The Hippo In The Audi Gets Canceled In The Culture

Herb’s Blog, Herbdate 22323 – 800:

Here’s the haps:

My Very Dear And Beloved Fans, Friends, Fiends, Foes, Foundlings, Freaks, Fiction Writers, Friction Writers, Fellow Bloggers, and Fun Folks,

Greetings. This is my eight hundredth blog post. If I had been writing in this blog ever since it started 16 years, 5 months and 16 days ago this post would be number 6011. I’ve already talked about that at length in several other posts. I have tried to re-commit to the daily post but I need to get life into some sort of regular flow to actually do it. Really, I feel pretty good about this being number 800. Apparently, I have been using the WordPress software for my blog for a little over 14 years because I was sent this beautiful award:

Except that I haven’t but it was still nice to receive. Well, maybe I have. It’s really not important.

So, since this blog was started by me, for me to write in and since I have frequently stated that sometimes it will be about religion, sometimes about politics from a right-leaning, moderate-to-conservative-to-flaming-right-wing-looney depending on the topic, but mostly my life and my feelings about it, some humor and also a bit of what-not. I’ve invited a couple of different readers to do guest posts at different times but not too many takers. Overall I’m pretty happy with it and it does keep growing. And shrinking. And growing. And shrinking. In other words, it’s alive! My readers are highly intelligent and come from a broad group of people. There have been times that I have said things that bothered them but when they left their comments of disagreement they were still respectful. I don’t think I have ever had to delete or edit a comment someone has left unless it was already in the spam folder. I do go in the spam folder and look for comments from real people and try to rescue them. The comments, not the people.

Respectful. People. I have concluded that a very, very large majority of my readers are Human Beings from the Planet Earth and we are all the same species. One way to tell is by the blood. No matter where in the world I go, whether it’s China or the Philippines or Malaysia or Holland or India or Africa or even the good old U.S. of A., if I poke a person with a pin (Of course, I would ask them, first, as a punch in the nose is often painful.) their blood would be red. Not only that but if one of my scientist readers put it on a microscope slide they could determine that it was Human blood. A surgeon from Maine could go operate on an aboriginal tribesman in some faraway place and know exactly what to do because we’re all the same. Veterinarians, in my humble and unlearned experience and opinion, would have a lot harder time than a human doctor because a cow is not a horse is not an elephant is not a budgie is not a fish is not a frog but a Human is a Human is a Human is a Human.

This post had originally started out making a point about our society’s current climate of what is being called “Cancel Culture.” I had been feeling kind of a silly tirade and was going to start chastising myself for calling the overweight person who cut me off in traffic an Audi Driver. But that’s what they were. I was going to do some self-deprecating humor about my own size and weight and then get into my stereotypes of different drivers and cars. For instance, the Lexus is marketed to people of very high intelligence. Listen to their ads. Big words, properly used, all to get these geniuses to buy a vehicle for a whole lot of money that doesn’t even come equipped with signal lights. I was going to get into how rude it was of me to refer to the driver of the car as a hippo when I am at least as fat and probably fatter than them. I had planned, originally, for your pleasure, to beat myself up over this very unchristian and uncharitable behavior. Then just drill down until I finally canceled myself and disappeared.

Then today, as I was going through my settings, trying to shrink the volume of email I get from WordPress all the time, I came across one of those notices that I had a new follower. If you’ve been a WordPress blogger for any length of time you know this means either a real person or someone selling vitamins. I try to go look, however, at all of them. I was really impressed with this one. The name of the blog is Haoyan Do and it was her most recent post, You Never Listen, that got my attention. The post is actually about a conversation with her friend about whether to buy a gun or not but I took something else out of it.

There is fear stalking Asian people even though they have done nothing wrong. Not all Asian people are Chinese and even with the Chinese, it is not the people who did anything wrong, it was their Communist government. To hate all Asian people is the height of stupidity, especially for Americans to hate Americans of Asian descent. Teddy Roosevelt was right, we do need to get away from being hyphenated Americans. I may be an American of German and Irish descent but I’m not a German-American or Irish-American. I am an American. And…I am a Human Being. Asians, whether they are from Japan, Malaysia, Indonesia, Korea, or, yes, China, are Human Beings. And the same is true for black people. And indigenous people. Humans. The whole lot.

The Apostle Paul summed it up in his address to the Greek Philosophers in Athens:

…And hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation; That they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from every one of us: For in him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring.

(Act 17:26-28)