- Not The Only One!
- Post #47
- LIP SERVICE!
- Howdy and once again welcome into the weird . Yes sometimes I can be a little on the strange side, and I get that after I wrote the post that ” I’ve Never paid For it”, that it would be completely understandable for your brains to run to Fellatio and Cunnilingus ,when I said lip service. However get your minds out of the gutter and try and pay attention. Oh, and by the way, if you are unfamiliar with those two terms, it’s a special treat waiting for you on Google. ☺️☺️. Lip service refers to when people’s words carries no , to very little weight. There was a time in our history, when a man, or person’s word was their bond. Believe it or not, big tycoons use to seal a deal with just a hand shake. There was actually a time when we lived under verbal contracts and people would just assume to give a kidney or a root canal without anesthesia before they broke their word. We use to have something known as shame, and people cared about their reputation and their good names. Well, I guess those days are long gone . I want to say that then lawyers entered the picture, and now we have something known as a no fault divorce. We really can’t blame this on litigators, but they surely have not helped the cause. There is something known as an imaginary pendulum and it has this way of swinging wildly from one side of the spectrum to the other. Two quick examples, we were so far to the one side post Vietnam War , that people were spitting on military personnel and calling them baby killers, to now ,you can hardly go to any public arena and not hear someone thanking someone for their service. It’s like anything else, yes the appreciation should be there, but I’m not sure that little old ladies should be expected to give up their seat on some mode of transportation, so an active duty personnel can have a seat, where is the balance?. I greatly appreciate our military and armed forces, but less not forget that they made a conscious choice to serve, they took an oath sworn to uphold the constitution against the enemies, both foreign and domestic. I would dare say that probably very few service minded people joined, for the sole purpose of outward gratitude, but yes it is nice to be appreciated. Example number two, I mentioned shame, and while it comes with negative connotations, it came with and did serve a purpose, much like when fear kicks in and you have that whole fight or flight thing going on. Once upon a time it was a deep shame to have a child out of wedlock, or to be a convicted felon, along with other things that were seen as being detractors from the society. People have judge others with very little sympathy as to how sometimes life just doesn’t always go according to plan, and yes sometimes due to our own poor choices. In times gone by, people were made to feel less than, simply because they had made a mistake or two, which came with public ridicule, after all, it’s a little hard to hide a pregnancy. However we are a one eighty from both of those situations and with some congressional leaders cheering to restore voting rights and to espionage criminal records, it’s almost as if it never happened. We live in a prosperous society, so if you haven’t found the right guy or partner, often women are choosing to go it alone and be single moms, after all that clock is ticking☺️☺️. We are currently living in a culture much like the wild, wild west and everything and anything goes and is considered to be cool, and I dare anyone to object to it, because I have a six shooter hanging from my side. In stead of lead bullets, we carry something much more dangerous and lethal, and almost everyone has one, it’s a tongue full of venom, and prepared to take down anyone who looks at us sideways. If we can’t take on and debate ideas, we can result to screams of rage, and intense rants against someone’s character and my personal favorite….name calling. Sadly, social media has made all of these popular choices behind a curtain of anonymity . One thing that has constantly perplexed me is why do we hang on to the negative comments and the positive ones for the most part go as insignificant or seen without merit. After all we are here to discuss ” lip service ” . I want to somehow categorize this topic into a high , low, and perhaps a medium, but they are rarely in the middle, because words usually mean something to someone, even when they are without weight or meaning. We have previously covered the whole sticks and stones thing, but we know that words hurt and can be very cutting. The substantial part of this is that one side of the equation is trusting that those words offer validity and carry meaning with them, so let’s jump in. So, let’s just say for fun on the low end, you yell upstairs to your offspring and ask them if they brushed thier teeth before bed. They may have told you a fib, and while it may further lead up to bigger fibs, or possible other poor hygiene habits, for the most part, that is unlikely, because that dentist drill down the road, will usually insure that they will straighten up and fly right☺️☺️. On the high end, let’s just say that we enter into some kind of peace treaty or agreement with another