Reflection for July 3, 2015

"For they sow the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind. The standing grain has no heads,
    it shall yield no meal; if it were to yield, foreigners would devour it."(Hosea 8:7)

Have you ever made what you thought was a harmless mistake?  Just got something wrong and someone calls you on it. Instead of admitting it and fixing the problem or just moving on to something else you have to keep justifying it and defending the decision and suddenly what probably was nothing spins out of control and grows bigger than it ever needed to be.

That for me this is like sowing the wind and reaping the whirlwind.  An example of this lately for me has been the defense of the Confederate Flag.  In its beginning it was just the symbol of the Confederate army.  An army that some of my ancestors fought for and by the way lost more than just a war, since they exchanged their money for Confederate currency.  But almost 150 years later this flag has become a whirlwind of bizarreness.  With the advent of the KKK it went from being about soldiers in a long ago ended war to a symbol linked with a terrorist organization.  And with racism being taken very seriously these days cries for it to be gone from public display have gotten louder.  And the flag should be gone.  The wildness of this whirlwind is the cancellation of showing reruns of a fairly unimportant and frankly not well written 70's TV show Dukes of Hazzard because one of the two things anyone remembers about the show, the car called the General Lee, has a Confederate Flag painted on its roof.  To watch the apoplexy of defense for this show is hysterical to me.  But it continues to keep the whirlwind going.  It begs the question why so many people many who have never lived in what was once the Confederacy and whose ancestors probably came to this country in the 20th century and for whom the KKK would have had not tolerance for either.

Sadly when a whirlwind gets going all kinds of things get blown away and a lot of hot air blows.  Maybe it is time to sow something a little more productive.

Blessings,
Ed