Passions, Emotions, Truths and Myths

Some have asked why I'm not blogging much these days. I can best answer that my plate is pretty full. But I believe it is time I said something about the passion being displayed by many people in Peoria County. I believe a book by Syracuse professor Arthur C. Brooks titled “Extreme Makeover” and commented on by Robert J. Mott, Jr. of Austin Texas and Stewart Schley of Englewood, Colorado, best sum up how I am feeling these days. Schley says “It’s not that angry politics is spilling over into our broader culture, it’s that an increasing coarseness in society at large has infiltrated the world of politics, just as it has infiltrated sports, religion and public institutions. Self absorbed, stressed out and lacking empathy, we’ve trash talked our way into a civic decline”.

Mott wrote “More compassion is not needed in our political discourse. One should have reasons for making political choices or political statements. And civic culture should be based on principles, not compassion. Passion and compassion issue from the same source in the human psyche. Rather than dispassionate, reasoned discourse, we generally get impassioned appeals to our emotions. The anger and lack of compassion that animate the political extremes might be moderated if they became more reasonable and less passionate”.

There is an article about me in the Peoria Observer North today that tells you that I am not swayed by impassioned appeals to my emotions, myths and threats.

Thanks, Editor Ben Lambert and Owner Henry Balfantz.

If Robert J. Mott, Jr. is related to the Bob Mott from California who I played tennis with years ago, please contact me if you pick this up on the web. Bob Widmer from New Jersey contacted me today. Bob family owns an office machine manufacturing company and whose product I sold many years ago. Bob is connecting me to Howard Widmer who is compiling a genealogy tree of the Widmer’s as is my niece Gloria Winston in Colorado. Then Gene Oder’s son picked me up and called me. (I wrote a blog “A Tribute to the Oder Brothers”). He was pleased that someone remembered his dad, a well known name in the show horse world in and around Peoria many years ago and with whom I spent at least four summers; employed by Gene and his younger brother Pres. Both are now deceased. I received an email from another friend of the Oders who had picked up my blog. Recently, Cindy Smeltz from California found my site and emailed me and we are exchanging information about our 1st cousin Richard Witzig who was killed in WW2.

I learn a little more about the computer each week. My first computer class was two years ago. What a world we live in!

What a shame that we are so absorbed with our perceptions that we do not have time to EDUCATE ourselves on the FACTS about community issues. And the internet has abetted the dissemination of both fact and fiction making it harder to separate obvious facts from myth. Few will take the time to study to seek the truth.

Look for articles in the Journal Star tomorrow which may be helpful to those of you who have remained silent and maybe confused about what has recently become the most controversial and inflammatory issue in this community .

I close with this thought “An idea ran back and forth in his head like a blind man, knocking over the solid furniture”. (F. Scott Fitzgerald)