ROGUE RAMBLINGS

I remember watching Lone Survivor with my nine year old son and when Murphy started his climb he looked at me and asked “Who's going to save them dad?” There was sense of sadness mixed with wonder in how I had failed to let him understand we don't always win. While he may not realize it he's been sitting around and grabbing beers for some of Americas barrel chested best since he could open the fridge door. He's sat on laps while we swapped stories and laughed about missions that went well or bad. Yet he understandably had no idea the heavy weight the left side of those mens dress uniforms bore or that some of the greatest had barely ever received any public recognition. It wasn't that he wasn't exposed to it but instead that he viewed his “uncles” as bigger than life while not even truly knowing who did what. 

We stand in complicated waters up to our knees with the tide coming in. The road forward for our society and our children is obscured by the waves of change rushing in. There is no retreat and once we sink beneath the surface there will be no rescue. The media seeks to have your attention on one celebrity or another or one scandal versus the next. Daily we are pushed down by the tide and in some ways even desensitized to the corresponding salt spray to our eyes. 

So what can you hope to do against such an unrelenting torrent of negativity and false issues?  First of all start consuming with your sources with a rogue mindset. Acknowledge that each person carries their own bias as well as reasons into everything they do. Its not always personal sometimes they truly don't realize what they're doing and in others its a malicious act. Ive always been unsure if its the intelligence world or the marketing world that have made me such a skeptic of people. Chances are if everyone is elbow deep at the feed troth Im the one sitting back sipping an unsweet tea shaking my head. 

Now the challenge that we have before us is to remain standing while not developing such a disdain for those in our same place of being. In the end we don't all have to like each other but we do need to survive together. We do need to allow the nation to continue as it works through its teenage years self identification process. No matter that sometimes we can only wonder if this is how the greeks felt watching their own downward spiral. In order to do what we must we must be willing to face criticism with understanding as well as patience. Understand that, and pardon my paraphrase, science advanced past someones understanding can only be viewed as magic. 

Seek to understand others so your points can be understood while still having your eyes open enough to see possible deception for what it is.