Purple socks

I'm wearing purple socks today, which instantly makes me think of Donny Osmond. 

I wore purple socks when I was a kid and then walked around the house singing, "I'm a little bit country, I'm a little bit rock and roll." 

Purple socks also makes me think about my purple underwear with a cow and poem on them, 
I never saw a Purple Cow,
I never hope to see one,
But I can tell you, anyhow,
I’d rather see than be one!

I don't still have the underwear, but I loved that poem.

Thinking about Donny Osmond and purple socks and cows also makes me think about the Duke brothers. 

Here are some of the divisions in my life growing up:

           Luke Duke vs. Bo Duke
           Ponch vs. Jon
           Magnum PI vs. MacGyver (Okay, you actually could choose both without TV trauma)

I don't remember placing people into many categories outside of TV culture. That was a pretty huge part of the 70s and 80s without an overwhelming amount of choices so it was easy to put yourself and others into appropriate subcultures.

Here's the phenomena that I see in our current culture. 

We have way too many choices. I don't know how folks manage the number of radio stations down south where you can run through the dial for hours and most of it ends up sounding like the same twenty songs. We have a billion choices and sometimes they are overwhelming, exhausting, and superfluous.

We divide our choices into two opposing options. We lump stuff into two major categories and turn life into black or white, right or wrong, my way vs. your way to try and make choices easier. It's not silly divisions like TV, but major dividing walls that leave us unable to live in the same reality let alone find common ground.

It might be time that we get serious about moving out of either/or thinking and engage a wider range of quality options without a glut of exhausting choices around minutia. 

I know it's true in the church. I'd love to get out of the consumer culture of church where the goal is to find one to suit your own desires and there's a church on every corner competing. There are so many churches to choose from we tidy it up by pitting evangelical/conservative churches vs. mainline/liberal churches. Those are ridiculous categories and we end up mocking God's vision of shalom.

I think it is also true in politics. It is time to move beyond a two party system. I appreciate what John Adams wrote a long honking time ago, 

There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other. This, in my humble apprehension, is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution.” 
― John Adams, The Works Of John Adams, Second President Of The United States

We don't divide neatly into "country vs. rock n roll." That's a lazy way to think through complexity. Donny and Marie could get along because they looked for a third way that honored both their ways. 

Oh Alice, see what happens when you get me purple socks:)