“Christianity might be a good thing if anyone ever tried it.”
Do you believe this quote? I am not sure if I do or not. Sometimes I look at the church and it’s a dismal failure in every way imaginable. Then I look at that same church and I see action that proves it is living out the creed.
I guess that is the sad reality of Christianity (and most religions if one is honest). We have ideals and we want to live up to them but we like talking about them more than we like taking the action necessary to make them real in our lives.
When you refuse to learn or understand, when you revel in your prejudice, and when you don’t have critical thinking skills to discern the difference between facts and propaganda then you become victim to demagogues who are only interested in their own ego and don’t care about you, America or any ideals America stands for.
Four years ago a Korean woman, Jessica, contacted me and asked if she could use a napkin drawing of mine in a book her team was writing in Korea. I said yes and quickly forgot all about it. I don’t remember now if she paid me or not.
Fast forward 4 years and I get a call from some foreign country on my cell phone. I am not going to answer it, thinking it is likely a scam call. A few weeks later I get an email, that I almost throw away since it too seems to be just another foreign spam email.
Something about it seems legit though so I read it. It’s from Jessica and she says the book is now ready and she wants to send me a copy. She wants me to call her. At this point I figure it’s legit even though I don’t recall it at all. I call her and she reminds me a bit about our interaction and tells me that the book took a lot longer than expected to finish but now it is done and she wants to send me a copy. I was really looking forward to getting it since I had no idea what drawing I had even sent her!
And now, a few week later here is the book! It’s a book about the economies of 7 different countries around the world. It is dense with charts and figures. Every once in a while there is a photo that shows the location or the people in that country. And every once in a while there is a cartoon or drawing that is illustrating some idea they want to get across.
What my drawing is illustrating I would never have had a clue if it weren’t for the letter Jessica included in with the book.
Front CoverMy drawing – illustrating something about the Brazilian economy after it’s collapse earlier this decade.
So now I guess I can tell people I have been published in 3 different countries, right? (I already have napkin drawings in an entire book about napkins published in Norway.)
“Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar”, said Freud, or Marx (Groucho that is). If you say this quote you are also saying sometimes it’s not a cigar, it’s a symbol representing a penis. That is what complex looking is all about, seeing what is there and seeing what might be behind what is there; maybe an intent, a joke, or a hidden agenda.
For example, there is a hand gesture that I recently learned has not one, but two meanings. It’s your index finger touching your thumb to make a circle. It means everything is A-OK and until this year that is all I ever knew it to mean. But I’ve been told it also means white supremacy. I am not sure of the history behind it becoming a symbol of that but it is now something that can be interpreted to mean that, especially if it’s displayed upside down.
Sometimes it isn’t visual, it’s verbal. A politician says ‘Nationalism’ and it doesn’t JUST mean having pride in one’s country. It also means they want to preserve the existing power structure that they feel is threatened by outsiders. Which outsiders? Well, according to our current President, those outsiders are not Norwegians. They are Mexicans, South Americans, people from ‘shithole’ countries in Africa and Muslims from countries in the Middle East. They are the outsiders that are threatening our nation, not the good white people of Europe.
It behooves us to always LOOK clearly at what is going on underneath the obvious.
I drew it on the day we had to put one of our pets down. Since then I’ve seen innumerable posts on social media from friends and family who have had to do the same. They are among the saddest but most uplifting stories I read regularly on social media.
There is sometimes a eulogy, but it isn’t ever a recitation of the animals upbringing, education, career, status or volunteer efforts in retirement. Instead it’s about how the animal made the person feel. How much love they felt from the animal, how much sustenance they were given by its mere presence in their lives. In other words it was about their character and their love, not their achievements.
If only we humans could be more animal what a better jungle we would inhabit.
The quote is from a four year old trying to comfort a family after they had to put their pet down.
