Monkey see, Monkey do... childhood truths...

  I am sure that sales all know that seeing something produces desires, even if you aren't directly selling a product... They have college courses on that idea. My monkey see, monkey do was my mother telling me that just because someone else did it didn't mean I had to do it... and then she told me how my grandfather had told my grandmother he didn't have to show her how to drive, she had been watching him for a few years already.

   The mind and vision link is amazing, and does make the transfer of knowledge or skills quicker than verbal pictures alone. But having taught a few things in my life, most of them critical survival skills, I learned early on "Do not ever show the wrong way to do anything"  The mind will always use what it saw, no matter how many words were used to say do not to do it that way...  Watching a governor say that our current culture has been corrupted by visual images in media and video games is only partially true. If your favorite actor never got to act again because he died in a motion picture, or if he was wounded and would ever after limp or was missing parts in following performances, the illusions about fighting and combat and death being painless and without cost would fade quickly. But your mind notices that he or she is alive and well next week or the next episode. Real mortality like real morality isn't very forgiving, but fantasy remains a fleeing truth forever.

   So we kill constantly on entertainment media, shooting guns out of hands and capturing the bad guys by smarts is so old Western fables, we want much more blood and lust. But the real people of the old west, would really shoot you if they thought they should. They had higher standards of polite conduct and social interaction. Y'all need to really study Mark Twain's works from his world. And doctors are giving us medications to cure our pains far beyond our ability to observe the patients constantly as their mind is bent, and the side effect lists and warnings become greater for the lawyers to profit from...  but the most troubling thing to me is the lack of faith among the many that really should know better. No God, no creator, no judge, no savior and no reason to be your best always... no reason not to grab all the little monkey sees and wants.

   Often asked recently, how did we go from so many more firearms fifty to sixty years ago, to fewer now and more school shootings. One TV show about schools and teachers had a teacher bringing a gun to school taking it out and threatening his students and then firing some blanks... I as a real student would have gotten up gone out of the classroom, to lodge a complaint and not worry about the rest of the day, I would have even gone outside and smoked a cigarette. But the writers wanted you to think the students would have been terrified of the gun - gosh, I was a much tougher kid than that, much. And I was more terrified of pretty girls and being thought of as weak.

   But I am almost sure I am going to be pounded for being so sure that God loves me, than accused of sexual misconduct or planning a bloody act of terror. Where did those strange values come from? And I won't make the evening news, I like shooting, guns and good people. I won't be news worthy...