This is how you can show your love to me: Everywhere we go, say of me, “He is my brother."
Therefore be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves.
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The 2021 generation has a penchant for believing it has had a harder time than any generation preceding it. Never before, has grievance been such a prominent calling. We seem to love labeling others - rarely do we label something good. It's always a term we have defined as the worst pox upon humanity.
Racist.
Communist.
Misogynist.
Entitled brat.
We love coming up with new names to label others. We have even taken to the use of a common name for women, to describe someone that is particularly obnoxious (it's not enough just to identify entire groups - we have to bring the point home by personalizing our hate). My friend Mike texted me something interesting yesterday, how Social Media has been used, not for dialogue, but for virtue signaling and to magnify separations between us.
Prior generations used scarlet letters to divide us - a concept which has traditionally been used as a warning to us, on how not to treat each other. Today, we have learned to use a mask as a way, quickly, to judge anonymous others. Never before in history, have people so suddenly lurched into angry assessments of total strangers.
Another friend emailed me recently, about the effect of so many current events (via happenstance as well as official governmental or corporate policies) to divide friends and families from one another. You do not have to believe it to be a conspiracy, to recognize the evil of it, and to want to work aggressively, to reverse it.
Division and anger is a thing, in 2021. A generation that had it made, but that desperately wanted to be "Great," like it's great grandparents, has fomented a crisis - - - the first crisis generation in history, that made up its own evils to defeat: like a re-enactment of The Hunger Games, where we all get to be Katniss.
People watch what they say, lest they be canceled. They quickly distance themselves from the ones they need the most . . . friends and family. Safety has become more important than honor.
We must become sly as a fox, try to stay a couple moves ahead of the culture, in order not to be snared by it. Think like them . . . so that we can overcome them, and perhaps bring them around to the true safety of free and clear consciences.
One of my cousins could put an end to a type of gossip, every quickly. If the group ever began talking about his sister, or brother, or friend, or family member - whether or not the gossip was true, or cast him/her in a negative light - he could end the discussion with a simple phrase "She's my sister."
And that would end it. Abraham did not know what he was getting into, when he wandered into Abimelech's country. He did boldly go into it . . . but he asked people to talk about his wife, Sarah, in a way that was partly true - "Tell them she's my sister." Now, there are obvious, troublesome, problems with the narrative. But Abraham knew the power of identifying someone else as your close kin. People can respect that (most people). They may leave you, and others, alone, if you align together in this way.
So many on-line angst and anger could be avoided, if we could just say "I'm not joining you in condemning this person. He's my brother."
We have to resist the urge to divide family and friends, on the basis of the fake connections of virtual media.
Hey knock it off. She's my sister.
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