Becoming the Thing They Hate

A curious spiritual principle is that you become what you contemplate. As Jesus puts it, if your eye is full of light, then you will be full of light. If it is full of darkness, then how great is that darkness.

For years, I remember listening to Limbaugh accuse the Dems (in FDR’s voice) of having “nothing to offer but fear itself”. Now the GOP have morphed into the thing they hate. Every morning, I log on to find these idea-free clowns doing nothing but looking for something to complain about and attack. Sotomayor’s a “racist” based on some stupid out-of-context remark. The Dems “plan to import terrorists into America.” Mark Levin is now one of that hottest voices on the Right, elevating our national conversation with stuff normal people left off in fourth grade. And today, we see the astonishing spectacle of GOP leaders rejoicing that “debt will bring Obama down“. This is exactly as anti-American as the anti-war nutjobs who long for the day the US is nuked as a lesson to the their enemies on the Right. It is a deeply myopic approach to our common life. The idiots now in charge of the GOP seem to neither know nor care that the debt they hope will destroy Obama will also destroy these United States–and that they share a huge role in allowing that to happen.

Our ruling classes have almost no interest left in the common good (on either side of the aisle). They care about power and, like all people made drunk by the sin of pride and gluttony, they are no longer thinking straight. Trusting them to actually bring about the common good is folly. Happily, God writes straight with crooked lines (and he takes care of drunks and fools). There are still many left in Sodom who are righteous, so he has not allowed the clowns who juggle our bombs, power, and retirement accounts to destroy us all yet in one of their petty scrambles for top doggery.

Now I need to turn *my* gaze away from these spectacles and toward God. I’m not immune from the principle above. Great is the darkness you see when you look at Washington DC.