Parabola (par-ab’-o-la): The explicit drawing of a parallel between two essentially dissimilar things, especially with a moral or didactic purpose. A parable.
“You don’t know the difference between shit and Shinola” my cousin Larry said. I was trying to shine my shoes with a dried piece of dog shit I found on the sidewalk. “Same consistency, as shoe polish, same color as my shoes. It smells different, but that can be fixed” I said. This was before the days of shit bagging, so there was free dog shit all over the place. I said, “Now, I’m going to smear it on my shoe and see how it works.” It didn’t work. It didn’t shine my shoes and my shoes smelled like shit—I could fix the smell, but the failure to shine made the whole thing a failure. My cousin just stood there with his mouth hanging open. He said “You really don’t know the difference between shit and Shinola. What the hell is wrong with you?”
I responded: “The Ancient Greek philosopher Protagoras said ’Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,’ He made his arch rival Plato crazy when he said this. Plato believed beauty, and everything else, was an idea floating around in Heaven and peoples’s heads—they were like keyholes that people peeped through to see reality. If one person’s hope about something was another person’s fear about the same thing, how could this be? We have the “same thing” with conflicted perceptions of it that induce real and different responses, that often, must be negotiated. It’s messy yet empowering. The “keyhole “ of human understanding reduces humans to seekers and squabbles—where difference is a sign of error and not the diversity of approaches to life and learning that may be the foundations of what it means to be human. Not knowing the difference between shit and Shinola may be an error, but that error, like all error, is a sign of my humanity, which I value more than being correct. I am fallible, and that is my most cherished attribute.
My cousin said, “I think I see your wig spinning into orbit. How can you bother thinking about this crap when you have a life to live? Your Shinola experiment is a sure sign of your broken mind. Stop throwing dog shit at me and get in the car. We’re going to the hospital to get you diagnosed and put on some kind of medication. Put down the dog shit!”
Maybe he was right. Maybe I was a lunar module. I dropped the piece of dog shit and got in the car. We didn’t talk on the way to the hospital. When we got there, we checked in and my cousin told the receptionist that I didn’t know the difference between shit and Shinola, and I didn’t care. The receptionist looked alarmed and picked up the phone and had brief, panicked-sounding conversation with somebody. She pointed to a door behind her and said to me, hand shaking, “Go in there and wait.” She closed and locked the door. I heard her say to my cousin, “People who don’t know the difference between shit and Shinola, generally do not know the difference between good and evil. They are a potential menace.” At that point, they determined that I had no health insurance. That did it. We were escorted out of the hospital by five security guards. I was blindfolded and handcuffed. The cuffs were removed at the hospital’s exit and I removed the blindfold on my own. Because I was such a threat, my cousin got me an Uber. At that point, he wouldn’t ride with me.
When I got home, my Dad was waiting on the front porch with a .357 aimed at me. He told me to get in the house, with no false moves. It was like an old cowboy movie. My cousin came to my defense when he arrived in a Kevlar vest. He said: “I’m sorry. This really got blown out of proportion. There’s nothing wrong with your son, there’s something wrong with society.” I thanked my cousin. “Not so fast!” My father yelled. “What you’re telling me is everything is relative, that there’s no single idea of anything: society’s in control?” My cousin answered “Yes” and Dad lowered the gun and hugged me. At that point I was promoted from “crazy as a loon” to “really quirky.” I was grateful.
Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).
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