God Go With You

I saw a T-shirt the other night, which lead me to deeper thought:

Dear God,

How can you allow all the violence currently in our schools?

Signed,

A Concerned Citizen

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Dear Concerned Citizen,

I am not allowed into you schools.

Signed,

God

I admit to paraphrasing, but my reproduction is fairly accurate. The gist of the shirt was simple: violence inherent in today's schools is a direct result of not allowing prayer within them. A most fallacious premise if there ever was one.

Anthony Weiner's Bad Day

A lot has been written and said and repeated and trumpeted and blathered about in regards to the shenanigans of Representative Anthony Weiner. I was trying hard to resist writing about the incidents involving him, believing that there was little more I could add to the general cacophony. Yet, as days have passed, as new information has come out, and as the import of the events that have transpired has sunk in, I am left wondering: what does it all mean?

I come to the unalterable conclusion that this is the ultimate teachable moment for our society in regards to many things: morality, the Internet, government, humanity, duty, honor. Within the tangled skein of these events, lie the truths we seldom wish to confront or take action toward. It is a tableau of the virtues and vices that both ennoble us and plague us simultaneously.

I won't pass judgment on Rep. Weiner. As the Biblical admonition from Jesus goes, "may he who is without sin cast the first stone." I may not be a public persona, but I have done many things of an indiscreet nature that I am not proud of. Many of us have, and whether we admit it or not, we know it in our heart and our soul.

I have no reason to believe that we can populate our government with angels and saints; we will have to accept that fallible humanity will be led by fallible leaders, and that hopefully personal failings of honor are not symptomatic of deeper failings of morality and duty toward humanity. We must take each of us as we are, and hope that those we elect to represent us can truly represent our best interests, as well as those of our state, our nation, and humanity as a whole. we cannot ask of them to become paragons of virtue, though we would wish them to, perhaps to salve our own conscience.

So let this moment be a warning to us: the world is more complicated by leaps and bounds than it ever has been, and our personal failings are magnified by the environment we now inhabit. We must turn away from our sanctimoniousness and turn toward each other, if we are to survive. Let that start now, and let Anthony Weiner have been the one to lead us in the right direction.

The Lie's The Thing

It is far easier to be honest with ourselves regarding the state of things, than for others to be honest to us about these same things. Expediency and politics often overwhelms reason and logic in public discourse, and we are led to believe one thing, a thing that is far removed from the truth of the matter. Far too many of us have given up challenging what we hear, content to believe that those who speak to us do so in earnest and without prevarication, which in our hearts we know not to be true. Seldom is the public speaker telling the whole story, for enlightenment would lead to questions, and questions would lead to inquiries, and inquiries would lead to a lack of answers or worse, an ever-complicated fabric of lies which would fray at the slightest pull.

The Rape Of Morality

There is a movement afoot to subvert a woman's control of her own body. For the longest time, it was held in abeyance, but now the movement has reached one of the pinnacles of power in Washington, D.C.: the Speaker of the House of Representatives. Representative John Boehner, heir to that title through the power of fear-mongering and President-bashing, coupled with Tea Party fomentation and ranting, along with the abdication of backbone by the Democratic Party, now stands at the forefront of the effort to strip women, not just of choice of what to do with their bodies, but even what constitutes violation of their bodies. One of his acolytes, Representative Chris Smith on New Jersey (who, sadly, is this author's representative), is introducing a bill that, amongst other things, redefine what constitutes rape, to include only cases of overt force.

So much for the party that claims to have the best interests of America at heart.