Chamblee54

There was a post at neo prodigy yesterday that got me thinking. It starts with a famous quote,

 “Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people. Micro minds discuss the color of people. “

 I added the last part of that.
Now for the fallout of this. I may get motivated later to see if I can determine the author of that gem, but for now I do not know. For all we know, it is the same bartender who came up with the gem ” We are born naked, and everything after that is drag”.

I don’t know if what is going to follow is wisdom fatigue, thinking too much, or wallowing in a cynic’s swamp. As Oscar Wilde observed, ” A cynic is someone who knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing”.
The point of all this ( besides providing text to go between some pictures) is that many well worded sayings turn out to be nonsense upon close examination.
Take today’s headline quote, about great, average, and small minds. The discourse that followed that platitude was a commentary on the folly of gossip. Now, I agree that in a perfect world people would not gossip. Adding the phrase “bless his heart” does not make it any better. ( Any Yankee who reads this can ask a Southerner for an explanation )
May those who never gossip throw the first pebble. Yea, I thought so, lots of folks are hiding. The truth is, gossip is about as human as lying and pretending. I imagine there is a study of chimpanzees where we see them talking about how mangy their neighbors fur is getting.
Another thing is that not all ideas are good ideas. ( I am going to use a favorite rhetorical stunt here, the Hitler argument ) Adolph Hitler talked about ideas all the time. And a few million folks died as a result. More recently, Jeremiah Wright talks about ideas. At the top of his lungs, and available on dvd.
I dare say the philosophers and thinkers of our time took an interest in the affairs of their neighbors. To think otherwise is to deny their humanity. “Great minds”…or the owners… have other shortcomings. I have heard too many stories about people who get a famous person to come to their party, only to get drunk and make a fool of himself.
There are other platitudes that sound good, but don’t hold up. “ I work to live, I don’t live to work” “ A man who stands for nothing will fall for anything” “youth is wasted on the young”.
Maybe the test of a mind is the ability to tell the difference between wisdom and a bunch of sweet sounding words.
Spell check suggestions for this feature:
neo- neon, no, Leo, Geo, net, neg, new , Zee
dvd- did, dad, dud