{"id":49,"date":"2011-07-09T00:28:53","date_gmt":"2011-07-09T04:28:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/fearofwhales\/?p=49"},"modified":"2012-06-22T07:51:59","modified_gmt":"2012-06-22T12:51:59","slug":"what-we-re-up-against","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/fearofwhales\/2011\/07\/what-we-re-up-against.html","title":{"rendered":"What We’re Up Against"},"content":{"rendered":"

There’s a lunch I go to when I can at another ministry house on campus. They gather to eat mostly organic local food, and It’s free, so win\/win! But the Spiritual Director had hoped it would foster just a bit more community than it does.<\/p>\n

To use his words “it’s a drag” people come, eat and leave, without talking to anybody they don’t know. And the people who do know each other form tight and unfriendly cliques. So he and I and a couple friends sat down and brainstormed ideas about how to mix it up a bit.<\/p>\n

“You could tape water guns under their chairs” Said one friend<\/p>\n

“Yeah but they would have to be unloaded or they would leak”<\/p>\n

“What about like an organized Mixer-game What’s a good game?”<\/p>\n

“Nah<\/a>” I said. To formal, people won’t go for it.<\/p>\n

“What if we just made paper airplanes and threw them at each other?”<\/p>\n

…<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>So that’s what we did. The next morning we took a bunch of discarded newspaper (Eco-Friendly) and folded them up into airplanes, and threw them at one another at the lunch. You won’t believe what happened.<\/p>\n

…<\/p>\n

Nothing<\/p>\n

…<\/p>\n

We were sure no red blooded American youth would pass up the opportunity to make a complete mess of a room while joyously chucking paper at their friends and perfect strangers but it wasn’t to be.<\/p>\n

We folded airplanes and we threw then at one another and we ducked and dodged all around a bunch of counter-cultural hippies in cliques eating their organic rice who did their best to ignore us completely.<\/p>\n

One man was actually began reading the old out of date newspaper rather than join the fun. I couldn’t believe it.
\nI mean I understand that I’m a lot more outgoing than most people are or want to be, and significantly more counter-cultural. But to sit down in the middle of an airplane war and disregard it… That takes some extraordinary level of militaristic introversion that I just can’t fathom.<\/p>\n

I mean it’s not like this was a meeting of the Southern Baptist Men in Business here! It was everybody. Including the friendly looking college kids folks with the tie-dye shirts.<\/p>\n

Thoreau said “most men life lives of quiet desperation” but even a quietly desperate man will respond to stimuli. Today I wonder if most men live at all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There’s a lunch I go to when I can at another ministry house on campus. They gather to eat mostly organic local food, and It’s free, so win\/win! But the Spiritual Director had hoped it would foster just a bit more community than it does. 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