This space is ever more public, ever more widely read, and I am painfully conscious of how public a life a teacher must live. My everyday musings have earned me the occasional accusations of too conservative and more often too liberal. How both?
I've been working through what it means to be a true friend in a polarized society. So rarely are we called upon to say what we really think. We volunteer opinions under threat of disapproval, even shunning from our communities, and despite the ever higher price, we volunteer our opinions. Why do we do it? It would be much easier to be silent, to stop at praying for peace. Another question: why is the price so high for having an opinion? Why do we care so much about each other's opinions?
Policy opinions that we will never touch, might never even vote on, have become shorthand for what kind of person we are. The ideas are so big, so full of paradoxical facts, that we don't do research deep enough to get to the truth. I find myself frustrated even in the shallow end. "What is truth?" And I wash my hands of what I don't understand.
Here's what bothers me right now. I have not yet put feet to what I hold to be our real charge—not just voting on how the government will care for the poor, but really caring for people who have needs they can't meet: clothing the poor and the feeding the hungry; visiting the sick and those in prison; caring for orphans and widows (or our modern-day equivalent for people without a livelihood).
Neither side of the aisle seems to be doing that, but Jesus, don't let me wait to take action.
