The Betelgeuse of the 1988 film was more humorously disgusting than frightening, but this scarecrow re-creation was fairly fearsome. It was the one scarecrow of the afternoon at Cheekwood that creeped out my young son, (though, in all fairness, that’s really not such a difficult feat). I wrote my last post about the importance of protecting our dreams and ideas as it related to a happy looking scarecrow image with stuffed crows on his shoulders. The reality of our internal lives, however is that there is a lot more that needs protecting. And I’m afraid that a happy looking scarecrow gently waving straw fingers in the breeze really isn’t good enough to scare off the things that need to be scared off.
I’ve been spending some time this week thinking about the variety of ways that cultural messages infiltrate our lives. Sometimes those messages benefit us and other times they don’t. The problem is that most of us don’t bother to think about filtering the messages, for ourselves or our children. If we are even aware of the harmful messages we internalize, we feel hopeless against the sheer magnitude of the messenger. Our personal scarecrows are few and far between and often not scary enough.
