13,000 words, Chris? Seriously?

I suppose somebody had to do it.

Glad it wasn’t me.

I had a good go at it last night, and today. Haven’t finished. It’s kind of depressing and horrifying. But really no more than the rest of it all.

Here are some thoughts that popped up last night:

…

It’s the incredible egotism that bugs me, I think. The fact that clearly he and his cabal seriously believe that in 2000 years of saints and doctors, no one in the Church has ever thought, “Gee… maybe people just find it ‘very difficult to act differently’ and have ‘mitigating factors’ in their lives, so maybe we should just excuse sin now, instead of expecting repentance and change, instead of expecting people to do this difficult thing.”

Only now, only in our glorious Age-of-Aquarius enlightenment, have the tie-dyed ponytail crowd finally figured out that people just can’t be expected to do anything difficult. Progress! Those saints and doctors were saps, right? They should have known that people can’t be expected to “act differently.”

And perhaps the most galling and arrogant assumption of all is that no one in the world is really capable of living the “difficult” moral life. The assumption that we’re all flaccid, overfed halfwits who can’t lift a finger to even try.

Change? Repent? Turn over a new leaf? Convert? No no! I’m OK; You’re OK. Take it easy on yourself! God loves you just the way you are. I’ll support you whatever decision you make.

But this isn’t love. This is, in fact, hatred and contempt. Or, perhaps even worse, indifference. The children of narcissists will understand this. There is in hatred, at least, a kind of interest. But the narcissistic parent simply does not see the child. The child is of no more moment than any other object or tool. Everything in the narcissists’s world is the same, all things to be used. The narcissistic parent simply does not care because he does not really believe in the child’s existence.

If your six year old tells you that from now on, he doesn’t want to eat vegetables but wants to subsist only on chocolate, what do you do? I know there are parents who don’t care. Who think, what the heck, the kid’s going to be difficult if I don’t give him everything he wants, and who needs difficult?

In the olden days of three weeks ago, we would notice that the kiddies were dirty and malnourished, and maybe send Grandma over to see what was going on. But no no! The kiddies have to have everything their own way, because … because… of some stupid hippie bullshit that I thought had mercifully started to die. At least in the Church.

But the kids are in fact starving and filthy, and they’re moral monsters who care about nothing but their short-term comfort and pleasures. And the churchmen are shrugging.

What is the pope’s message here?

That people are really just not worth the bother of saving. Not to themselves, or to the churchmen currently in charge.

“Difficult”? Feh. Who needs that?

The thinking behind this is not only negligent and destructive, but stinks, fairly reeks of the 70s. Hey, grownup Gen-Xers! Remember? Remember what the stupid hippie adults were like with their kids? Remember what little monsters they were breeding beause they thought it was bad to ever utter the word “no,” or to expect them to behave? Remember the ruling principle? “They have to be free to express their feelings.” Oh yeah, I bet you do. Quite a few of us were on the receiving end of those freely expressed feelings.

With an adult’s perspective, I understand now that it was one of the things that made me perpetually angry with the adults in my life when I was a kid in the 70s. Not only did none of them ever take any kind of responsibility for me or their own kids, they never imagined that anyone was capable of putting in a little effort, of rising to a challenge.

My grandparents helped to build a whole town in the deep wilds of British Columbia in the 1920s. In the 60s, when they were starting to get elderly themselves, they built their own house on the side of a cliff above the sea. And when they were done, they took a look as the two inches of topsoil on their property and said, “Welp, if we’re going to have a garden, and make this place a little miniature English country paradise, we better get to work.”

The saddest thing about this pope and all the people in the world whose minds were poisoned by that ideology of the 70s, is that it produces nothing good. You don’t get pioneers bravely facing down difficulty to build something lasting where there was nothing but trees and rocks before. You don’t get magnificent engineering projects like tunnels under the Alps. You don’t get advances in science or medicine. And you don’t get saints.

The message here from the pope, which leaves me nauseated, disgusted and dispirited, is, “Doing difficult things is obviously too hard for you. Why don’t you just give up?”

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