Steadfast Living in Turbulent Times
Where are you putting your marker down?
Do you remember the famous “I’m mad as hell” speech from the 1976 movie “Network”? The character Howard Beale, in part of a long monologue, cries out:
“‘Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won’t say anything. Just leave us alone.”
Some mornings these days, I feel this deep in my bones. It’s not steel-belted radials for me, it is my coffee and fiction escape novels. Sometimes, in times of chaos and increasing inability to sort out truth from fiction, I would rather tune out everything that isn’t within my immediate control.
With a political landscape that seems better suited for a pro wrestling match than a dignified debate over the future of our country, it is tempting to decide that we are not having anything to do with it. We can opt out — no one would argue that these spaces are negative and hateful. No one would question our desire to live only in spaces of love and light.
Maybe we secure this choice by telling ourselves that our voices wouldn’t really make a difference anyway and that we don’t want to be associated with the madhouse. Or that it is someone else’s job to solve. Or that both sides are equally bad anyway. And so we…
