1) Be careful what you wish for because you just might get it:
Probably without us even aware of such an ironic fact, an occurrence of seeming supremely good fortune in our life turns out to actually be nothing of the sort—if not in fact the very worst of luck (thus the profound adage, “Thank God for unanswered prayers”). Although, of course, the silver lining in such irony is that the exact opposite can be just as possible. Hence, existential prudence should dictate that we always try our best to keep in mind, to place all into proper perspective, that the apparent misfortune we received from Fate by, for example, slipping on the figurative banana peel and breaking our leg, which forces us to heal at home for a month, may actually prevent our untimely death in a violent vehicular accident while driving to work the day after we happened to just barely notice in time to avoid the said hazard banana peel; or the lottery jackpot we missed because we stopped buying our regular same-numbers lottery tickets but a week prior due to the pair of gratuitously expensive flashy shoes, which in turn becomes the deciding factor in stopping us from continuing the gambling practice since we never win anything at all noteworthy in the first place, etcetera.
Perhaps we all should keep the abovementioned great irony in mind whenever we feel that matters could not have gotten any worse or, God forbid, vice versa.
One of my favourite examples of this kind of irony brilliantly displayed Hollywood-style was by way of an old Twilight Zone episode titled “A Nice Place to Visit”, first aired on CBS, April 15, 1960”: In the episode, Henry “Rocky” Valentine is a criminal who is robbing a pawnshop after taking out a night watchman. Before he can get away, he is shot by an off screen police officer while trying to climb a fence. He wakes up to find himself seemingly unharmed by the encounter and in the company of a pleasant individual named “Pip” who tells Rocky that he is his guide and has been instructed to grant him whatever he desires. Rocky is suspicious, having never received anything for free in his life. He believes Pip is trying to con him and asks him if he is a cop. Pip proceeds to quote personal information about Rocky’s tastes and hobbies from a notebook. Irritated, Rocky demands that Pip give him his wallet. Pip says he has no wallet but obligingly gives him a large amount of money and is willing to give him as much as he desires. Rocky believes Pip wants him to commit a crime on his behalf and that the money is an incentive.
Rocky holds Pip at gunpoint, following him to a luxurious apartment that Pip insists is Rocky’s. Demanding to know what he must do to acquire all this luxury, Rocky remains skeptical when he is told that it’s all free. Despite his suspicions, he begins to relax, changing his clothes and taking a shower, after which he is presented with a meal served on a silver platter. He abruptly becomes suspicious again and demands that Pip taste the food, believing it to be poisoned. When Pip claims he can’t remember how to eat, Rocky shoots him in the head but finds that the bullets just bounce off, leaving Pip unharmed. Rocky now realizes that he is dead and immediately assumes that he is in Heaven and that Pip is his guardian angel.
Later, we see Rocky in a casino, surrounded by beautiful girls and winning every game he plays. Outside he sees a tall policeman and is able to make him smaller and thus pick on him. After returning to his apartment with Pip and the “dolls” (as Rocky refers to them), Rocky asks to see some of his former friends who have died. Pip says that won't be possible, as this “paradise” is his own private world, and none of the people are real except for Rocky and Pip.
Rocky becomes curious as to why he was allowed into Heaven. “I must have done something good that made up for all the other stuff. But what? What did I ever do that was good?” With Pip, he visits the Hall of Records (seen to have been established in the year I), but it merely contains a list of his sins. Rocky is puzzled but he decides that if God is okay with him being there, he won’t bother worrying.
After a month, Rocky becomes thoroughly bored by always having his whims satisfied and predictably winning at anything he attempts. He calls up Pip and asks if he can put a challenge where he would actually get caught in a robbery. Pip is able to do that, but Rocky backs off claiming there would be no fun if he knew the outcome. He then tells Pip, “If I gotta stay here another day, I'm gonna go nuts! I don’t belong in Heaven, see? I want to go to the other place.” Pip retorts, “Heaven? Whatever gave you the idea that you were in heaven, Mr. Valentine? This is the other place!” Shocked and horrified, Rocky unsuccessfully tries to open his apartment door in order to escape his endless “paradise,” as Pip begins to laugh malevolently at Rocky’s predicament.
The lesson here may also be one of the more abstract bits of ethics that The Twilight Zone has ever attempted. It’s better to want than to have. Rocky goes insane because there’s no more challenge in his existence, there’s no more effort needed, and there’s nothing to hope for because it all exists as soon as he wants it. This is a bit like the lesson from The Escape Clause—which features a fat Satan making a deal with an idiotic human who thinks he can cheat the system. Just as death defines life in that episode, the challenge of working for and possibly not getting what you want defines desire here. (en.wikipedia.org)
2) The worst of enemies can become the best of friends:
Irregardless of it being sci-fi fictitious, the profoundly compassionate (or humane?) movie Enemy Mine (released in December, 1985) nonetheless portrays a plausible yet seemingly very rare theme. The two main, and almost sole, characters—the alien Drac named Jeriba “Jerry” Shigan (played by Louis Gossette Jr.) and its human enemy Willis Davidge (played by Dennis Quaid)—are interstellar war-time adversaries essentially left little choice but to reply on one another while stranded on a hostile environment planet. As they gradually become not just allies but close friends the movie viewer can observe tears welling up in the eyes of the androgynous-like pregnant Jeriba’s when Willis was about to go out on his own out of necessity. It’s an incredibly heartwarming story indeed.
3) People can be educated to the point of literal tunnel-vision narrow-mindedness:
The well-educated are frequently blind, perhaps even willfully so, to the irony that science can actually be received and treated by the masses similar to that of a religion – indeed a faith. For as a whole we, society, will typically consume then believe in some research finding or fact because a relatively very small number people in long, white lab coats found it to be true. Then, when we read or hear that some scientific fact has just been deemed outdated or non-factual, we’ll commonly consume the new replacement facts as gospel truth. After all, it’s science, so it should and must be true—right?
