By Moristotle
[Originally published on July 23, 2006.]
This morning I linked to an old friend’s church website and read his most recent “letter from the pastor.” It ended with the words, “The wisdom of God surrounds us. Thanks be to God!”
I share the belief that we are surrounded by and can participate in something we might call “God’s wisdom,” and I believe that gratitude (not taking good things for granted, but accounting them blessings) is a valuable attitude and makes a significant difference in the tone of a person’s life.
But it seems to me that thanking GOD for things that make us glad implies reproaching God for things that make us mad...such as the fact that we have in our country today a pretend president who makes statements like
My desire [is] to promote institutional change in parts of the world like Iraq—where there is a free press and free religion—and I told [Russian President Vladimir Putin] that a lot of people in our country would hope Russia would do the same thing.Bush’s “good friend” Putin, into whose soul Bush imagines he can look, responded that he didn’t think Russians would want to promote what’s going on in Iraq. And more and more Americans are coming to agree with him.
While I am grateful for this, I don’t thank God for it, anymore than I blame God that Bush supporters seem to vote for political leaders for much the same reason they select country club members: “What will this person do for me or my interests? Is this person ‘one of us’?” (Thanks to a friend of fifty years, a high school classmate, for this formulation of Bush voter values.)
So, whether God has anything to do with Bush’s dwindling support, or with the growing numbers who realize that the man’s a nincompoop, I don’t know. But I’m still grateful.
| Copyright © 2006, 2020 by Moristotle |
Not the serious response your post deserves, but on first reading I was reminded of this: "if a hitter in baseball thanks god when he hits a home run, shouldn't he blame god when he strikes out?"
ReplyDeleteIf not for Trump W would have gone down in history as the dumbest President, now he seems smart.
ReplyDeleteEd, your comment is SO APPROPRIATE to James Knudsen's Acting Citizen column tomorrow. I wish I would be able to see the smile on your face when you read it.
DeleteEd, in the years I lived in DC and was around many people at least somewhat in the know, several of them said (loosely quoting here) "the thing people don't understand about W is he is a lot smarter than most folks realize, and not nearly as nice as many people like to imagine." Americans tend to dismiss what seem to be incompetent politicians as "dumb" when what they actually are is corrupt--at least by everyday people/outsider standards. If you are raised in a win/lose world where all that matters is your family and friends winning and everyone else losing (as with both W and Trump and many, many other people where win/win is an alien concept) then that is all you know and that is all you have in the way of instincts. These people aren't dumb, they are just innately finetuned to look after family and friends without giving a second thought to the "collateral damage" suffered by the country or the rest of the people in the country.
DeleteWe outsiders tend to look at W and Trump as dumb because the country basically fell apart under their "leadership" but from an insider perspective they were top-notch leaders who delivered the goods as expected when they accepted massive campaign contributions from people who later made epic profits from 9/11 and the "Great Recession" of 2008. Just as people on the inside today are making unimaginable profits thanks to Trump's "dumb" leadership.
Not so sure you can't have them both, dumb and corrupt, it is said, that Karl Rove was his brain and Dick Cheney was his cashier. Both of these men were very good at what they did as bad as that might be. They were both close friends of his daddy and I'm not sure W had much control over either one of them. Unlike W, Trump is educationally dumb. He came from a gangster background and that's all he knows. He acts it out every day and the American people have always made heroes of crooks and murders so he feels right at home and there in lays the dumb...in the end we kill the crooks and murders. He has never been able to read the complete book and thinks this can go on forever.
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