Our politics have been born of one subtraction after another, one cut followed by the next. For ours has become a dissipative age lacking the ballast to temper or self-correct. Full steam ahead, then! Damn the torpedoes, for I am king and captain and I bow to nobody!
It is difficult to be good, or to try to be good. Kindness, compassion and humility are some of the difficult tasks that face each and every one of us every day. But it is burdensome because it asks us to set ourselves aside, for just a slight moment, to gauge a situation from a vantage point outside ourselves — to imagine that we are not all we make ourselves out to be and to admit that we ourselves don’t belong on center stage.
It is difficult to be a Christian, too. And perhaps that is why so very few Christians gesture toward being one. It takes labor, real labor, to rise to the calling of something greater than ourselves when we imagine our own self as the greatest thing imaginable (actions, or lack thereof, speak volumes here).
It’s also difficult to really care about knowing truthfully when seeking any truth holds the capacity to render a person defenseless against a self-directed charge of being wrong. And then what — need we change? And to what end — to be kind, to be generous or gracious? It seems that this is often too much. It is just easier to let inertia be the guide and let careless indifference fill our heart-broken days.
Every invective coming out of Washington and its political suburbs, rising to the surface of social media, is just more flotsam set afloat by another wreckage of state. The spectacles of hate and moral dissipation masquerading as strength and greatness confound our own true north, rendering us rudderless and disoriented. Damn the torpedoes!
Steve Moore
Kalispell