nation over nuclear arms, yet for the most part, it has no means of verification, then this too is lip service, on a very high level and the possible repercussions, and ramifications speak for themselves. Now, let’s just go a little deeper, where some may see this as a middle tear kind, or form of lip service, I do not agree with that estimation. Have you ever had someone tell you that they love you, or that they will always love you? If you have, and they do, then that is truly awesome that you found someone who would put your needs and concerns before their own. We want to address those on the other end of the continuum. Sadly there are people who utter those words from their lips and nothing could be further from the truth. Have you ever had the Sting of deception to make you wonder if they even know what it means to love anyone other than themselves? I get that sometimes romantic love has blinders on, or perhaps you are one of those people who choose to seek out or see the best in all people, situations and circumstances. Regardless of the story , there are people on the planet that are not truly capable of caring for anyone other than themselves, and some people characterize them as narcissists, usually men, but they are not exclusive to the club. There are usually tell tale signs of there lack of sincerity. Perhaps they would rather watch their favorite show, opposed to spending time with you. It could be a football game on the DVR, that they want to watch before someone at work spoils it for them, or it could be the Bachelor or Dancing with the Stars. They may have secrets hidden on their phone, or just never learned how to share beyond a superficial level of looks, money and possessions. Have you ever been the donkey with the carrot out in front of you? They may lure you in with dreams of a possible relocation, because they want to escape the winter cold, yet they could never leave the security of what they have known their whole life, just not brave enough or caring enough. They may allow you to spoil them and they may make promises of reciprocating, but I wouldn’t suggest that you hold your breath there, something else that they believe that they are better at ,than they actually are. Lip service is not limited to words, but also shows up in people’s actions. Sometimes people can be so bad at maintaining a relationship, that it’s almost like they are saying how many other ways can I say that I just don’t care. I believe these individuals can take shallow to a new low. In today’s culture its almost a lost art form of people saying what they mean and to mean what they say . There is just so much to decipher about people’s true intentions. There is hope, and it’s almost like a silver bullet or an antidote of sorts. I culture has become inordinate with the white lie syndrome. Why is it so much more exceptable to tell a lie opposed to the truth. Just tell the freakin truth!. We lie to one another at such a rate and with such ease, that I suspect that on some level, when we deceive others, that we are branding it as” our truth”. You mean that you didn’t think that it was wrong to use your friends Netflix account, or when the cop pulls you over for speeding and he asks you if you knew why he pulled you over or how fast you were going, and you say that you have no idea. Perhaps it’s when your boss asks you about an email that he sent you about some task that you weren’t really feeling, so you tell them that you never received it. Then there is always the instance of trying to return something to a store, pass the deadline of the return policy, and you tell them that you were unaware of any such policy, when you have been shopping there for years and all the way over on the drive, you are telling yourself, I hope they take this back, fully aware of the deadline being violated. We sometimes wonder where our kids learn some of the tools about being dishonest, and haven’t they been watching us the whole time?. I think that we think to ourselves, what’s the harm? Why are we surprised when our child is caught cheating on a test at school, when we have taught them from an early age about deception , or do you not remember the look on their innocent little faces when they first found out that there was no Santa Claus?. Whatever happened to just ripping the band aid off? Yes, there are often painful insights that accompany the truth, but think about the disastrous ramifications of it being delayed for some unspecified amount of time. This is true, if it’s some pain, that you received as a child at the hands of a parent and you never felt comfortable discussing or confronting them about. It’s also true if we have an employee performing at a subpar level , and we allow this to go on for sometime before it’s addressed, it can leave them dazed and confused. And never is it more true than in a relationship, when one partner has checked out, without informing the other. Talk about the ultimate betrayal and lip service to the fullest. I remember when my daughter was small and had just started first grade. At the time they were teaching sight reading over the well proven course of phonics. We were working with her on reading and she had a certain book