I asked the question on July 4 before heading over to visit with my Mom and Dad on my Dad’s 75th birthday. Tonight, after being a couch potato all evening for about 5 hours, I am ill equipped to answer or to elaborate. My son is at work and the wife and daughter are up in Cincinnati.
In the past, I got really worked up over the nonsense of the Bush administration. But it also seems like a little more serious than just “nonsense”. It’s destruction. It’s a glaring example of what institutionalized corruption and greed can achieve.
But what really bothers me increasingly in the past couple of years is the unwillingness of the church to be any match for the kind of individualism and consumerism that seems to reign over all else. The ineptness of the church to be a challenge to this makes watching this stuff all the more frustrating. And that’s what we’re reduced to: watching it. Because without the kind of life that the church is called to provide, just fighting politics with politics cut from the same cloth, beholden to the same system, we are all ending up chasing the same empty “goals”, only the “goals” are just carrots dangling in front of us. Such is capitalism, and the endless chase after those things.
