Thought for today:
"The fear of intimidation is a mental process, much more than a physical thing. It is something that you allow yourself to believe. Your beliefs are there to choose and can never be forced on you. Your beliefs will always govern your actions. Your mouth may say ,'Yeh, yeh, yeh, yeh' while your belief system is saying ,'No! No! No!'
Since the recent referendum result to leave the European Union, I gain the impression that so many of the Remain camp not only genuinely fear the possible future in some respects for themselves and their children, but that they also feel intimidated by perhaps some of the more extreme views and actions of a minority of people with racist views who do not represent the normal man and woman on the streets of Great Britain, or indeed, the overwhelming majority of Leave voters.
Being intimidated is much more to do with the having of fear and the lacking of control. It sends out a very clear message to every parent in the land: "Mess with us and we'll do something much worse than mess with you; we'll mess with your children!" The less control we seem to have, the greater the intimidation we will feel.
Wife beaters and torturers have long known that the best way to control someone is to make them feel afraid; to make them feel powerless and unworthy of consideration. Consequently, our intimidation cannot last longer than our fearful thoughts, our feeling of low self worth and our belief that we are powerless. Whilst we can never stop an assassin taking our life should someone be determined to murder us, we can stop ourselves from being afraid to live it, whatever the future holds.
We must learn to discover the enemy within us than focus too much on the one without; we must learn to see ourselves more clearly and to hear our inner voice. We must learn to exchange the negative things we tell ourselves about the present and the future for more positive self-talk and change our belief systems to more rational and helpful ones. If we want to see the fiercest competition close up, all we have to do is to look in the mirror.
The intimidation we feel today, unless we rid ourselves of it, will be felt down the generations. Those children whose fears are reinforced are more likely to become fearsome adults, those who are led to feel they are being bullied, will in turn become bullies, and those who are intimidated will be more likely to become the next intimidating generation!
When I was a Probation Officer, I experienced other Officers and Social Workers spreading the notion throughout society that children brought up on council estates were brought up deprived and at a disadvantage in adult life. Not only was this a load of nonsense, but it was pernicious and destructive to many people who started to believe it, not least, previous council estate dwellers. Any adult, whatever their genuinely held view, who today tells others that the future in Great Britain is to be feared and will be disastrous for all our young, is at best doing them no positive service and at worse, is robbing them of future dreams they might have had and now,never will!
Whatever our past views prior to the recent referendum, however we voted, recent events throughout the country reveals a panic response which merely adds to any uncertainty instead of lessening it. The one certain thing we can all do now which is guaranteed to make things worse than they need be and as bad as one's greatest fear might suggest, is not to work together as the great nation we have always been and still are. If this opportunity is to work, than it is incumbent on all of us, now that the referendum has been democratically delivered and voted upon, to make it work!
The 20th century English Christian evangelist and author, Leonard Ravenhill wrote that any man who was intimate with God would never be intimidated by man. So place your faith in whatever you believe in, whether it be God, self, children, country, whatever, but as a base line of any future success, please have faith. The choice is yours; you can either make today your day of intimidation or independence!" William Forde: July 4th, 2016.