Recent acts of life have kept me from writing. As a writer, not finding quiet time to knit the threads of thought into words is like hiding a knitter’s favorite needles after giving her a basket of colorful new skeins of yarn.

Still, I observe. Recent observations show tangled life contrasts. It’s as if the cat has ripped through what was once a tidy, elliptical winding of string, and knotted it to the point where I may as well throw the mess into the trash. Yarn chaos.

For instance, this business of holiday design for an overpriced cup of coffee. When a verbally flamboyant, alleged Christian evangelist called a plain red coffee cup another sample on the war on Christmas, his video went viral. The man created a successful frenzy. I suspect that his campaign raised some money for his coffers. (His website has a donation button, DVD and t-shirt sales.)

Like the Rocky Horror Show, this man’s campaign is the theater of the absurd.

The website offers an interesting video where he, dressed in black and in a blackened room, tells the story of how he was on the verge of suicide after “a girl just left me … for another man … it was the darkest, worst moment of my life … I was broken, shattered, devastated … I asked God ‘where are you, how could you let this happen to me?’ ”

Now, if this video helps prevent a suicide (which is on the rise for white middle-aged men), I’m okay with that. Yet at the same time, I have to put my knitting needle thoughts to work and ask, “All that over ‘a girl’ that left you? Seriously, you were going to use your Second Amendment rights, and go lights out? And then you scream at God for letting that ‘girl’ leave you for another man?”

That’s about as petty as the red cup frenzy. I smell a cow barn that hasn’t been cleaned in years. Where’s my muck-raking boots?

When a woman leaves a man for another, there’s usually a good reason why. From personal experience, reasons to leave would include your man’s a jerk, obnoxious, abusive, chauvinistic, or you mistook love for lust, etc. These reasons have little to do with God. Imagine if God had to manage the love-life of every single human alive. (Whoa! I just left the stinky barn and galloped into a potential sitcom project.)

I can’t help but wonder if we take on petty causes — as if the world were ending — because our real challenges are so large, that petty is the best we can do.

A computer science student who lives in the Mumbai area of India, recently posted a video — that has not gone viral — about one of our many real world challenges —child trafficking. Child-trafficking is world-wide, even in the near perfect little community where I live.

In direct opposition to the bombastic man wailing about a red cup for holiday coffee service, Jeffin Varghese’s video “A Dark Room” an idyll he wrote and illustrated, portrays a captive child’s living nightmare.

Varghese states the purpose of his work, “We can prevent crimes like child trafficking with (art) as it makes people to think and act on it.”

Will a pimped-up controversy over a red cup prevent anything? Will it convert more people to Christianity? Not likely. True persons of any faith will continue knitting life’s skeins of yarn into real works of comfort and aid, while shutting off the loud banality of false wars.