Success Starts Here!

This blog post isn't about Catholicism. It isn't even really about the Pope. This blog post is my opinion about something I consider a huge plague on our society today, the seemingly lost art of figuring out exactly who or more specifically why we are. This past week, Pope Francis, popular successor to Pope Benedict has been visiting Brazil. Everywhere he goes, tens of thousands of youth follow him. He is getting the attention of a rock star. To most non-believing Americans, the fervor is third-world nonsense. Generally speaking, we have long since intellectualized ourselves out of religion in the United States. It is the dead hocus pocus of ignorant people gone by. We are far too "smart" to be believing in some deity we can't see. Yet the human soul, the human heart, the id, whatever you want to call your subconscious self, has always desired to not only understand "who" you are (an answer which can in some respects be answered rather completely), bu

You get up in the morning and pour that tasty first cup of coffee and maybe like many people, go to Facebook to see what your friends are up to. You start looking at wallposts when boom, there it is; your "victim" friend does it again. They're sending a note to all the people who "don't care," or asking "why" nobody loves them, or begging for attention in any of a million whiny, far-too-expected ways. I am all about empathy and sympathy but friends who are constantly making themselves out to be victims are incredibly draining aren't they? I'm not talking about the person who has an occasional mishap, falls a little short sometimes, or says a little more than he/she should after having a few drinks. I'm talking about the person who actively works to be a victim 24/7. The person you could say the most positive thing to and can somehow turn it around into a story about how horrible their life is. So what do you do with friends like that

I am such a lucky man. I have amazing friends who truly encompass the entire spectrum of opinions and beliefs. Thanks to Mr. Zuckerman, I enjoy watching banter and opinions regularly streaming down my Facebook page. I try to remain respectful of those deep opinions and usually look for humor to try to bridge the gap between friends who's opinions are polar opposites. Over the last couple of years, I've seen divisions grow to toxic proportions around political parties during the elections, firearms, and same-sex marriage. Yet no subject ever seems to promote as deep a divide as "color" in this country; most recently the Trayvon Martin case which we are ALL intimately familiar with at this point. What surprises me most is the predictability of the divisions. It truly pains me to see how loving and tolerant and seemingly "open" people lose their marbles and fall-in when the issue is race. It can go from 2013 to 1956 in no-seconds flat on my FB wall, and it ha