Comic strips

How many of you like to read the comic strips in the Sunday paper, or the "funnies" as we used to call them? Or how many follow a particular comic strip in the daily paper or online?

I do, I admit it, I'm a 45 year old male that likes to read the comics. I need a laugh every day, don't we all? I have been following "Peanuts" since I was 5, I have "Maxine" delivered to my Facebook page every day, and even have "Dilbert" accessible from my cell phone. I also have all the Dilbert comic books on my bookshelf, I wish I had all the "Peanuts" books from when I was a kid, I must have had about 100 of them. Don't know what happened to them all, guess they were lost in moving with some other things.

Anyway, today's "Peanuts" strip was the one where Violet is chasing Charlie Brown threatening to beat him up. He stops and tries to reason with her, telling her that if little kids can't solve their differences, what hope does the world have when they're grown up? She hits him, then tells Lucy she had to because he was starting to make sense.

What's the saying, "Out of the mouths of babes?" It's true, sometimes kids say the darnedest things, but there is a lot of truth to them. I saw "Everybody Loves Raymond" yesterday, the episode where Frank scares Allie by getting into an argument with a supermarket employee. He doesn't like she's afraid of him afterwards so he sits down and talks with her. She tells him when she is wrong she has to apologize, shouldn't he do the same? For Allie, Frank goes and apologizes, even though the employee won't accept it. But at least he tried.

Sometimes we do something wrong, and don't apologize. Sometimes we do apologize, and it's accepted. Sometimes we apologize, and it isn't accepted. Other times we don't do anything wrong, but we apologize just the same.

I think it's a measure of how much we've grown up by how willing we are to try and achieve peace with others. We can be juvenile and say, "I'm not apologizing, he started it!" Or we can be the bigger person and do whatever needs to be done to remain on good terms.

I guess what I'm trying to say is we should all look at how old we are and how we want our world to be. If all it takes is saying a few words to live peacefully, even though we may not totally agree with the other parties, isn't that worth it? As long as we don't compromise our principles and who we are I don't see the harm in it. It's only if something is really worth fighting for that we should refuse to let the other parties walk all over us.

Let's all try and look at things from the little and big picture angle. It's always easier to put something smaller away then something bigger. And if we let the little things go too long, they can escalate into a bigger thing, so shouldn't we stop it while we can?

Think about it the next time you're in an argument with someone, it's easier to talk it out and maybe apologize then let it become a major problem that can't be solved.