Thursday, January 21, 2010
FITmedia: The Truth is on the Move
Therefore, much of the information formerly discussed on this blog will be integrated with our lead blog at FITmedia.blogspot.com. It remains uncertain if this blog will be transformed and relaunched, or used as a less public area for deeper discussion as we add new members.
However, rest assured that the consortium is still being build, and it's spirit is still in tact under the wing of the FITmedia brand.
Never give up the good fight!
FITmedia - Find your FIT.
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Education, Law, and People
Friday, August 21, 2009
"The Stranger"
As I grew up I never questioned his place in our family. In my young mind, each member had a special niche. My brother, Bill, five years my senior, was my example. Fran, my younger sister, gave me an opportunity to play 'big brother' and develop the art of teasing. My parents were complementary instructors-- Mom taught me to love the word of God, and Dad taught me to obey it.
But the stranger was our storyteller. He could weave the most fascinating tales. Adventures, mysteries and comedies were daily conversations. He could hold our whole family spell-bound for hours each evening.
If I wanted to know about politics, history, or science, he knew it all. He knew about the past, understood the present, and seemingly could predict the future. The pictures he could draw were so life like that I would often laugh or cry as I watched.
He was like a friend to the whole family. He took Dad, Bill and me to our first major league baseball game. He was always encouraging us to see the movies and he even made arrangements to introduce us to several movie stars. My brother and I were deeply impressed by John Wayne in particular.
The stranger was an incessant talker. Dad didn't seem to mind, but sometimes Mom would quietly get up-- while the rest of us were enthralled with one of his stories of faraway places-- go to her room, read her Bible and pray. I wonder now if she ever prayed that the stranger would leave.
You see, my dad ruled our household with certain moral convictions. But this stranger never felt obligation to honor them. Profanity, for example, was not allowed in our house-- not from us, from our friends, or adults. Our longtime visitor, however, used occasional four letter words that burned my ears and made Dad squirm. To my knowledge the stranger was never confronted. My dad was a teetotaler who didn't permit alcohol in his home - not even for cooking. But the stranger felt like we needed exposure and enlightened us to other ways of life. He offered us beer and other alcoholic beverages often.
He made cigarettes look tasty, cigars manly, and pipes distinguished. He talked freely (probably too much too freely) about sex. His comments were sometimes blatant, sometimes suggestive, and generally embarrassing. I know now that my early concepts of the man-woman relationship were influenced by the stranger.
As I look back, I believe it was the grace of God that the stranger did not influence us more. Time after time he opposed the values of my parents. Yet he was seldom rebuked and never asked to leave.
More than thirty years have passed since the stranger moved in with the young family on Morningside Drive. He is not nearly so intriguing to my Dad as he was in those early years. But if I were to walk into my parents' den today, you would still see him sitting over in a corner, waiting for someone to listen to him talk and watch him draw his pictures.
His name? We always just called him TV.
Told by Keith Currie
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Read, Discuss, Write, Apply
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
On Hypocrisy
I recently read an article, which started a train of thought about the concept of hypocrisy. At one point in the article, which was a response to a video post, the author argued that the man in the video was a hypocrite. Without going into detail about the content of the video, I'll just say that I found myself in agreement with the video prior to reading the response article. In effect, I believed the video to be telling the truth.
So my question is: how relevant is it that the man in the video is a hypocrite? If he is speaking the truth, does it matter if in another time and place he had done the opposite of the truth?
Let me pose this another way. Imagine a man in prison, who is a convicted murderer. He tells someone that the Bible says, "Thou shalt not kill." First, is he a hypocrite? Not necessarily, since the very fact that he is in prison suggests the possibility that he has changed his ways. However, his past misdeeds clearly show that his is capable of not doing what he advises.
Let us assume that the situation is such that this man clearly has no intention of following the biblical advice. The question I encourage you to consider is: what's the point of calling this man a hypocrite? Often, I feel, people use the concept of hypocrisy as justification for ignoring the truth. Certainly a healthy level of skepticism should be applied when taking advice or learning something new, and the character of the source of that information is a factor to consider. However, truth is truth no matter who states it, and to disregard truth, even from the mouth of a tyrant is, in my humble opinion, lazy thinking.
I'll admit to being human right here. I say what I say at the risk of being a hypocrite myself. Do I ever get tired and subsequently have lazy thoughts? Do I seek a quick answer from someone I trust, without fully analyzing it? Of course I do. But knowing one's weakness is the first step toward fixing it. I urge you, dear reader, to daily remember to look beneath generalized terms like "hypocrisy" to truly understand.
Thursday, April 23, 2009
On Socialism and American Culture
The true war in our day is the Media War. Commercial interests in media have destroyed the wisdom of our stories. Self-interest has become selfishness because everyone is feeding off everyone else. The immediate solution on most people's minds is really a part-time socialism.
No one said socialists are bad. In my understanding, socialists are trying to do good, they have a really great IDEA, but are merely short-sighted. Socialism doesn't work. It didn't work out for North Korea, the USSR, Germany, etc. And here's why: people are inherently self-interested. If we weren't, we would not eat or sleep.
However, in any instance of a third-party taking resources from the producers to give to the consumers, there is no incentive for the consumers to learn how to be producers or the producers to continue to be producers. Therefore, everyone consumes, but no one produces. Then the third-party has to FORCE the unskilled consumers to produce. A little bit of poison, merely kills the body more slowly.
In the free market system the United States used to create everything we now take for granted, business was about helping people... it was service. Those who had the dream and ambition to serve above and beyond were allowed to keep the profits, much of which was re-invested in the business. To accomplish this, a person had to learn godlike altruism, self-discipline, and long term thinking. Their efforts created opportunity for those who were a little less ambitious, and the process repeated until everyone had opportunity.
Now, I imagine you'll ask about slaves... I agree, that was a flaw. Consider this perspective: a slave was given housing, food, clothing, and even medical services by their masters, at their masters' discretion. So their quality of life, and therefore happiness, was determined by the character of their master, rather than by their own work ethic. The same is true of employees and their bosses, the difference is we determine how to spend our meager pay, but what we do with our time is controlled by someone else. Still sounds like slavery to me.
Socialism ultimately robs the incentive from those who serve above and beyond and gives it to those who have not learned to do that yet. As a result, we have high-level executives who are ignorant of the fact that every business is a people business, and who abuse their power to rob from the working man.
The working man then feels oppressed and is less productive. If he is awarded money by the government, it does not change the relationship with his employer. Therefore, the employer is squeezed from both sides (losing money to the government and productivity of his workers) until his business fails, and the working man is unemployed.
This is because we no longer teach integrity in business and we no longer have the opportunity for those executives to learn from their failures that people don't like that. Massive organizations that do not give people ownership, do not give people responsibility. True freedom built this country, true freedom will RE-build this country.