******* STARS *******

Sometimes we know when they arrive.

We watch them grow; we see them thrive

The blossoms they produce give joy.

Sometimes their private lives annoy.

We watch them mellow then mature.

For passing Time there is no cure.

We hate to see them start to fade,

Begin to dim, move towards the Shade.

As we grow old, we can look back,

Review their lives as ours grow slack.

We lose our grip, as they lose theirs,

Yet of us they’re caught unawares.

It doesn’t matter that the Affection

Moves from us in one direction.

What they have given us will last

After their own brief lives have passed.

For they gave meaning to our lives

Through losing husbands, changing wives,

Raising children, our careers

Without them might conclude in tears.

But at their best the Empathy

They evoked helped us to see

The Laughter they put on Display

Gave us Perspective, showed a way

To see less egotistically

To think far less derisively

To act with more Compassion

Our point of view refashion

To lighten Burdens, keep on smiling,

Know Good Humor is beguiling.

The worst things have a funny side

Knowing that, the sunny side

Of life is reached more easily

When we behave less sleazily,

Shun the lazy, cheap and foolish,

Wasteful, hateful, weird, and ghoulish.

We owe these Special People much

They’ve taught, enriched, filled Gaps. They touch

Our Hearts long after they have passed.

What they gsve us we know will last.

Performance Art transcends the faults

Performers lives have as they waltz

Above to Music of the Spheres

Where Uplift cheers,  and then endears.

And so though Stars, like us, may fade

Flicker, dim, move  toward the Shade

Their Light will last with Certitude

If we love Them with Gratitude.

~ FreeThinke

NOTICE:

WE DO NOT ACCEPT BOILERPLATE, PARTISAN DIATRIBES, PERSONAL CRITICISMS, SCOLDINGS, BLOG GOSSIP or REMARKS THAT MAKE NO ATTEMPT TO RELATE TO THE SUBSTANCE OF THE MATERIAL POSTED. 

NO EXCEPTIONS. PERIOD!

TRY TO REMEMBER

Black and White TV        

(Under age 60? You won't understand.)

You could hardly see 
for all the snow.

Spread the rabbit ears 
as far as they can go.

'Good Night, David.     

Good Night, Chet.'

Chet Huntley and David Brinkley

My Mom used to cut chicken, chop eggs and spread mayo on the same cutting board with the same knife and no bleach, but we didn't seem to get food poisoning.

My Mom used to defrost hamburger on the counter and I used to eat it raw sometimes, too. Our school sandwiches were wrapped in wax paper in a brown paper bag, not in ice pack coolers, but I can't remember getting e.coli.

Almost all of us would

Have rather gone swimming in the lake instead of a pristine pool (talk about boring!), no beach closures then.

The term cell phone would have conjured up a phone in a jail cell, and a pager was the school PA system.

  We all took gym, not PE... and risked permanent injury with a pair of high top Ked's (only worn in gym) instead of having cross-training athletic shoes with air cushion soles and built in light reflectors.  I don't remember getting seriously injured, buI must have because they tell us how much safer we are now.

Flunking gym was not  an option... Even for stupid kids! I guess PE must be much harder than gym.

Speaking of school, we all said prayers and sang the national anthem, and staying in detention after school caught all sorts of negative attention.

       We must have had horribly damaged psyches. What an archaic health system we had then. Remember school nurses?  Ours wore a white cap and everything.

I thought that I was supposed to accomplish something before I was allowed to be proud of myself.

I just can't recall how bored we must have been without computers, Play Station, Nintendo, X-box, 270 digital TV cable stations and SmartPhones.

         

Oh yeah... And where was the Benadryl and sterilization kit when I got that bee sting? I could 
have been killed!

We played 'king of the hill' on piles of gravel left on vacant construction sites, and when we got hurt, Mom pulled out the 48-cent bottle of mercurochrome (kids liked it better because it didn't sting like iodine did) and then we got our butt spanked. 

         

Now it's a trip to the emergency room, followed by a 10-day dose of a $99 bottle of antibiotics, and then Mom calls the attorney to sue the contractor for leaving a horribly vicious pile of gravel where 
it was such a threat. 
         

We didn't act up at the neighbor's house either; because if we did we got our butt spanked there and then we got our butt spanked again when we got home.
         

I recall Danny Winfield from next door coming over and doing his tricks on the front stoop and falling off unto bushes Little did his Mom know that she could 

have owned our house! Instead, she picked him up and swatted him for being such a jerk. 

Ours was a neighborhood run amok!

         

To top it off, not a single person I knew had ever been told that they were from a dysfunctional family.

How could we possibly have  known that we needed to get into Group Therapy and Anger Management classes?

We were obviously so ignorant about societal ills, that we didn't even notice that the entire country 
ought to be taking Prozac!

However Did We Survive?

LOVE TO ALL OF US WHO SHARED THIS ERA; AND TO ALL WHO DIDN'T, WE'RE SORRY FOR WHAT YOU MISSED. I WOULDN'T TRADE IT FOR ANYTHING!

It’s good to emember that life's simplest pleasures are very often the best.

A CARTOON MAY BE WORTH 

TWO-THOUSAND WORDS

CURRENTLY #1 on the ASS PARADE

BUT FOR HOW LONG?

