Jack Pelham

If I should live a thousand years,
I shall never understand
Why they have such outrage
Over calling a liar a liar
And none over the lie itself—
Unless it is because,
In calling out the lie,
The challenger is threatening the very essence of their being—
Desecrating the twisted religion—
Toppling the idol of the lying class—
That being, of course, the lie itself.

They tell me I do many things well,
But in having learned to do this many things well enough
That they should have gotten this impression of me,
I have discovered this fortunate irony:
I have learned that I could do most all these things better,
And beyond that, that I could learn
To do yet more things well,
Should opportunity and interest ever align.

When God made man, both male and female,
He made them that they should give a formal account for themselves
When it was all said and done, at least—
If not from time to time before that
In special cases.
This was the nature of the reality
Into which the human life was set;
It was a certainty.
This was the set
And they were the cast
And the play was on.

Even in this darkness,
Where one gets the feeling
That the evil fashion of the day
Is viler than the market will truly
Bear in the long run—
And that the wearied masses are,
For the most part,
Just quietly going with the flow—
Some for just not caring much,
And others for fear of the backlash
They know would befall any protester—
Where what is supposed to be
Generously accepted by all today
Would have been a scandal had it been
Even whispered about by our grandparents—

One contacts me to give me something,
And a thousand, to sell me something.

There are two kinds of empty,
The first being the ordinary kind—
That simple state of having nothing inside.
It’s what we would expect of the new bucket
We select from the shelf at the hardware store,
Or of the new nail apron, still in the stack and neatly folded,
It’s strings tucked away inside the folds.

When will the ruckus be over?—
This churning chaos of a world
In which our lives have been set
And in which we have been tossed
To and fro all our lives,
Sometimes hurt in innocence,
And sometimes in guilt,
And most all the time,
Wishing for something more peaceful?

Will it go on forever?
Will it never stop?

I am quite good at failure.
I’ve done it many times.
The things I’ve tried have often died
And crushed some dream of mine.

But still I keep on going,
Come failure as it may,
For I have found, while digging ’round,
Some gold along the way.

So I am not complaining,
As some may well suppose.
For what’s the thorn of failure’s scorn
When one may have the rose?

I fail, but I’m no failure,
For I am gaining still.
The failure’s he who is not free
To risk another spill.

I hope you’ll take this lesson
And learn from your mistakes,
For there’s just not a dumber plot
Than mindless trying makes.

My thanks to my wife, Kay, for her help with the difficult fourth line of this poem.

What happens when:

1. a church mis-advertises itself in some way (Bible-based, loving, open-minded, inclusive, The New Testament Church, etc.), and
2. an authentic person starts going there because he or she thinks that whatever’s in the ad is really important, and
3. the person figures out that things are not really as advertised?

Here are some of the possible outcomes:

How do I dismiss thee?
Let me count the ways!

1. I will be too busy with things more important than you. Therefore, I will not be responsible for dismissing you.
2. I will smile at you and pretend to agree, while I tell myself what an idiot you are.
3. I will take you as “angry”, and dismiss your every word as nothing more than anger.
4. I will decide to see “arrogance” in you, and then tell myself I need never consider anything you ever say.
5. I will see you as “vain”—as one who “just has to be right”, or who “just likes to argue”—and will dismiss everything you say as empty.
6. I will label you as a member of this camp, or of that one—even if you are not—because I’m already very good at dismissing members of such camps.
7. I will declare you a “heretic”, and even a “son of Satan” if I must, so that it becomes my religious duty to ignore you.
8. I will declare that your demonstrations of fact are really just your “opinions”, and from there, I will opine that we all have a right to our opinions, and to dismiss the opinions of others.
9. I will twist your words into something you didn’t mean—such that they become something I can now make a show of debunking.
10. I will posit that your concerns, while perhaps being mildly important, are simply not the most important thing to be considered right now, and that I, being wiser than you, know better than to get bogged down in your concerns.
11. I will simply put you off until a “later” that will never happen.
12. I will declare you “biased”, after which I will take the mental shortcut of assuming that everything you say is biased. After all, who would want to consider the words of a biased person?

For more observations on quite a similar theme, see my 2012 article, How To Be Criticism-Proof.