Opinion/Editorial
A TIME FOR EVERY PURPOSE UNDER HEAVEN
It’s not a hard time for your country. It’s a hard time for a lot of poor people, a lot of underemployed people struggling more with self-identity than income, a lot of lost veterans home from fighting wars they can make no sense of, and many more. They need our current leader. They need this leader to fashion his mission from the New Testament. They need this leader who’s has taken hits and sometimes done wrong to give hits and do right. They need this leader who acts instead of talking about acting and doing nothing, except talking some more.
Modern life came along and swept the mindset of everyone away, like a great wave washing up on a beach. Old forms of getting together, communicating, and getting to know one another disappeared almost overnight. The new distance between the people of today is much greater all the while the people think it is less. The vast presentation and availability of the information available to just about everyone with access to the Internet have been anything but presentable and revealing. Instead of discovering much more truth, the public has come to discover that truth is a relative term when considering where the vast information is coming from and the ability of presenters to lie about and distort it.
It’s not a hard time for our country. It’s a hard time for the places that make up our country. For the broken roads, cracked bridges closed broken-windowed factories, and the lack of great skyscrapers building and spaceships departing and returning to earth.
It’s not a hard time for our country. It’s a hard time for our image, as we’ve turned our back on the wondrous tenants of the words written on the Statue of Liberty, on the papyrus of the Declaration of Independence, and on the amendments to the Constitution.
It’s not a hard time for our country. It’s a hard time for our country’s friends, on both borders and beyond. It’s hard for all those people to keep their fearful giggles to themselves while they fear to the point of terror the people they once thought of as their closest living and saving friends. Our job, if we will see and accept it, is to indeed make these places and things hard for our country to ignore and overlook.
It’s our job to make it hard for our leaders to act out and alienate so many of the citizens inside this country and those beyond its borders. It is our job to make it hard for our country to continue to swallow lying platitudes, accept phony tax breaks, divide the different cultural groups that make up this country, and then meld them into the great advancing social machine the USA really is. It’s our job to do these things. It doesn’t pay much. It pays for everything. If this is our job, then how do we do it? It’s not enough to read articles and think about injustice and what might be done about it. It’s our job to go online and write about it. Even if we have few social media friends it is important that our words be expressed to whatever part of the public that might read them.
Our words don’t have to be well written, well-edited, or even in the best English…but they’ve got to be put down to lay there for the ages. The price may be putting up with disagreement and even being placed on rabble-rouser lists, but that price must be paid. The struggle to rise against the difficult and corrosive elements of this planet to continue to forge ahead in civilization’s development is all about action. The Internet, demonstrations, and election working are the social battlegrounds of today. Church meetings, social gatherings of all kinds, and even bars, clubs, and restaurants are all failing as places to meet new people and socially thrive.
The country needs leadership, and that is sorely lacking at the present time. What the country also needs, and has, is us. It is a time to meet someone. It is time to write something. It is time to do something. The nation was assaulted by the pandemic and then hit a second time. The war between Russia is running with the threat of the use of nuclear weapons on everyone’s minds if not tongues. To everything, there is a season and a time to every purpose under the heaven.
This is our season. This is our time. Let’s go do something about our purpose.