~ § ~

NOTICE:

WE DO NOT ACCEPT BOILERPLATE, PARTISAN DIATRIBES, PERSONAL CRITICISMS, SCOLDINGS, BLOG GOSSIP or REMARKS THAT MAKE NO ATTEMPT TO RELATE TO THE SUBSTANCE OF THE MATERIAL POSTED. 

NO EXCEPTIONS. PERIOD!

WHY OUR COUNTRY'S DEMISE 

IS IMMINENT

She has no tits.

She has no ass.

Our biggest curse?

She's bold as brass,

But far far worse

SHE HAS NO CLASS,

And BRAYS just like

A DUMB JACKASS!

It’s the 

BELLIGERENCE 

and

CRUELTY, 

Stupid!

Heretics about to be burned at the stake

Recent discussions on the subject of biblical infallibility and how it relates to the punishment of sin and homosexuality in particular have prompted this article, which hopes to further examine the subject from an historical as well as a humanistic perspective. 

The accompanying illustrations tell a story all their own requiring little textual amplification.

Two male lovers at rest

I do not believe the Scriptures are infallible and meant to be taken literally any more than I  believe the Church has been right in its blanket condemnation of homosexuality. The sheer viciousness, arrogance and barbarism of the Old Testament, the dour, pessimistic, anti-human Augustinian view of Christian doctrine, the grim, joyless life-denying aspects of Calvinism, and the smug, purse-lipped, puritanical prating of modern Evangelicals and Fundamentalists have done incalculable harm to untold millions of lives by fostering the kind of self-righteousness that leads to mutual suspicion, resentment, antagonism, official persecution, and the kind of virulent hatred that has often led to violence against those perceived to hold attitudes or engage in behavior proscribed and haughtily condemned by a few verses in the Bible.

Impalement graphically depicted

Having said that I agree that The Church –– and all the rest of us –– have an inherent right to be wrong -- in each other's eyes.

However, once upon a time –– and not so very long ago –– I would not have been able to issue a statement such as the one made above, which clearly implies that the Bible is ANYTHING BUT infallible and still expect to see the sun rise on another day.

Sawing sinners in half

There is nothing more evil than SELF-RIGHTEOUSNESS, which is really nothing more than a pseudo-respectable venue for venting hatred, advocating intolerance and giving an official stamp of approval to Sadistic cruelty. 

The Pear of Anguish was inserted into the anus of sodomites, the vagina of
adulteresses, and the mouths of heretics. It was capable of expanding to make
use of sharp knives contained inside designed to mutilate the body cavities of
offenders causing excruciating pain usually followed by infection and death.

The Catherine Wheel. Sinners were stretched over the spokes and
 tied down, then their limbs were systematically smashed by clubs
or hammers held by their torturers and executioners

Not even murder is worse, because an assumption of righteousness used as a motive for condemnation of things not properly one's business is a mask for the kind of conceit and overweening pride that too often leads to the most dangerous form of GroupThink –– the Lynch Mob mentality.

The Judas cradle

Sodomites and adulteresses were impaled on this device,
and then systematically tortured until death
mercifully spared them further agony

hose who oppose The Church on this issue are probably right, but that doesn't mean that they have any more right to express their views arrogantly, haughtily and with the kind of aggression that tends to foster violence than vain, puffed up, fired up Evangelicals or those Roman Catholics who not-so-secretly long for a reprise of The Inquisition.

It's the BELLIGERENCE, stupid! The  sadistic, brutal, sheer barbaric viciousness of perverted concepts of "righteousness," apparently sanctioned by the Bible, that ought to sicken us.

We've come a long way since we burned "heretics" at the Stake, and for that we should only be humbly grateful to Almighty God, who has slowly-but-surely led us out of the darkness of primitive savagery, pagan barbarism and the tragic, Mediaeval misunderstanding of Christ's Word into the Enlightenment and hopefully –– someday –– far beyond.

The Coffin Cage where sinners were horribly kept alive
for days on end while their bodies were slowly chewed
by hungry rats or pecked at random by wild birds
and insects while the cage was suspended high above
the ground outside the city gates.

Anyone who does NOT want to see a world where EVERYONE may be loved and enjoyed for who they are is PERVERTED in my never humble opinion.

The Breast Ripper designed to mutilate and tear off
the breasts of women  deemed to be witches
or adulteresses. Sometimes the women were chained
to similar devices affixed to a wall and then roughly
pulled away leaving their breasts behind.

God works in mysterious ways. He cares nothing for manmade Doctrine and Dogma –– the faulty perceptions of ignorant individuals whose motives may be highly suspect. He wants only for us to love one another and live in peace and harmony. 

Who knows? –– the admitted obnoxiousness of the Gay Rights Movement, which is really holding up a MIRROR to the twisted, mocking, hate-filled Face of the "Ignoscenti," may be a necessary step on the road to Social Salvation.

The hatred, scorn and mockery you see coming from the Gay Community today is nothing more than a REFLECTION of the abuse stated and implied they have had to endure from the Majority for countless centuries.

The REAL tragedy is the way Marxists have managed to MANIPULATE these ugly dynamics to further the ends of Cultural Marxism, the most ungodly ethos of them all. 

Ironically, obdurate religious zealots –– and the dear “Mrs. Grundys,” “Old Wet Hens,” and “Ladies Who Lynch” of this world –– have probably done more to deliver us into the hands of the Communists than all the “Greedy Capitalist Pigs” on Wall Street combined. 

If this image offends you as much or more than the other illustrations
accompanying this article, you must be the victim of a tragic mental disorder.

~ FreeThinke