Sneerful Insanity

Life is a series of punctuated conscious moments. Much like the frames of a motion picture on a reel passing through a projector create an image and then vanish, our awareness of life also passes from instant to instant.

Every action we take involves this kind of on-off movement. Each time we raise an eyebrow in incredulity, or flare our nostrils in a sneer, a large number of mental events occur. As we listen to an untrustworthy politician's speech, not all of our neurons, muscle fibers, skin patched, and nerve endings want to go along to produce our incredulous sneer.

In a society of sneerers, your sneer is expected. You have learned well how to sneer. You have watched your peers sneer. You have learned just how to hold your head, to flare your nostrils, and to condescend. The society of sneerers could conceivably encompass a whole country! In such a country perhaps sneering becomes an accepted, expected norm, and if we lived in that country perhaps our normal expression would be sneerful. Thus our faces become the face of a nation. Not only that, but our way of speaking may be shaped by our faces, our expressions literally shaping the very way we utter a word.

What would have to occur to create a shift from a sneer to a grin? Simply awareness and intent would do it.

Fred Alan Wolf Ph.D. wrote those thoughts. We live in a world of duplicity. A world where associations like right and wrong, good and bad influence our beliefs in one way or another. We want to be on the side of right and good, but as we work toward those goals, we find those associations have elements of bad and wrong interlaced in them.

There is a sneer in our laughter and pride in our prejudice. We travel the road to justice on a broken wagon filled with past expectations. Our sense of comradery is infused with morsels of doubt, and our vindictiveness is salted with a beaker of remorse.

We forget that this world is a fraction of our life and snippet of our purpose. We treat our emotional wounds with the ointment of redundancy and heal in the arms of our sneerful democracy. We do all of this to feel our sneers, our laughter and our beliefs. We are purpose- filled warriors. We fight to do what we do never knowing what we are doing. And in the final act of surrender, we sneer at love and then fall in love with the sneerful insanity of it all.