Jonathots Daily Blog
(4292)
There are many ways to win the immediate approval of an audience.
You can:
- Compliment their city.
- Tell them how beautiful they look.
- Inform them you have two children, but parenting seems to “escape you.”
- Say “God bless America.”
- Make sure they know you support the troops.
- Tell them how much you love your wife, and you know that she’s “the boss.”
- And of course, you can always call them exceptional.
Or you can say “America is exceptional.”
Most of these methods work real well because they feed on a common misconception: We’re happier when someone panders to us. Actually, in the long run we’re happier when someone alerts us to our obvious flaws.
I, for one, have no problem saying that America is exceptional as long as we determine the definition of “exceptional.” At the heart of the word is another word, which is “except.”
Except means to leave something out, to delete or to rid yourself of it—making sure it is not attached to you in any way, shape or form.
Exceptional is when you live around “crazy” but insist on removing that temptation from your mission.
To be exceptional, you have to accept what needs to be excepted.
If you don’t, you just end up being mediocre.
I agree that America has flirted with being exceptional. There have been times when we have made a stand as a nation—against barbarism, fanaticism and bigotry.
Then again, there are times when we stood in line to imitate the insanity of the world around us.
But let us presume that we actually want to be exceptional.
Then we must realize that we can only have freedom of speech when those words do not attack the freedom of another.
We can worship—but we have no right whatsoever to hate people. We must decide that hating people, disincluding people and despising people has no religious profundity.
If we’re going to be exceptional, we have to state loud and clear that it’s okay to be a politician—except you can’t lie.
You can be a parent–except you can’t be a hypocrite.
You can be a man–except you can’t hurt women.
You can be a woman–except you can’t hate men.
You can be in business–except you can’t cheat your customers or fail to take care of your employees.
If we truly want to be an exceptional nation, we must accept what we have to except from our conduct.
You can be a leader, except you must not act like a master.
You can be intelligent, except you must use it and therefore prove it.
Let’s work on being exceptional.
Let’s find out what is causing this world to be so uncertain and filled with tribulation and use our good cheer to overcome that imbalance by being the exception, and therefore becoming exceptional.
Jonathots Daily Blog 