High Steaks - Slack Tide by Matt Labash - 0 views
mattlabash.substack.com/...high-steaks
rage inner life peace self-control dysfunction psychology culture crisis
shared by Javier E on 04 Feb 22
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In the whole Bible there are perhaps no words that everybody everywhere can identify with more fully than the ones St. Paul wrote to the Roman church: “I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.” …..That is as rich a summation as any I know of the inner battle that we are all involved in. Which is the battle to break free from all the camouflaged and not so camouflaged hostilities that we half deplore, even as we engage in them.
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These are the wars that go on within families, within marriages, the wars we wage with each other sometimes openly, but more often, so hiddenly. That even in the thick of them we are hardly aware of what we are doing
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Sniping and skirmishing, defensive maneuvers, naked aggressions, and guerilla subversions are part of the lives of all of us.….If only we could see that the people we are one way or another at war with are, more often than not, less to blame for the bad blood between us than we are.
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Because, again, more often than not, the very faults we find so unbearable in them are apt to be versions of the same faults that we are more or less blind to in our ourselves.
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On this day, my text luckily came from the great Frederick Buechner, the Presbyterian minister, highly-decorated writer, and theologian. I’ll let some of his words play us out. They might seem a bit preachy. But that’s to be expected, since they come from a book called Secrets In the Dark: A Life in Sermons.
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some shit arrived in the mail. Not figuratively. A literal bag of shit, postmarked with a return P.O Box, but which came by way of an anonymous sender. My wife asked who would send such a thing to me. It’s hard to say – the suspect list is a mile long. Irate subjects? Irate readers? My mom?
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Forty-two percent of those survey respondents reported they themselves were angrier in the last year than they had been in the past
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a 2019 NPR-IBM Watson Health poll found that a whopping 84 percent of survey respondents said Americans are angrier today than they were a generation ago. (The other sixteen percent were presumably too angry to stay on the phone.)
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According to The 19th, an Austin-based nonprofit news organization, in 2020, the Federal Aviation Administration initiated 183 investigations of unruly passenger behavior, well above average, even for a COVID year in which air travel was significantly diminished. By November of 2021, that number had increased to 990 investigations, after reports of 5,240 unruly incidents