplate my next move.   I haven't had the power to just let the rotten bait dangle there and move on to calmer waters.  Sometimes I just don't have the power to shut the hell up.

And until I do, me and Ernest T. Bass can only dream of that granite beauty, that perfect rock, that elusive "first stone." That chucker to end all chuckers.  We can only dream of a day when the scribes and Pharisees all link arms around the common causes of goodness and beauty and spin golden threads across the social media highway.   We can only dream of a time when Evil loses its grip and careens back into the black pit from which it first slithered.  In the meantime, I'm hoping me and Ernest T. Bass can both work to overcome our own little self-indulgent urges.  Him breaking windows like a backwoods banshee and me conquering the deliciously recurring temptations of living with a endless pile of plain old common rocks in a glass house.