that she had not mastered. She excitedly jump off the bus one day and came home with a new book, with a slightly increased needed level of understanding. We were a little concerned, and when we addressed it with the teacher, she said that she didn’t want her to feel bad that the other kids had moved on, while she was in the same previous reader. OMG!, how devastating that could have been for my daughter down the road to have her self esteem to rule over her learning, and never discount home schooling ☺️☺️☺️.We wonder how certain children make it all the way through school without picking up the necessary skills to be successful in life. While this may be isolated or an uncommon illustration of lip service, I believe that it completely demonstrates the point about what happens when we aren’t truthful and forth right with the truth, and in that story, the truth is that she wasn’t ready to move ahead. We live in a post modern society, where a lot of people believe that truth is relative which means what is true for me, may not be someone’s else’s truth. This can be absolutely correct if we are discussing something that is subjective, such as what color compliments some one’s eyes, and it’s completely different if we are discussing something objective, such as a simple math equation. No matter how much some one else’s truth of two plus two equal three, or five, or any other number other than four, is completely false. We have so dumbed down our culture for the sake of inclusion and diversity, that we want to and are expected to believe that all things are to be respected, seen as relevant and counted as having some kind of value. This is a slippery slope, because all things in life are not equal and we do a disservice to pretend that they are, when in our heart of hearts we know that they are not. This is more of the everyone gets a trophy thing and it has the same potential for destruction and mayhem, as my daughter moving ahead for a book that she was not prepared for. Again, we think what’s the harm, maybe in the short term, very little, but over an extended period of time extremely devastating. I remember when I was a sophomore in high school in an AP class and we did this exercise, where we all stood up and one person was told something by the teacher in a whisper, and they were supposed to pass it on to the next and so on. You know the drill, by the time it had gotten all around the room, it vaguely had any of the teachers original thoughts left to it. Sure, you can maybe chalk it up to teenagers wanting to be funny, but the lesson is still there, the further we get from the truth, the harder it is to recognize, or to go back to. It can be somewhat eerie , when we take the above math equation and make it about moral relativity, we find ourselves in the middle of the ocean without a life preserver , while being surrounded by sharks. You may be thinking, how so? If a person or a culture’s morality is based on what they think is right, there is no foundation there and it is always subject to change, depending on which way the cultural winds are blowing. So, if my morality says that it is wrong to take someone else’s life and the other person says that their morality is OK with that, then we have a dilemma. You say how ludicrous, is it really? . Let’s take the position that I have the right to do whatever I want with my body, do you really? Do have the right to take your body, put a knife in your hand and shove it into someone’s else’s body? I think not so much! Well you may think that is splitting hairs of sort, but we should, and must be able to extrapolate these things out into the future. Think about how far we have come, not just since turn of the century, but even in just the last decade. I’m not going to take the time to point out all of the things that we have just silently gone along with. We are in a culture war, and many are thinking just keep your head down and it will just blow over. When the dust settles if it ever does it will be something unrecognizable to you. It would be the same as if you brought one of the founding fathers into the present time, completely unrecognizable. The difference here is, this all actually took place on our watch and we were to cowardly to engage in the culture. How did we get here?, oh yeah, lip service, we were to busy in our own little corner of the world with our own little deceptions, be it at work, our family’s,, social settings and yes in our personal relationship with our significant others. It’s not rocket science, just tell the truth. If it hurts someone’s feelings, it’s.better to do it up front , than to let it be a slow and painful death. And I want you guys to always to be mindful to say hard things covered in love, not in deception. Before you go blazing off with your new found freedom to tell it like it is, first take a serious pause and ask yourself if what you are about to share, is it true? Is it necessary? And does it posse the ability to make things better or offer some improvement to the cause?. Remember to say it in love and with compassion, whenever possible.
- Till next time ✌️ peace !
- Sandy The Southerner
- Reply
- ,
- Reply All
- or
- Forward
Thank you.Got it.Cool.Send
