Yay!

While looking through my boyhood diary, now over sixty years old, I kept coming across a word you don’t hear much any more: The word, “Yay.” It was an expression of enthusiastic approval, for example, “School is out for summer. Yay!”

I suppose we don’t hear it much any more because cancel-culture includes little approval, which seems odd because its proponents flatter themselves with their so-called “inclusiveness”. It gets confusing. For example, they approve of disapproval. Finally you have to disapprove of their approval, just to stay sane. In any case, few people say “Yay” about each other, anymore.

This is quite the opposite of the love and understanding that permeated the atmosphere of the Summer of Love in 1969. Rather than disapproval there was the active appreciation of differences.

The opposite of active appreciation and acceptance is the sort of lock-down mentality we’ve been dealing with in the strange war we are midst. Because war is hell, we to some degree must resort to the very thing we disapprove of, when disapproving of disapproval, however it helps to simply get quiet, from time to time, and to recall things that require no arguments. Some things are true simply because they are. For example, gravity requires no arguments to work, at least until you learn how to levitate.

One thing the strange war has involved is an incredible shortage of workers, which has had me working full time at age seventy. Then, to my joy, colleges let out for the summer, and a couple of former interns returned wanting summer jobs. So this morning I got to sit and sip my coffee, and think of things that are true simply because they are. Yay!

I am thankful for a morning without
The urgent, the rush, the shove of the self
to push gutsy, and instead to just flout
The slave-drivers. Like a book on a shelf
I'll stay unread; remain unmanifested
With my Maker. His goodness and mercy's
In all and beyond all, and yet it's said
None can see. Why not? None sees the breeze
But all feel its fingers pass through their hair.
I'll sit and hear what silence has to say.
The heart is fuller when without a care
Yet strangely empty when caring. The way
To fullness, when your sad spirit's sunk,
Is to open your heart and clear out the junk.

YOU CANNOT CANCEL TRUTH

The entire “cancel culture” sidetrack society has slumped into is dismaying to me, for it is the exact opposite of the “Everyone Is Beautiful” optimism prevalent during the heady “Summer of Love” in 1969.

It has been a long and in some ways losing battle, and the young and hopeful Ray Stevens in the above video now is reduced to a wry old man singing, “When Bubba Changed His Name To Charlene”.

Of course, the repressiveness of “cancel culture” flies in the face of the wish to “come out of the closet.” Confession is good for the soul, but repression is not.

After more than a half century of this quibbling, (which in some ways reminds me of when I smoked cigarettes, and would alternate between gratifying my desire and repressing my desire, never quitting the desire itself), I have woken to a delightful conclusion:

Truth remains true, whether it is repressed or not. Truth cannot be canceled. To attempt to do so is an exercise in futility.

The beauty is always there, and cannot be killed. It can’t be crucified, because it has the audacity to rise from the grave. The slaughter of the innocents cannot stop it. In the darkest night it rises like a morning star.

Once you understand this, the prime frustration is due to the failure to share. One attempts to share, but gets a rejection slip. One gets cancelled. This may hurt our feelings, but it is not Truth that gets cancelled. What gets cancelled is the other person’s vision; there is none so blind as one who will not see.

The person doing the cancelling is the pitiable loser. The rejected person speaking Truth in fact loses nothing for, in the end, the Truth they stood by is with them, very beautifully.