Blog Humor, Inhibitions and Paying Attention

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Humor diffuses potentially awkward moments and anger. Humor lightens up lives and can make us forget sadness and other negative emotions for a time. Laughter is often a healthy release. However, humor can also be used in hateful and negative ways.

Bullies use derogatory humor to cut someone they don’t like down emotionally. Cruel humor can leave scars that last a lifetime. This includes parents, teachers, or others who constantly call someone stupid, fat, slow, or any number of hurtful terms. The big deal today is to call anyone whose opinion you don’t like a racist—usually totally untrue.

Humor has an even more insidious result. Humor is used to lower our inhibitions, getting us to accept things that would otherwise horrify us. But if a situation can be put in a humorous context, we laugh, not realizing we are no longer seeing a situation for what it really is.

One TV series, using humor, has an 8-year-old boy seeing through an alien’s disguise. The alien seeks to murder this child and, though the child is saved, the humor context focuses on the humor not the horror of a main character seeking to murder a child.

What about comedians who make fun of their wives or husbands, make a joke about the overweight, Christians or other groups of people? Such humor tears down instead of lifting up. God calls us to a higher standard. Let’s use discernment in the humor we allow in our lives—walking away from humor that really isn’t humor at all, a humor that becomes a tool of evil rather than good. Even more, let’s take care of our own, so-called humor, doesn’t hurt the very ones we profess to love.

© 2022 Carolyn R Scheidies

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Blog Politics Tolerance should always be in fashion

I almost don’t want to get on the Facebook pages of our representatives at any level of government. The vitriol is almost unreal. It is as though, for many Americans, tolerance and basic decency aren’t part of their thought processes or behavior.

For example, what many individuals say on Representative Adrian Smith’s public page should make them hang their heads in shame. Many express opinions with name-calling, accusations, and absolutely no tolerance for someone with another point of view.

This has been building for years as our culture of respect and tolerance has disintegrated. It became especially nasty with those whose hatred for President Trump became almost pathological. Didn’t help when certain Representatives and Senators egged this on by encouraging the public to get in the faces of those in the Trump administration to the point some were accosted on the streets or run out of restaurants.

Have Americans become little more than an angry mob with no sense of looking for facts beyond rumors before reacting? This goes for too many media outlets that spread little more than innuendoes and half-baked assumptions instead of fact-based news.

Such behavior certainly does not speak well for us as citizens. Liking or disliking a president should not lead to such hatred. Even though I really saw Obama and now Bidden as destroying our Constitutional Republic, I refuse to hate them.

I may seek to change things, but never with name-calling, threats, or the spewing I see and read constantly now—behavior that is anything but tolerant. Such behavior changes nothing.

Want to make a difference? Get involved and make changes in a positive way. One way is to get involved with the candidates you like. Another way is to communicate with those who’ve been elected.

But there is a right and a wrong way to do so. It starts with letting go of irrational fury which freezes rational thought.

I have written articles, shared at conferences, and included in my book “Especially For the Christian Writer” how to communicate in a way to be “heard”—in a way others won’t turn you off. This includes letters to businesses, government representatives, and letters to the editor.

If you wish to be taken seriously, make sure you have the facts, let go of the anger that stops rational thinking, and write with passion, but with respect, without name-calling, intimidation, or nastiness. Why should anyone listen to an angry rant that is full of emotion but devoid of facts?

Consider how you want to be approached or treated. Think tolerance. In other words, communicate with respect for the office if not for the other person. If you would not spew garbage to the person face-to-face, then it is certainly not appropriate in print where everyone sees you at your irrational worst.

Ask. What do you really wish to convey? What is the best way to do that in order to be taken seriously? How will I feel about this rant five, ten, and more years down the road? Is this what I wish to teach my kids?

Respect and thoughtfulness will get you much further than spewing anger. Wish to communicate? Calm down, think beyond your anger, and consider long-term consequences. Then communicate in a way to gain a listening ear.

Remember tolerance should always be in fashion.

© 2021 Carolyn R Scheidies
My column published in the Kearney Hub 4/26/2021
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Blog Winning friends, influencing people and respect

We live in a culture that has lost one of the strengths of America. That used to be the right to the free exchange of ideas. We listened to ideas different from our own and we learned from one another, even if we basically held the same opinion as before.

Today we live in a culture that spends way too much looking for, finding, even manufacturing reasons to be offended. We’ve made name-calling a first response along with anger that almost automatically engenders a negative response.

This desire to hurt others who offend us all too often and without provocation, uses the race card, physical harm, or trashing someone’s reputation or job simply because a person might say or write something not fitting the current politically correct fad.

People from all walks of life are losing jobs and suffering insults because of something that surfaces. Whether true or not, one person may pick up on one aspect of something communicated, chooses to be offended and targets the person through the media. They gathers others to the cause until employers are intimidated and a person, who might be perfectly innocent or who stated something awkwardly, loses a job that may well support a family. This has a name—bullying. Too many in our society have become bullies. Are you one?

Why do we think we need to trash a person personally simply because we don’t like what they said or wrote? Everyone is entitled to their opinion. Also, on many issues, there are often more than one legitimate side, backed up by “experts.”

Whatever happened to self-control, reading without blowing a gasket and considering another side—without anger and without the desire to lash out?

Those who really wish to change someone’s perspective need to realize response matters. No matter how “off the wall” you may think someone might be, that person is a human of worth. That person probably has family and friends who care and may well respond in kind on behalf of a family member or friend who gets trashed in public forums.

Think before you write something in anger. Consider where you might be in agreement and start with those points of agreement. This gives you a more neutral platform to state, respectfully, your reasons for disagreeing.

Maybe when you read or listen without rage you might gain a different perspective of what was communicated. Maybe you will realize no harm or disrespect was meant. Maybe you’ll discover things that may need more research—and not just from one point of view.

When you respond without rage fueling the response, you are more likely to reach an audience who will consider your point of view instead of turning off your reasoning because of the way it was presented. We live in a culture that nourishes anger and hurts and, in doing so, creates circles of hurt and wounded.

How much better to treat one another, especially those with whom we disagree, with respect and learn to think first and respond rationally and without anger.

Romans 12:21 says it best, “Do not be overcome by evil. But overcome evil with good.”

Extending and accepting forgiveness never goes out of style. Who knows where respectful dialogues will lead.

© 2020 Carolyn R Scheidies
Published in Kearney Hub 8/17/20 as “Winning friends with respectful dialogue”
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