Where is America?
America is on line at the airport. America has its shoes off, is carrying a rubberized bin, is going through a magnetometer. America is worried there is fungus on the floor after a million stockinged feet have walked on it. But America knows not to ask. America is guilty until proven innocent, and no one wants to draw undue attention….
And so I came to think this: What we need most right now, at this moment, is a kind of patriotic grace — a grace that takes the long view, apprehends the moment we’re in, comes up with ways of dealing with it, and eschews the politically cheap and manipulative. That admits affection and respect. That encourages them. That acknowledges that the small things that divide us are not worthy of the moment; that agrees that the things that can be done to ease the stresses we feel as a nation should be encouraged, while those that encourage our cohesion as a nation should be supported.
Read it all. For those of you preaching tomorrow, I think you have little choice but to address the national anxiety of which Ms. Noonan speaks head on–KSH.
“The nation’s mood is marked by a sense that our great institutions are faltering and our leaders have gone astray.” So runs the lead in above the article.
I was speaking to a friend today who recently arrived home from being overseas. He said the sense outside the United States is that our leaders do not know what to do. Speaking to someone else earlier in the week, I spoke of a sense that we are a nation that seems to be unable to govern ourselves.
Note carefully: seems. One prays God enables us to rise to the occasion.
Boomers and their stupidity have left us with few moral imperatives to pass on to the next generation. Perhaps they’ll do better amid the mess we’ll leave them.
Brian
National anxiety? Maybe those who are anxious should be anxious. Anxiety can sometimes be like the little lights on your dashboard. They warn you to correct course before some greater calamity happens. Instead of worrying about how to insulate people from anxiety, or from consequences, I wish just for once we’d be intellectually honest about the “crises” we face.
There are those of us who (no triumphalism intended here), are not anxious. We are not anxious because we are the citizens who quietly get up each day and go to our jobs; work efficiently and diligently; live below our means; save money; avoid risky investments; never saw it as our “right” to have a house; never saw our home as a way to make a quick buck; put food, clothing, shelter and medical insurance (in that order) before big screen TVs, iPods, vacations and elaborate Christmases; and get along better when government is out of our faces instead of “solving” our problems with “change.”
While others are anxious, we’re busy taking care of each other without fanfare or bureaucracy. We’re busy noticing that a friend has been laid off, so we quietly pay their rent. We see that an uncle needs health insurance, so we buy it for him. We can do these things because during the “seven fat years” we laid up what we needed. We don’t need or want a “bailout,” and we’re deeply offended when those who made choices we knew were silly (both Wall Street and borrowers) are going to be insulated from the folly of their actions by Government using its coercive power to take from us.
Maybe we need leaders and clergy who will use the current crisis and malaise to point people back to the basics.
3, Amen.
My problem, in a nut shell is what do I do other than pay the bill for the folley? As a tax payer who has paid MY BILLS who gives me relief? Obama, no I earn to much, McCain, a little better but I am still stuck with Cater, Reagan, Clinton and the House and Senates failure to act dispite warnings from Senator McCain, Senator Obama, and President George Bush.
Perspective would help; how does the current crisis compare to (1) the Cold War, when the possibility of atomic bombs falling on your City was real , especially if you lived near a submarine base, or (2) the 1930s depression where unemplyment was 4-6 times that of today, and there was no unemplyment bebefit to provide a cushion, or (3) 1941 right after Pearl Harbor, when we shut down our much of the our industry and shifted to war production, or (4) the 1970s when there were lines for gas and two recessions worse than the one we have ( in 1982 gas was about $3.25 adjsuted for inflation).
This persepective might help us see that “good times” are just temporary islands between crisis; and that even in good times our own personal crisis are all too real.
But my main question is, why should we what we hear from the pulpit this Sunday differ from what we hear any Sunday?
I submit that there is not a thought here that cannot be brought down with a common pin. We have a mass of well intentioned platitudes that lead to obviousnesses. Her biases is pretty clear -well, that;s fine – but she offers not a grain of genuine insight. This is writing for Lady’s Home Journal. Larry
This was not addressed directly in the Pastor’s sermon this mornng but was in the LCMS equivalent of the Prayers of the People (which are read by the Pastor).