You Can Be Anything! You Can Become Anything! You can Do Anything!

Don't know about you, but I have been affirmed that way most of my life.

I've tried to impart to my CCD kids the ways in which that is true, and the ways in which it is not.

We cannot all go to Stanford. We cannot all be scientific geniuses. We cannot all be movie stars. We cannot all be NBA phenoms. We cannot all be.... well, fill in the blank with virtually anything.
It's not a matter of resolve or will, of setting goals and accomplishing them.
I could have practiced until my feet were bloody, and starved myself anorectic, I could not have been a ballerina.  Himself could never have been a mathematician. A dear friend who is mentally disabled could never have gotten a college degree.
We all have gifts and talents and aptitudes, but we also all have certain lacunae in our potentialities. God does not hand out the same skill set to every soul and body He creates.

There is nothing that everyone can do.  Right?

Not quite -- there is one aspiration that we all HAVE been given the wherewithal to achieve.

We can all be saints.

All of us.
Every one ever created.
I used to read a message board on which a woman declared, "I'm not  raising my kids to get them into Harvard, I'm raising my kids to get them into Heaven," and was walloped for conceit and sanctimony by most of the other participants. (The Interwebs is full o' bullies.)

But she was absolutely right, and her attitude toward her objective, her obligation as a Catholic parent was absolutely right.

I was thinking about it this week because of a triumph-over-adversity feature that's been on the news, ("I wanted to show that you can do anything you want, if you just set your mind to it!") and a Newman Society story about a Catholic college hosting a lecture called "Moving Beyond the Gender Binary."

Because, you know, individuals can "engage in different kinds of gender expression," and whatever is expressed is, or should at least be honored as if it is.

To do otherwise would be.... what?

Political correctness decrees that one respects others  madnesses as somehow revelatory of truth, you know, greater truth than those of us who think there are two sexes, or that surgically removing healthy limbs is evil, or that marrying an inanimate object is crazy, are capable of understanding.

Marry whom you wish, consider yourself what you wish, become whom you wish with help from a surgeon.

Yes, I am just a big ol' a squasher of cockroaches dreams....