Anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic. - Flannery O’Connor

Photos by WWW.POWNETWORK.ORG

Well, as it turns out, Knoxville evangelist Ernie Ray Lester didn’t really fight in Vietnam.

His 23 war wounds? The single-handed killing of thousands of Vietnamese? Waiting for rescue as the sole survivor of a massive enemy ambush?

Not so much.

But he did work as a biker assassin.  Really, he did.

And as for getting rammed at full speed by the Lincoln Continental? while collecting on a drug debt? which “knocked my eyes out of my head and my teeth out of my mouth” until they got sewed back in again by a biker doctor?  That really happened, too.  But not in Houston, as he’d said before. 

“That was Atlanta,”  he corrected the record on Friday.

Faced by a flood of evidence provided by attorneys, law enforcement officials, and other folk, Ernie Ray Lester has agreed to update his testimony a wee bit. 

I think he should consider opening a sperm bank, as well.

Very few of us will do the right thing, economically, unless we have to do it.

Doing the right thing because we have to do it still can be a positive experience.

Both Republicans (situationally) and Democrats (legislatively) believe in forcing people to do the right thing.

Republicans and Democrats take turns being right — and catastrophically wrong.

Maybe there are few definitive solutions at all.

Maybe there are more solutions than we can imagine.

Maybe most of us are getting poorer.

Maybe that doesn’t matter as much as we think it does.

Maybe we can’t make money doing the things that we love.

Maybe that will break our hearts.

Or maybe that will force us to discover how to love what we do, instead.

Maybe we’ll do everything right and still  fail.

Maybe we’ll make one mistake after another and turn out just fine.

Maybe life eventually will confound us all.

Should you take rejection personally?  Good Lord, of course you should. You are a person, after all.

What else are you going to do, take it like a llama?

(1) Resiliance is not a moral virtue.

The amount of resilience you have is more like a hair color: It’s something you’re born with, unless you change it with chemicals.

Don’t listen when people tell you to get over it, move on, and let go. What the hell do they know? Feel what you feel. Discontent and anger are not defects, they are human. They are also very powerful tools for change, if you use them right.

(2) Success is not a moral virtue either

Success often is more like the lottery. Some people win the first time they buy a ticket, and try to convince the rest of us that winning only happens to people who believe in themselves with their whole entire hearts; other people win the lottery after buying 100 tickets, and then spend their lives urging the rest of us to keep on buying lottery tickets until it works for us, too.

The only logical conclusion to this line of thought is that people are starving in Africa  because they deserve it.  We need to stop equating vocational (and economical) success with personal virtue.

(3) … Nor does success  inevitably follow upon hard work or persistence

We also need to stop telling people that hard work and persistence will inevitably lead to vocational success. Hard work may increase the mathematical odds of success, sure, but there are no guarantees.

How unfortunate it is that we keep insisting that success comes from good character and hard work.  The American mobility myth is astonishingly persistent, despite many recent (and bipartisan) studies that debunk it.

The good news? You can stop beating yourself up, now. Being unsuccessful is not a character flaw, and there is nothing wrong with you.  Nor is there anything wrong with embracing your own experience for what it is, and moving through and past it your own way, too.   I’m sorry I can’t tell you how to succeed, nor even guarantee that you will. But on behalf of the rest of the world, please let me say: we need you just the way you are.

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Update:  Yesterday our local paper posted excerpts of my entry about the Knoxville shooting in several places on their website.  For a few hours it was Google City around here.  Therefore, I’d already written today’s entry when I was pinged by this article about anger, written by a licensed therapist, who took my point and ran with it quite beautifully.  So now you have it from a real expert!