He said what?!?

I'm going to attempt to do something quickly here...share a few political thoughts during my lunch break. I always get myself in trouble with these spur of the moment blogs. Not quite as bad as the middle of the night revelations we sometimes feel compelled to share only to wake up the next morning horrified at those previously…seemingly….almost divinely-inspired thoughts. But it’s too late, before you can even remove your latest post, the damage has been done. Your mother’s boss has already posted her remarks….”interesting,” and that Aunt Wilma is already on the horn to your grandma saying, “do you know what your grandson did/said/didn’t do last night?” You’re not quite sure what interesting comment means, but you’re pretty sure you’ve just stuck your foot in your mouth in variety of ways and there it is…those thoughts…out there for the whole world to see…I often wonder why I’m so eager to share these thoughts sometimes. Never mind the fact that we change our minds sometimes. Sometimes we get more facts, or we become informed in the first place concerning a given view and we recant. Sometimes we realize the haziness of the night before produced thoughts that lacked not only cohesion, but tact and all those other good things momma taught us. We’re human.

The candidates must also feel this way, but magnified times 300 million-give or take a billion or two in other countries. They know every word they’ve ever said to anyone at anytime will potentially come back to haunt them. “Bomb bomb Iran!” or “…they cling to guns or religion.” And a million others. That’s not the point.

We each have our preferred candidates and ideologies and whenever someone on the “other side” slips up, we jump all over it. Our eyes glisten and our mouths water as we think of more fuel for our argument with a friend over (place your issue here).

I shudder to think of the words that came out of my mouth, even less than 10 years ago. “I don’t need this job because God is about to do something really big, I quit.” “I don’t love you.” “You need to get your life right with the Lord.” “Stupid fundamentalists.” I can’t even type out the ones that came out of my mouth while driving, even as recent as last month.

I’ve been sitting here thinking about what dirt the media would produce on me if I we’re in the spotlight. A thousand thoughts flash through my mind a second, that distasteful video a coworker shared and I didn’t speak up, or that time I almost ran into a guy on the interstate b/c he passed me, (seriously, 2 inches from his bumper, I was gonna kill him), the woes of my freshman year(s) of college, throwing a brick through the office window of someone that made me mad (actually I didn’t do it, but I thought long and hard about it…so long in fact, that I had secured a source for the brick and ran through an escape route in my mind). That’s right folks, I’m guilty of a pre-meditated drive-by bricking. How’s that for dirt?

The company I work for has a ton of ethics videos they make each worker watch. One quote that has stuck with me is “don’t do anything you wouldn’t be comfortable reading about on the front page of the newspaper.” Of course, the company makes us watch this stuff because they could be help liable for our stupid actions-actions that could potentially bankrupt a multi-million dollar company.

I never really had a goal in this post , outside of listening to these thoughts and writing them down. I apologize for you poor souls that have to read it. I guess I could wrap it up by saying, cut others some slack. Don’t jump on the band-wagon when you hear the failures or flubs of those with whom you disagree. Reach past your own bias and try to see people for what they really are deep down…human. They screw up, their ideas aren’t always right, they change their mind, blah blah whatever. This obviously applies to politicians, since we’re right in the middle of crunch-time on the election…but I would encourage you to extend this same level of understanding to all areas of your life. It’s amazing what you learn about people when you find out their reasons for saying something or you learn more about their situation. Extend the same level of grace that’s been extended to you, you jerks.