There’s something to be said for passion. I used to say that a lot. Mostly when Brady was three years old and I would be out in the front yard, talking with a neighbor. He would stop his playing and run up at me full force to hug me around the legs, nearly knocking me over! That was a passionate boy. He’s still that way. I had to stop the running-at-me-to-hug-me thing (since I knew he was bound to be over six feet tall), but he does it with his girlfriend (who is about five foot one and weighs about 97 pounds, soaking wet). She can take it, though. She’s a tough cookie. When their baby, Lexi, was born a month premature, the nurses would have her under the warm light and be beating her back with a little rubber pad to make sure her lungs were working. I would watch them doing this seemingly harsh thing to that baby who weighed just over four and half pounds and think, “Well, I guess it’s making her strong. Just like a baby giraffe.” Kick-kick-kick. “Get up! Get up and run! Before the lions get you!”
Brady also used to be behind me in the car, in his car seat, when he was less than a year old. He would be drinking his bottle and when it was empty, he would just THROW it. Not at anything specific, he just threw it. But I developed the habit of cringing and covering my head protectively as soon as I heard that end-of-the-bottle sound. At one point, I realized this was INSANE! What was I doing? I was frightened of an infant?? I decided to teach him to control this impulse.
Now, what do we do with our passionate impulses? Did anyone teach us to control them? I think it’s great to feel strongly about the things we believe in. But it’s a double-edge sword. We feel passionately excited about the positive things, and we are really really really really pissed off about the negative things that happen with the things we love. The scale is all over the place.
Let’s talk about the holocaust. Yep. People should have been outraged and reacted strongly to that. There should have been such an outcry from humankind that the earth shook. I think just about everyone agrees with this. People were dying and it was wrong. But what about abortion? War? Global warming? Should we be marching about grabbing people by the shoulders and shaking them saying, “WHY aren’t you doing anything about this??” We could say people are dying. We could say people will be dying.
I previously posted a comment by a reader who stated that (yeah I know I said we were going to be done with this, but we’re not!) when Natalie Maines made her statement about the Prez, she brought about confusion in the world about our country and caused the deaths of Americans. What? Fuckin’ hell.
Abortion doctors have been killed in the name of God to save lives. People have been burned at the stake, in the name of God again, in order to save souls. Soldiers are dying daily, in the name of ~ oh probably God again ~ in order to preserve life and freedom. Sheryl Crow jabs and grabs important people, in the name of um… I dunno… (starts with a Go__ … Al Gore? Hehehe) in order to save the earth.
So anyway, misplaced passions. How do we know when ours are defined thus? Well we really never do. We only know when others have gone wrong with theirs. Our own, we treat very delicately because our own precious egos are wrapped in them.