(Note: a few years back salt sodium did a double 180-degree flip-flop only about a week apart. Nevertheless, truth via science should still trump over theological truths.)
For so many well educated people or experts there’ll always be a “logical explanation” to explain away every truly unexplainable occurrence. As though willfully blind, if the skeptics disbelieve the inconceivable or unconventional concept or possibility, somehow it cannot/will not really exist, on both a conscious and subconscious level.
According to one long-since-closed cash offer advertised on a website, “Magician James ‘The Amazing’ Randi has created a foundation that offers more than 1,100,000$ [sic] to anyone who can demonstrate a paranormal phenomenon in a scientific test. Isn’t it amazing that certain people are absolutely convinced that they have supernatural powers but that none of them seems interested in collecting such an amount of money? Food for thought ...”
According to another website, “… Despite attempts by various [supernatural-feat-claiming] individuals, the prize has yet to be awarded.”
However, what was conveniently ignored by the skeptics was the fact that The Amazing Randi could—and likely did albeit covertly—completely avoid having to pay up a red cent by simply remaining “unconvinced” and/or by concocting some “explanation”, regardless of how specious it may be.
4) Humankind places so much of ourselves into the relatively imminent finite material secular world; meanwhile, we so inadequately value and therefore place so disturbingly little—if any at all—planning, energy, concern and reverence into the infinite, that which indeed should count the very most in our meager, relatively momentary Earthly existence:
“I don’t wanna go to Heaven; I wanna go to the bank and cash the goddamn cheque! [for $4,000,000]”,Oda Mae Brown (played by Whoopi Goldberg) to Sam Wheat’s haunting spirit (played by the late Patrick Swayze) in the 1990 box office hit movie Ghost.
5) Too frequently though nonetheless very humanly, those who are in need the most receive the least—and, yet once again, vice versa; for only in feel-good fairy-tale-themed movies and books does justice typically prevail:
This fact has troubled philosophers and authors for centuries. Perhaps most notable in this category is the profound Victorian-era fiction A Christmas Carol—a.k.a. Scrooge, the latter film version with the favoured actor/director Alastair Sim—penned by the prolific humanitarian Charles Dickens. The most haunting scene for many fans is that of Jacob Marley’s ghost showing the gratuitously and even uselessly wealthy miser Ebenezer Scrooge, who was Marley’s good business partner and ‘friend’ in life, how the spirits of other in-life wealthy though also miserly men try in seemingly agonizing vain to throw their non-physical-realm money at a living woman huddled cold with her baby in the snowy night against a wooden fence. But of course it’s eternally all in vain, Marley’s distraught ghost moans to Scrooge, for they all had their chance to do much good with their wealth when they were alive. Translation: What a gratuitous waste, and what a terrible waste!
6) Many of the most religious people are the least humane, while many of the non-religious, even atheistic, people are the most humane (perhaps via secular humanism); and some of the most ‘civil’ nations and societies have been known to behave the most immorally and inhumanely towards other politically and militarily weaker nations.
7) Some of this planet’s largest national cultures that are also two of the worst abusers of women’s rights are those of two countries that are early ‘members’ of a tiny minority of global nations that have elected a woman to their highest office.
Hateful anger towards others (notwithstanding translating the hatred into physical or verbal attacks) only hurts those doing the hating thus bearing the resultant emotional poison. Contrarily, however, loving and forgiving benefits all persons involved, though especially the fortunate ones doing the loving and forgiving:Since the vast majority of all hatred in the developed or ‘civilized’ world is not physically realized, it’s but the haters who suffer because of it. It’s actually quite poetic. One only need experience true forgiveness of a party against whom one has carried a grudge for a considerable amount of time. Some would describe such a great mental release as being a supernatural-like relinquishment of overly burdensome emotional baggage that accompanies hateful grudges—it’s almost a mirror reflection of some universal law uncompromisingly declaring that all hatred really is unnatural and plain wrong. However, one should not consider hatred and anger as being synonymous; indeed, some positive can come from progressively constructively directed anger. One is not at all necessarily hating a gratuitously wealthy hoarder when one feels anger towards him or her; and any resultant anger felt and expressed over the potential good that can come, but apparently won’t, from that said wealth can and likely on occasion does directly result in generous, enormous philanthropy.
9) The peaceful conduct and co-operation of no less than one hundred percent of the globe’s populace is required to ensure that one hundred percent global stability, one hundred percent of the time. Meanwhile, it can take but a few or even just one person to cause the disintegration of global stability and then catastrophe, for example the lone Bosnian Serb’s 1914 assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife, an act which triggered the brutal First World War. Thus we have the peaceful countless many within humankind are vulnerable against the power of the strategic vicious few or even the one.
10) Conceiving, gestating and delivering children by full choice is the most selfish of natural (non-criminal) human acts; meanwhile lovingly and unfailingly competently rearing children with all of the accompanying worry and heartache is the most selfless of natural human acts:
After all, no one ever decides one day that, “I think I’ll do a potential human being a favour and bring him or her into this world.”
11) Although once gone every passing second is never to be repeated, many of us humans—though especially our restless youth—often let it pass, wasted, even anxious for it to become ‘time successfully killed’:
As a great example, there was the episode of the animated Beavis and Butthead characters anxiously allow a half-dozen hours to pass as totally killed time while they just sit there on the couch waiting for some (judging by what they say about it) utterly trivial, lame and unproductive if not also regressive TV show. What made it exceptionally anxiety inducing was that literally every few seconds, Beavis asks Butthead, “What time is it?”
Frank G Sterle Jr