When Good Gets Too Good

Two pages in black and white, a large gray image covers making up a frame crosses the dividing line, and two lighter gray boxes contain the text. Faintly visible in the gray are the lines of a grainy church or cathedral, with jellyfish floating freely above the pews. The text reads as follows: When Good Gets Too Good – LHX – One of the pillars of growing up in the modern day Fairy Tale life is the notion of ‘following your heart.’ This seems to correspond roughly to following hunches. Follow your hunches even in the face of adversity. Follow your hunches when the people around you are heading one direction, but there is something telling you to head in the other. But what do you do if ‘following your heart’ consists of going against the very system that advised you to follow your heart? Go ahead and ask them. It’s fun to hear people backpedal. In the Fairy Tale books, they didn’t put stipulations on the whimsy. “Follow your heart unless it entails dismantling the destructive society of which you are a part. If that situation arises, please stop following your heart, and just follow these simple rules…” Oops… I read something somewhere some time (for some reason I think it was McLuhan) that detailed the notion that it would be eventually calamitous for a society to raise their children with images of super heroes and then expect them to obediently ease into a button-pushing desk job. How are you gonna grow up admiring those figures that didn’t go down easy, and then end up being the type of person that goes down easy? Well… I guess liquor and drugs help snuff this out. The curse of resilient able-bodied youth works against a lot of people, as there seems to be a constant ‘do it tomorrow’ mentality – WHICH DOES MAKE SENSE for the most part, until (again LOL) KABOOM all the caffeine and cigarettes and fast food turn a person into a soft, neurotic – albeit sharp-witted – person with little agility. These elements help break people down into becoming the type that go down easy. That’s beside the main point here. The point is that there are situations where people will advise you to go against the advice that they themselves gave you. Yeah read that again. They will give you heroic advice today – that age old wisdom. The rallying cry. But sometimes a person is a part of the problem that the wisdom would seek to alleviate. There is another side to this – the exploration of ‘when does somebody know they are really right, or if they are just nuts.’ This is the territory we get into when we talk about people with a subversive point of view ‘becoming organized.’ “What makes you so sure you are right?” Perhaps its not so much a matter of knowing when you are right, but being in a position to react when you recognize that something is wrong. The days of being able to ‘get away with something’ are coming to a end – even for those who are either ignorant of their misdeeds, or seek to cover them up by preaching words that sound right. That goes for me too. If you see me doing wrong, please, by all means… SRSLY.