The Thrill of Being Offended

Dear Companions in Contempt:

The other day I was offended. No matter the context, I saw a billboard with an ad campaign poking fun at some group or another. Quickly juggling in my mind the intent of the offender as ignorant or outright hostile, I calculated both the content and the context of the group being lampooned, subjugated, dismissed. I counted myself among their number; I and people like me were the intended butt of the insult. Or was it a group I feel morally obligated to protect?

With lightning quick mental calculation, I recalled the history—and rekindled the memory—of how I have been coached to react. I remembered the dark days when I could have been a similar offender. I retraced my journey from ignorance to enlightenment, and smugly congratulated myself for my journey toward wisdom. I then lamented how the current state of politics, economics and religion was permitting overt yet subtle hate. I rhetorically wondered how long we would permit ourselves to flounder in this culture of debasement? My heart longed for a simpler time yet to come, where such reckless prose would no longer cloud our public sphere.

I envisioned the copy editor several months before, pulling the mocked-up billboard graphic on his screen (I instinctively knew it was a ‘he’), nudging his colleagues with a smirk, wondering if they would get away with it. I pictured the advertising client executives, all in on the joke, assuming the masses would be too ignorant to recognize the veiled hostility implicit in the campaign. Throughout the whole process from idea to massive roadside display, no one said “stop” and put an end to this social atrocity. I shook my head in disgust.

These rapid mental gymnastics gave me a feeling of smug enlightenment; a good workout always does. It granted me the luxury of abiding in the tents of the wise, the sensitive, the compassionate. As for those others, the wolves that tear at the very fiber of what is decent and true, I wished upon them their destruction, fancifully seeing the day when at the resolution of all things they would face weeping and gnashing of teeth, their just desserts for such willful ignorance.      
  
As I said, the particular offense is of little consequence. What happened next, however, was astounding. Confident in the calculation and somewhat exhausted by the burden of my social awareness, I realized I had misread the billboard. It wasn’t offensive at all; in fact, it was kind of cute.

Tracking outrage so you don’t have to, I remain,

With Love,
Jonathan Krogh
Your Pastor

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A Recipe for Reconciliation Has a Starting Point
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Dear Non-Conference Non-Attendees:

As you may know, a great deal of effort was put into planning and promoting a post-COVID conference scheduled for the second Saturday in March. Pre-registrations were underwhelming, so the week before the event I decided to cancel it. It’s bad form to have more breakout groups than attendees. I’m grateful for the presenters and preparers who were unable to showcase their no-doubt brilliant work; but discussing the impact of the pandemic four years out was clearly uninteresting to a wider public.

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Dear Pledging Patriots:

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Concern over the new arrivals’ ability to assimilate and a fear that they lacked understanding

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Dear Ones:

As you may imagine, today’s Musing doesn’t wander far from Dani’s brain surgery today. Some things overwhelm all other threads of concentration. Counting out Aggi’s (our dog) pills this morning and smooshing them into her favorite gummy candy, I was taken aback, because next to the newly filled pill cup was another pill cup containing the pills, each stuffed into a gummy. Clearly, I had done that task earlier in the morning and had no actual memory of having performed that part of my morning routine. I’m finding myself making sure the keys are in my pocket several times each time I get out of the car. Deep thought clearly takes up a lot of space, crowding out the mundane mental wanderings of an average day…

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Dear Past Pandemic Prospectors,

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Dear God Lovers:

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