Dateline:
Lake Geneva
September 6, 2017

Opinion/Editorial

A TIME TO EVERY PURPOSE UNDER HEAVEN

It’s not a hard time for your country. It’s a hard time for a lot of poor people, a lot of underemployed people struggling more with self-identity than income, a lot of lost veterans’ home from fighting wars they can make no sense out of, and much more. They need a leader. They need a leader who might fashion his or her words from the New Testament, whether Christian or not. They need a new leader that has taken hits and done wrong to give hits and do right. They need a leader that acts, instead of talking about acting and doing nothing, except talking some more. Modern life came along and swept the mindset of everyone away, like a great wave washing up on a beach. Old forms of getting together, communicating and getting to know one another disappeared almost overnight. The new distance between the people of today is much greater, while so many people think it is less. The vast presentations and availability of information are accessible to just about anyone who can gain access to the Internet, but it has been anything except presentable and revealing. Instead of revealing more truth, the public has come to discover the “truth” ability of presenters to lie and distort it.

The country needs a leader that wants to make the people in the country bigger, not just himself. They need the security of knowing that they are at least thought about by that leader, if not truly cared about. The country needs a leader who does not cheat them out of the little they have in both money and self-respect, in order to reward friends only at the top. It’s not a hard time for our country. It’s a hard time for the places that make up our country. For the broken roads, cracked bridges, broken-windowed factories, and for the lack of new great skyscrapers rising up and spaceships departing and then returning to earth.  It’s not a hard time for our country. It’s a hard time for our image, as we’ve turned our back on the wondrous tenants of the words written on the Statue of Liberty, on the papyrus of the Declaration of Independence, and on the amendments to the Constitution.  It’s not a hard time for our country. It’s a hard time for our country’s friends, on both sides of every border and on all continents, and beyond. It’s hard for all those people to keep their nervous giggles to themselves while they fear to the point of terror the people they once thought of as their closest loving and helping friends. Our job, if we will see and accept it, is to make these places and things hard for our country to continue to ignore and overlook. It’s our job to make it hard for our leaders to act out and alienate so many of the citizens of this country, and those beyond its borders. It is our job to make it hard for our country to continue to swallow lying platitudes, accept phony tax breaks, divide the different cultural groups that make up this country into the great advancing social machine it is. It’s our job to do these things. It doesn’t pay much. It pays everything.

If this is our job then how do we do it? It’s not enough to read articles, and think about injustice, and ponder what might be done about it. It’s our job to go online and write about it. Even if we have only a few social media friends, it is important that our words be expressed to whatever part of society that might read them. Our words don’t have to be well written, well edited or even in the best English…but they’ve got to be put down there for the ages. The price may be putting up with disagreement and even being placed on rabble-rouser lists, but that’s a price that must be paid. The struggle to rise against the difficult and corrosive elements of this planet to continue to forge ahead in civilization’s development is all about action. The Internet, demonstrations and election working are the social battlegrounds of today. Church meetings, social gatherings of all kinds and even bars, clubs and restaurants are all failing as places to meet new people and socially thrive. The country needs leadership, and that is sorely lacking at the present time. What the country also needs, and has, is us. It is a time to meet someone. It is a time to write something. It is a time to do something. “To every thing, there is a season and a time to every purpose under heaven.”

This is our season. This is our time. Let’s go begin to fulfill our purpose.

~~ James Strauss  

The Byrds