Davison's Doodle

Continued National Grief

Sojourner’s is a good website for a variety of political and religious views on current affairs of the day.  I like the diversity of people that write for God’s Politics, the blog that Jim Wallis (my best public example of an evangelical) began, that is at the heart of Sojourner’s.  This post by Dr. Valerie Elverton Dixon caught my attention and in the process of reading her post it struck me that our nation has been living in and through grief since the Supreme Court called the election for former President Bush.  That “constitutional crisis” began the nation on a path of grief as our naive belief about the exceptionalism of our way of governing was shattered.  That incident in our history proved both that our government can still change without violence, and it also that our election system is rife with fraud.  It probably has always been this way, but until the Internet and 24hr news the public was much less likely to know anything about it until some time had passed.

Another layer of our national grief, I think, is the public’s inability to really request, require, or insist on systemic change in our institutions.  Unlike the 1960’s when people would march on the capital, write letters, or make phone calls, today manyt are too far into debt to be able to afford the money or the time to go and make a statement with our presence.  The freeing of the credit markets ensured that we have become a debtor nation to the corporations and cemented the lobbyist sector for decades to come.  To go and speak with your presence requires a level of sacrifice for some that is too much to bare.  Unlike European countries, Americans are not ready to just shut down an industry, or government, by not participating.  This awareness just compounds the grief.  This leads me to the post by Dr. Dixon who notes that our country wants our President to be pastor, king, and CEO.  I’ll post a couple of paragraphs here.  Click the title to read the entire article.

President Obama Cannot Please Everyone
by Dr. Valerie Elverton Dixon | June 14, 2010 | God’s Politics

Commentary on President Obama’s response to the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico says that he has not been tough enough on BP, that he has not shown sufficient leadership, that he has not shown enough emotion, that he has not demonstrated that he feels the pain of the people in the Gulf States.  After an interview with Matt Lauer on the “Today Show” where he spoke about needing to meet with experts so that he can know “whose a** to kick,” he is criticized for using this expression.

It is impossible for President Obama or for BP to please all.  This is so because no one will be pleased until the leak stops and the spilled oil is removed from the water.  No one will be happy until the coastline is safe from pollution.  This is not unlike a family fight at a funeral.  Family members fight each other because they are angry that the loved one is dead, and they cannot fight death itself.