Hello again, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to another episode of Freedom's Treaty. So today I have hit a milestone. This is my 30th podcast episode. And so I thought I would introduce a new wrinkle into the podcast. And I'm calling this Tolerating Tuesday. Now, you may be wondering why I came up with this phraseology, and hopefully, as the uh program unfolds, you'll see what I'm talking about. And so I'm going to go ahead and get right to it. To be brutally honest, I haven't decided if I'm going to make this an every Tuesday affair or just make it one Tuesday per month. So that has to be decided yet, and eventually I'll make that decision and we'll see how it goes. In any event, the format is going to be well, that there is no format. Now, typically, when I do a podcast, I have a topic and I try to keep it pretty close to that topic. I try not to stray away from it too much. I try to make sure that I'm within the ballpark in terms of the things that I'm talking about, that they're relevant to the main topic. Well, this format will be quite the opposite. In fact, I will be talking about whatever I want to talk about, and I won't hem myself in and stick to a particular topic. So it's going to be all over the place. And I'm looking forward to doing this actually today, and also looking forward to doing it in the future as well. And I hope each of you will enjoy this format as well. The idea of tolerating something or someone is clearly a two-way street. It's never one-sided or one-way. It's not right that one person should be expected to tolerate the behavior or the actions of another person, and the other person not have any obligation whatsoever on their part. It just doesn't work that way. Now, I chose tolerating because I think that it's very applicable in our society today. I think that there's an opportunity for growth when it comes to our tolerating other people. Now, we don't have to agree with them, of course, but shouldn't we have the decency and the respect to tolerate other people, even if what they're doing or what they believe is 180 degrees different than how we believe. Now, to tolerate comes from the Latin. So I have two brothers, so pay attention, guys. Um, this is for you mainly. Uh, but but the to tolerate comes from the Latin toleratus. It's a past participle of tolerare, which is to endure or put up with. So I think that that's very apropos. I think it doesn't matter whether we agree or disagree. What matters is that we really have an obligation at a minimum to put up with the things that we may not agree with, and we should be able to tolerate those things. There's no law that says we have to agree or even be agreeable. We can simply agree to disagree, and sometimes that's the best option until we can perhaps wait for another day and try again to have a conversation with someone where I don't know, the conversation didn't go so well before. Let me start off this tolerating Tuesday inaugural event by mentioning something that perhaps each of you have noticed or noticed as well. And that is whenever I was on my social media feed before the presidential election of 2020, there was a ton of activity of people expressing their viewpoints, and there was no lukewarm. It was either hot or cold for whichever candidate you voted for. But there was just, I mean, dozens and dozens of stories almost on a daily basis, and not just stories, but the way that uh sort of the the hatred and the uh vitriol that took place uh during that time, but it was every day, it was constant. Uh, if you were on every day, then you had to take some sort of I don't know, uh patient's medication or something, because it was it was out there a lot. Now, I'll admit that I put my share out there, but my contention has always been that I I just want to be able to debate people, to talk to people about the issues, and not have it be personal. But the the news feed in in my my personal newsfeed or my feed in my social media was just non-stop talk of Trump and Biden, mostly Trump and mostly from people who uh uh seems as though they they truly hated him. And now post-election, I find it very interesting. I don't know about you, but my feed is is uh well, it's virtually gone. The people who were against Trump, particularly, are they gone. I don't know where they're at. I I don't see their uh posts anymore. I don't know. I assume they're still posting things here and there, but I don't see it. It's just disappeared. I find that to be really odd, uh, particularly because it's not like we got a new president and all of a sudden everything's better. That's just not the case at all. So anyway, I find that very interesting. And I'm guessing that some of you think that that is, if not interesting, very odd. Well, a friend of mine, I'm I'm actually uh got a little bout of uh sciatic pain. And if you've ever had that kind of pain before, you know what I'm talking about that uh runs all the way from your hip all the way down to your ankle. It's uh it's annoying. And a friend of mine reminded me of this little thing called YouTube where you can go in and type something in and find a video just about anything you want to find out about or learn about. And he said, uh, well, he actually sent me a YouTube clip of uh some exercises, some stretches that I could do. And I thought to myself, well, gee whiz, yeah, I've used YouTube before. Why didn't I think of that? Um, I think I'm just in that situation where the last two or three days it's been more of the acute pain than what I had been experiencing prior to that time. And so uh a lot of times when we have pain like that, we just think that, well, we got to wear it as a badge of honor and we just have to grin and bear it. Uh so needless to say, I am going to be more diligent about doing these stretches so that I can uh keep this uh sciatic uh nerve pain at bay. I'm actually really, really getting the uh desire to want to go out and play pickleball again. I learned how to play just a few months ago, and my uh son and daughter-in-law uh gave me a pickleball paddle for my, well, for Father's Day actually. And I haven't been able to play since then. And it's been hard. So, you know what? I want to get out and play some pickleball and have some fun doing that. Uh, it's a really fun game, and I want to get back out there and and play some more. I consider myself to be a religious person, I am a Christian, and I uh love the idea of faith. It's certainly uh faith is a principle of of action, it's believing something that you can't see, and it's not just confined to uh uh religious people or pious people. It's when we get up every day to do uh everything that we do throughout the day. It takes faith. It takes faith to take another step, it takes faith that we're gonna do well in our job and not get fired. There's so many things that that require faith, things that we want to have happen that we right now can't see. So it's it's that belief that that good things will happen and even though we can't see them, and certainly it there's no guarantee that uh challenging things don't happen to us in our lives. Uh they do. Uh we have to have the faith to uh believe that things will get better, and my belief is that they will. One of my favorite pastimes that I I have to say I used to like to do was to watch uh pro sports on TV or go to the park or the arena or whatever to watch a sporting event. And frankly, it didn't really matter what the sport was, I liked it. But I've really lost interest in watching pro sports. Now I love basketball. It's