Breaking Headlines, Vol. 1

Ignoramuses Politicize Supreme Court

Public dialogue across the United States in 2019 should trouble anyone with a soul, if not anyone with a brain. A unique type of ignorance shows up in a lot of commentary surrounding the U.S. Supreme Court. People often use everyday political terms, such as “conservative” and “liberal,” to rant about matters that concern legal interpretation and precedent. Commentators believe using these familiar code words will make their thoughts relevant, as the ultimate hope of most U.S. citizens with opinions about the Supreme Court is to avoid the work and time required to study legal theory and history.

Steph Curry Is Not the Greatest Shooter

Imagine you have this country-boy friend who claims his uncle is the greatest shooter of all time. This buddy says his father’s brother can draw a smiley face on a target using the bullets from his .22 semiautomatic pistol up to 50 yards away. This long-time childhood pal also shares that his favorite relative competed with other shooters. Now imagine you ask this good ole fella if his uncle ever won a national championship with one of his patented killer shots, and he answers, “No, they had these special rules where you could have someone shoot on your behalf in tough situations. He won a few championships, but the most important shots were made by the guys backing him up.”

Are Curry worshipers country bumpkins or something?

A Final Guess about Social Media

Social media is the worst thing to happen to mental health in my lifetime. Mental health is tied to how we see ourselves and the world. When we start to think that social media’s oversimplifications, generalizations, and advertising represent planet Earth, we suffer, because social media doesn’t involve true reality. It promotes addictive alternate realities, such as the Twitter reality or Facebook reality, that, on the whole, reflect the ramblings of neurotic, strung-out users. Social media encourages you to hate the world that it doesn’t represent, including yourself. Taking a break isn’t enough. That’s like saying, “I need a 30-day vacation from meth,” or “I’m going to lay off the gas huffing for a while,” or “I’m giving up rotting human flesh for Lent.” We should treat social media, and its creators, like we treat other menaces to society.

God Has High Standards

A monstrous challenge in Christianity — the type that seriously examines the life and teachings of Christ as opposed to what some person in a well-maintained modern building said — is to identify one’s place in society. Most U.S. Christians, unless I’m just listening to the wrong ones, seem to think you’re supposed to be a good U.S. citizen by worldly and banal standards. Yet the example of Christ and his disciples doesn’t remind me of stay-at-home families, smiling voters and their horrifically kiddish “I voted!” souvenirs, organized and funded rallies, hard-working contributors to the national GDP, audiences who keep up with current events, job-creating businessmen, lying politicians, lying media who lie about the lying politicians, employees who break out in song after another customer donates $10 to a cause they’ve never researched … obviously we all make the list in some form. (Some of you might even make the list in multiple forms — which, to quote many fellow Millennials, is totally ok. Just maybe not in God’s eyes without judgment.)