Tag Archive for cause

Painful Wishes

It’s so hard when someone deliberately attacks us. A red-hot knife goes through us. We want them to hurt as much as we do….Maybe they do. Today’s Thursday Thought gives us something to consider.

For People with Foot Pain

Are you over age 70? If so, are you among the half whose feet hurt? Or over 24 and among the 24% in that age group with foot pain? Yes, you can go to the doctor (a good idea). But it helps to know the causes and ways to prevent, lessen, or get rid of it. The AARP article How You Can Fix Those Aching Feet offers some good insight to this.

Guns: Where we stand in the World

The CDC has compiled all its 2017 statistics and revealed a startling fact: almost 40,000 people died last year from guns in the U.S. That’s the highest number in 40 years. (1999 saw 30,000 such deaths.)  It’s also the third year in a row of increase, after years of stable numbers.

Worldwide, our country makes  up 14.2% of gun deaths, surpassed only by Brazil, with 17.2% of the world’s gun-related deaths. Note that we aren’t talking war here–except individually against other individuals and ourselves. A good number of U.S. gun deaths (60%) are suicides, and we see daily news reports about someone shooting people in schools, venues, and places of worship.

You can read more specifics in the Huffington Post article U.S. Gun Violence Claimed More Lives In 2017 Than Ever: CDC.

I don’t care if you’re pro-gun, anti-gun, or something in between. It’s obvious that gun violence is an epidemic in America, one that needs a cure. Studies have shown that it isn’t because we have more people with mental health problems here–countries with similar numbers of those people don’t have the gun violence we have.

So what is the cause? We don’t know but must get serious about finding out. And what is the cure? Again, we don’t know but MUST get serious about finding out.

Money, Marriage, and Family

Today’s Thursday Thought considers family, marriage, and the annual cost of social programs:

“ACF spends $46 billion per year operating 65 different social programs. If one goes down the list of these programs… the need for each is either created or exacerbated by the breakup of families and marriages.”  —  Wade Horn, Assistant Secretary, Administration for Children and Families (ACF/HHS)
Maybe we need to work harder on protecting our families and marriages….

 

 

How to Fight for Right: Kim Davis and Planned Parenthood

If you have a righteous cause, why jeopardize it by (let’s be kind) “stretching the truth”?  Publicity that isn’t based on actual fact can fire up current followers and garner a few more–until the truth comes out.  At that point, the black cloud of suspicion gathers over your cause and you.  Take two recent cases in point.

First, Kim Davis and her encounter with the Pope.  Yes, her position would be strengthened if the Pope granted her an audience and offered her support for her stance against issuing marriage licences to gay couples.  IF that had actually happened.  Instead, she was among dozens of people who had a brief casual conversation with Pope Francis, not an audience or deep discussion, let alone encouragement and support.

Next, the Planned Parenthood video with the horrendous talk about an aborted fetus. This is powerful ammunition against Planned Parenthood–if the video is true.  Many people still choose to believe the validity of that video, although reputable sources question it because the jumpy motions indicate that the camera was stopped and started again and again (lots of editing), because there is no sound (e.g., discussion about harvesting the brain), and because the maker of the video admits he made it elsewhere to depict a story he had heard.  It doesn’t create an air of truthfulness, either, when the mother of the fetus says publicly that her child was a miscarriage, not an abortion.

I believe that we need to act on our consciences.  To do so effectively, though, we need to use the truth as our weapon of strength, not emotion-grabbing falsehoods.