While I ate lunch this afternoon, I was scanning channels and I saw a guy on TV. I thought, wow!, he looks just like Speedcat! Seemed like a nice guy too, just like Speedcat.

Except, of course, for the fact that he was in jail for murdering 2 or 3 people!

It was scary how much he resembled Speedcat. Scarier still was when the show (finally!–and note that I didn’t catch it from the beginning, so they had probably covered the introduction earlier) mentioned his name… Eric!

And, for a brief moment, you wonder who you’ve really been blogging with! After all, who knows if the blogger you’re communicating with is who they say they are and who knows if they might be incarcerated somewhere?

But, of course, we have photographic evidence that Speedy is out there loose. After all, he’s been taking pictures of mirror balls and his socks lately. Plus the voices were not the same.

And, the Eric-in-Jail apparently went to jail pretty young, and there was no mention of him having a family or being a grandfather. So, I’m pretty sure we’re safe. Plus, I’m pretty sure that if Speedy were in jail, or ends up there, it will be for medical fraud. I mean just look at his plastic surgery work!

After all, does this look like a murderer to you?

Anyway, if I really thought Speedy was the guy in jail, I wouldn’t be doing this post, ’cause he’d probably be really mad if he ever got out.

At any rate, the show was about reconciliatory justice, or something. It was pretty interesting. But, you know, how can you ever really be sure if someone is really sorry for what they’ve done, or just acting remorseful to get out of jail? I guess we can never really be sure. If you really think about it, can we ever really be sure that someone we know won’t become a killer one day?

At what point do we stop judging people for what they’ve done in the past and for who they are today? I’m not talking about just criminals here, but anybody. How much of how we view someone is colored by their past actions, even if they seem different today? There is a part of us that still remembers who they were and we wonder if they people can ever really change. Of course, if we wonder that, is that more telling about who we are and how much we have or haven’t changed?

And, at what point do we stop letting other people’s actions control our own lives?

In a way, we are trapped by time. We can only see the past and present. We can’t see what a person will be in the future. So, we tend to judge them by their past. Maybe the majority of the time, that is a reasonable view of things, but it is not always an accurate one. For example, there are people in jail for murder. If you were to release them, some of them would kill again. Others would not. How do we sort who is who?

But, that’s not what I want to talk about. Instead, what about the ones that would never kill again? What of those people who really have changed? Put them somewhere, and many people are going to be mistrustful of them. It’s understandable, right? After all, you know he or she has killed before. They could do it again, right?

It could be, though, that the person next door, the person they’ve known for years, the person they thought could never harm a fly, will be the one to one day go on a killing spree and kill his or her family, or the neighbor kids, or random people at the mall.

Perhaps, judging people as good or bad is a bad idea. We just don’t know what’s really going through the other person’s head. Maybe science someday will be able to tell us, but, for now, we just don’t know. It could be that one day the ex-con who was a murderer will one day be the person who will save our life from the friendly high school soccer coach gone postal.

Maybe we just always need to be aware of the world around us. Trust, but be careful. You still look both ways before crossing the street at night even if you don’t see or hear a car coming, right? You still look both ways before crossing the street even if the street rarely ever has traffic, right?

Another thing is the mixed messages we get too, which I got to thinking about after catching bits and pieces of another show afterward. I was cleaning, so I didn’t hear the whole thing; just bits and pieces of it. From what I gathered, a woman had killed or tried to kill somebody. Maybe it was attempted, since she wasn’t in jail and ended up dating a guy who was warned about her past.

Anyway, they started talking about her medications, and how her medications seemed to make her condition worse. She went to different doctors, and they’d try different things, but shortly thereafter, she was back to being worse. Finally, she stopped taking one drug that she thought was causing the problems. And then of course came the recriminations because she didn’t follow doctor’s orders and all that.

And, that’s what got me thinking about mixed messages. How often do you hear that our own health is something we have to watch for and manage on our own? How often do you hear that we need to take the initiative for our own health? Sometimes, doctors just get too busy to keep up or push certain drugs or just don’t care or etc. I’m not trying to incriminate doctors here; we’ve all heard of bad doctors or doctors that are unsympathetic or doctors that just get overwhelmed managing too many patients or whatever. The point is that we are often advised to better manage our health ourselves. Some doctors will even tell you that! If they prescribe something, and it has ill-effects, they might advise you to determine an appropriate level of medication on your own. This may vary by medication and health problems. I have seen this in diabetics, where they may be prescribed a certain amount of insulin, but are also advised to self-dose based on their blood sugar testing and so on. Now, bear in mind I’m being very general here; so don’t try to self-medicate or self-dose yourself based on anything I’ve said! That’s completely not my point!

Anyway, the point is that we’re often advised to be in charge of our own health concerns. And that advice comes from other people, it comes from the media and it may even come from doctors.

Of course, you can do all that, but if something goes wrong, you’ll be blamed for not following your doctor’s orders to the letter. In other words, take charge of your own health but if something goes horribly wrong, shame on you for not following your doctor’s orders!

Sometimes, you just cannot win. The lesson is that you will (usually) be held responsible for your bad actions, but others will share in the responsibility for your good actions. You just have to learn to deal with that.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 27th, 2008 at 6:27 pm and is filed under Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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