Tired in the Heartland...

"I am no believer in the amalgamation of parties, nor do I consider it as either desirable or useful for the public; but only that, like religious differences, a difference in politics should never be permitted to enter into social intercourse or to disturb its friendships, its charities or justice. In that form, they are censors of the conduct of each other and useful watchmen for the public." --Thomas Jefferson to Henry Lee, 1824.

"Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. Hate destroys a man's sense of values and his objectivity. It causes him to describe the beautiful as ugly and the ugly as beautiful, and to confuse the true with the false and the false with the true." --Martin Luther King Jr.

We have been at this for some time, no doubt. Perhaps it is just because the guy that I favor is in office, but it seems like the vitriolic rhetoric is reaching new heights. Whether it is the "birther" movement, the "Obama-Hitler wants to kill your grandmother" slogans, or the current "education indoctrination" criticism, the general atmosphere (at least here in Oklahoma) makes it hard to find any sense of civility or reasonable dialogue about our future together as a nation.

Yes, that's right. I said OUR future TOGETHER as a nation. Sometime pretty recently we lost the sense of taking care of one another. Someplace between Survivor and American Idol we have decided that our own personal ideologies, our own personal feelings about someone or something, trump everything else. They trump reasonable legislation, they trump any possibility of changing our minds and they apparently trump moral imperatives.

Can we really not have meaningful changes - needed changes - in issues like health reform, education or immigration without simply retreating to our corners and spitting insults at one another? I will call myself out as guilty of this during the last administration. I wouldn't let anything be good if it came from Bush/Cheney because of my ideology.

As a Christian, I believe that Christ calls us to love. To love means that we are willing to change our own minds, to see another's point of view and to try to walk a mile in their shoes so that we might understand them. athe apostle Paul once told us about love in a passage that is unfortunately usually relegated to weddings, but should be the Christian Constitution, right after the Beatitudes. Paul said:

If I speak with human eloquence and angelic ecstasy but don't love, I'm nothing but the creaking of a rusty gate. If I speak God's Word with power, revealing all his mysteries and making everything plain as day, and if I have faith that says to a mountain, "Jump," and it jumps, but I don't love, I'm nothing. If I give everything I own to the poor and even go to the stake to be burned as a martyr, but I don't love, I've gotten nowhere. So, no matter what I say, what I believe, and what I do, I'm bankrupt without love.

Love never gives up.
Love cares more for others than for self.
Love doesn't want what it doesn't have.
Love doesn't strut,
Doesn't have a swelled head,
Doesn't force itself on others,
Isn't always "me first,"
Doesn't fly off the handle,
Doesn't keep score of the sins of others,
Doesn't revel when others grovel,
Takes pleasure in the flowering of truth,
Puts up with anything,
Trusts God always,
Always looks for the best,
Never looks back,
But keeps going to the end.

1 Corinthians 13:1-7
translation from The Message

We may not still agree, but disagreeing with compassion and understanding is a far better place to be in than where we are now. Our lives together should not be dictated by the talking heads and blogospheres looking only to increase their ratings. They should be forged in the discipline of agape love, as Dr. King once told us. We don't know who to trust anymore because we aren't looking with the right eyes.

Frankly I'm tired of being a liberal. I'm ready to just be an American.

"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye." --Antoine De Saint Exupery