Americans tend to believe there is a simple solution for any
problem. Your child can’t master a musical instrument? He just needs a bigger,
or better, one. Traffic is snarled? The Mayor needs to widen the streets. Crime?
Simple: more prisons. More money, bigger homes, better cell phones, more
troops, more guns. It never stops.
Such simplistic determinations used to be the fodder for the
coffee shop crowd. No more. Social media has seen to that. Our belief circles
get smaller, and our interaction with other humans gets more limited. Our leaders communicate in intemperate "sound bites." Even some
so-called “faith leaders” preach spite and bitterness. We get angrier and
angrier.
Then it explodes. It did yesterday in my country. Can there
be any setting more deserving of safety and tranquility than a group of our
country’s elected officials practicing for an event specifically designed to
promote fellowship and unity? Along with schools, meeting places, and public
events, such events demand the moral imperatives of peace and harmony.
It saddens us and we seek answers, simple answers. They don’t
exist. I’m afraid there will have to be a total rethinking of our role as brothers
and sisters of a common universe before the situation will calm itself.
I think back about 1968, Hardly a year in which Americans can claim
greatness. I was “out of country” as they say. Each day, there seemed to be a
new and more horrific story than the one the day before. The impacts of these
even permeated the places where I was serving my country. Comrades in uniform
distrusted one another. We had to watch in both directions for danger. One
longed to go home, but wondered if home would be any safer than where we were.
Many times, it wasn’t.
America lived through it. Believing it can again, I’ll do my
part, which, after all, is the only thing that each of us can do.
No comments:
Post a Comment