Jack Pelham

If you really want to know the man,
Look at what he will tolerate
And what he won’t.

Did you know
That your feelings
Can be wrong?

It seems there’s generally always
Somebody trying to take a new stab
At bolstering the notion that
People who don’t do anything substantial
To stop evil can themselves be good.

It’s a shame that in high school,
When we had so much time for it,
We didn’t know much about how
To get to know each other better
Than we did.

If someone had taught us that,
We might have come out
With more good friendships,
And with more maturity,
With which we might have
Enjoyed them better.

When the man is finally corrected
And put in his place by his Maker,
I suspect that the lion’s share of
What he learns in that session
Will be the certainty of things
He already knew.

On this Earth,
Your kids will make their choices—
Which is exactly what
God has put them here to do.

It is perhaps the stupidest ploy
Of unruly humans
To pretend that the character of God
Was transformed from
The Old Covenant to the New,
Such that afterward,
He was no longer adamant
About judging man according to
What man does.

The wicked man errs on purpose,
And the simple man from ignorance.

Shall they be rebuked the same?

I’m listening to a podcast discussion in which both sides are pretty clearly sympathetic to a certain mega social media platform and its attempts to regulate free speech in the name of keeping the members from “getting into silos”. The idea of the discussion is that you have to step in and regulate things, or else, the participants in the community will be drawn only to the camps that gather around their own favorite points of view. And so the hunt is on, it seems, for the most effective and efficient ways to do this—apparently, to inject an alternate point of view into discussions on the platform.

And is anything wrong with this?

When they are free,
They will tell you at last
What they think.

And they will have questions.
Lots of questions.