probably, well, it was my favorite sport when I was growing up and uh even well into my uh adulthood. But I came of age watching uh Julius Irving, better known as Dr. J. And I wanted to be able to do everything that that guy did, and obviously I fell far short of it. But I loved that generation of uh pro basketball players into Larry Bird, uh, Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan. To compare the players from that generation or from that time to today's players is unfair. You can't really compare the different uh generations of professional athletes, but those guys back in the day, they would get bloodied up and they'd get right back on the court. It seems today these guys get a little splinter or something really minor, and they're gonna be carried off the court. It's just really give me a break. It's it's laughable, actually. Well, I'm on it full bore here. There is no rhyme or reason to this format, which is how I wanted it. And there is no segue, there is no transitioning, it's just boom, boom, boom, rapid fire. So let's keep going. I just want to know one thing. How did civilization exist for thousands of years before we realized that there are supposedly more than two genders? That one's really got me. Uh that just really stumped me when I heard that. In fact, it's probably I'm 58 years old, going on 59. It's something I never even dreamt of that we would be talking about in my lifetime. It's just not something that was on the radar at all. And clearly, for the last, I don't know how many thousands of years, it wasn't on the radar of a lot of other people either. Now, I'm gonna say something here that I hope doesn't get misconstrued or taken the wrong way at all. Uh, but I guess that's the point of tolerating Tuesday, right? But there was a time in our society where people would be institutionalized because they were deemed mentally ill, and the professionals, uh whoever the powers that be, didn't know how to deal with them. So they thought, okay, let's just put them all in an institution and not really do anything for them to help them overcome their mental illness, but just give them medications and other perhaps narcotics to keep them controlled, I guess you could say. And we all know these things went on in these institutions. There have been multiple investigations and studies into what happened in these insane asylums, so-called. So we don't have to hash that out necessarily. But my point is now we seem to coddle the mentally ill and we tell them that they're special. It makes sense to me that we need to sort of find that happy medium between the institutionally insane, so-called, and not just coddling mental behavior or mental illness today. And I'm really serious about this. I biologically, there's only two sexes, male and female. Everyone knows this. Yet to the highest degree of the government, the highest level you can go to, we are coddling people who seem to think that they are not the sex that they were born with and somehow need to change that because a mistake was made. I mean, is this not uh uh troubling to you? I I mean, and I mean don't no disrespect to anyone. I was taught growing up that I should be kind and love all people. Uh, I'd like to think that I have grown into that teaching that I was given by my parents at church and in other places. Yet when you speak out against this kind of behavior, somehow you are intolerant and you are unforgiving, and you're not able to accept people for who they are. Well, accepting people for who they are is one thing. Pretending that someone is another gender other than what they were born with is indeed quite another. And what I'm about to say is something that I've said on a lot of my episodes so far and will continue to do so, and that is that we live in a country where we have the right to disagree and to express ourselves to that end. And there shouldn't be any repercussions, there shouldn't be any one who tries to harm us or even, dare I say, kill us, because we simply have a different viewpoint, a different opinion. Uh it's just, it makes no sense to me. It's like right and wrong have been flipped around, and we take our time in our society to coddle those who have real mental issues. And what we should be doing is trying to get them help, either from family members or from professionals who will not substantiate the incorrect behavior. And yes, it's incorrect, it's a mental illness. I've run out of words really to describe it, and it's not just because it's tolerating Tuesday, it's just this happens whenever I have a conversation with someone else in real life, day to day, where this is discussed. Not just the idea that there's only two genders, but any other impractical stance that people may take that is just the most irrational, the most illogical uh stance that we can imagine. And we don't have to imagine it because we see it every day. And it, I just don't think it's right that the rest of us uh put up with this kind of behavior. And when I say put up with, I mean accept it, to to just simply say, oh, well, that's okay. They're not hurting anyone. No, no, they are hurting someone, they're hurting themselves, and it's it's a terrible thing to see, in my opinion. And to that end, do you think that our right to expression has been diminished in, say, the last 10, 20, 30 years, or even the last few years? I do. I think it has been diminished, and I think that those who may have an opinion or belief that is uh outside the so-called mainstream are the the ones who are targeted uh by those who are in the so-called mainstream. And I this is not a good place to be at all, I don't think, ladies and gentlemen. But I don't know what's to be done about it. I know that we should continue to speak up for the truth. We should continue to let our voices be heard, and most importantly, we should do it in a respectful way, a way that doesn't diminish or devalue that person. That person is still, in my mind, a child of God, and he loves them as much as he loves me. Well, ladies and gentlemen, let me just borrow a phrase from Carol Burnett, who used to say, I'm so glad we had this time together. She did it in song, but I'll dispense with the singing at this point. And just because this is the first iteration of Tolerating Tuesday, I will continue to give to you my positive quote at the end of each episode, and today is no different, so let me go ahead and do that right now. This is from a gentleman named Kent M. Keith, and it's something that he wrote to students. It's called the Paradoxical Commandments. Quote People are illogical, unreasonable, and self-centered. Love them anyway. If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish ulterior motives. Do good anyway. If you are successful, you will win false friends and true enemies. Succeed anyway. The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow. Do good anyway. Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable. Be honest and frank anyway. The biggest men and women with the biggest ideas can be shot down by the smallest men and women with the smallest minds. Think big anyway. People favor underdogs but follow only top dogs. Fight for a few underdogs anyway. What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight. Build anyway. People really need help but may attack you if you do help them. Help people anyway. Give the world the best you have, and you'll get kicked in the teeth. Give the world the best you have, anyway. End of quote. And as always, if you can think it, you can plan it. If you can plan it, you can do it.