I have been fairly silent, and have decided to be a learner rather than a meme sharer on this one because something to me didn't add up.
For one, I am seeing all of this anger defending Starbucks and their red cups, but I'm not seeing anyone defending the stance that the red cups are anti-Christian. It's like everyone is fighting this weird war that only has one side.
That's because the damage has already been done, and there's one mans sitting back and raking in the glory...and the dough.
Joshua Feuerstein, or 'Red Hat Man' as many call him created this craze. He went to war with a company that does not identify as Christian over cups that didn't even have Christ based decorationss, and he started a war. This guy has created more anger filled frenzys in the name of Christ than he knows what to do with. Through reading more and more in depth on him, I wish more people would dig deeper rather than just sharing memes about something they don't even understand the generation of....rants of a man in a red hat creating a social media frenzy.
Sure, a lot of his videos are super uplifting and motivational, but a lot of his actions are to specifically designed to create wars over things that have nothing to do with how Christ would want us to live, and it causes Christians to stumble.
No wonder so many people think we suck. Christianity is once again the focus of negative attention over something that is truly unworthy of a fight. Yet, here we are again up in arms over....cups.
What we don't realize in this social media share crazy world is the more we share our outrage over this man's rant about coffee cups, the more attention he gets, the more people jump on his bandwagon, the more people buy his books, his DVD's, and give him money. The more hits he gets on his website, the higher he crawls on the search engines, and the more big dollar advertisers his website can attain, putting more and more money in his pocket. The more people who watch and share his videos, more YouTube income he gets. Then guess what happens? He has to come up with more strategic ways to make you angry enough to get the frenzy going again. You're his personal piranhas and he just keeps waving a hot dog over the tank.
This is a man who makes his living by getting people riled up and angry. He creates anger where it wasn't there before. He went into a Starbucks and made them write Merry Christmas on the cup because he believes Starbucks to be anti Christian. He went in waging war, got some right wingers to write some articles, and here we are.
I believe he should be unnamed and forgotten. My wish is that people from this moment on ignore the red cup thing, because the man that started it all did it just to ruffle feathers and bring out the worst in us. No one I have talked to about it even knew where the whole thing came from, they just said, "some Christians somewhere".
He believes we are dogs and he is Pavlov. He proved it. Just scroll through your Facebook, and I promise, you'll start salivating at the thought of hitting the share button on some red cup meme.
My wish is that people unplug and learn before they jump on the bandwagon. My wish is that people don't trend things that only further the agenda and pocketbooks of people who purposefully spread anger.
This man, who claims to be a Christian forgot the Christ part.
If you want to put Christ in Starbucks, then make sure love, acceptance, grace, and peace beam from every cell in your body and walk into a Starbucks. Put good in the world, don't create black holes that suck our energy and replace it with anger. Be a window to Jesus rather than to hate and dark things.
Spread the love, push back the darkness, and you'll see the truth.
XOXO
The Stun Gun Girl
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