It’s cold and rainy again today. Yesterday was a warm and sunny day; a tease of hope that spring is coming. This morning the news seems especially sour after the prospect of a new start under the Biden administration. It is business as usual as the media partisans and politicians return to their barricades. We seem to have learned nothing these past four years.
I’ve always been an unabashed optimist believing in the goodness of people. I wake up every morning happy. But I have to admit that the news, our political bickering, and the state of the Union worry me. I may have been wrong all these years believing in ethics and the ability of reasonable people to get along.
This morning I read the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Brunswick News and the Dahlonega Nugget. I also read Letters from an American by historian Heather Cox Richardson. The news and the weather made me not want to leave the house today.
Pick any topic at random – immigration, climate, or school openings, for example, and it is politics that drives the discussion not solutions. The destructive winter storm in Texas has become an argument for the left and right to score points. The question of school openings has become as politicized as the pandemic. Congress continues to be in a constant fight to defeat one’s opponent. Everything, everything the opposing party proposes is always, always wrong. What a way to run a country!
And it is no wonder. Letters-to-the-editor in local papers continue to be outrageously and insultingly partisan. In this they both engender and reflect the larger problem. There are not enough reasonable people who are willing to work together for the common good. Politicians and the media gain too much by not cooperating.
You are so right During Lent we should pray for a new beginning for each side to listen to the other and vote their conscience Doing that is a Christian act.
Of course, Anita, but note that many of the rabble rousers who attacked the Capitol and Trump’s lieutenants in Congress loudly profess their Christianity and go on to commit offensive and unethical acts.