There are other forces at work here.
Both sides use the dramatic rhetoric of life and death. Both side scream at each other. The left is the side of abortion, euthanasia, moral relativism. The right approves of the death penalty but will not let someone die in dignity. They are hypocrites, wearing their righteousness on their sleeve. None of them have the full story. Everyone is right and everyone is wrong. There is venom and name calling and hatred.
There is more here going on than a woman’s tragedy. There is evil. This is a skirmish in a spiritual war that has been brewing in this country for the last 20 years, and the roots of which reach back through eternity. Each side of every issue becomes more polarized, more assured of their correctness, more assured that the motivations of “the other side” are not to be believed or trusted.
It is the attitude of Us VS Them. It is tearing our country apart. It is attempting to destroy our faith. Our faith in God, our faith in the rule of law, our faith in each other. The cacophony of the talking heads on television, the screaming headlines of the papers and magazines, the shrill screaming lunacy of the blogworld, is not the sound of people sharing ideas and communicating. It is the sound of the ripping apart of our spirit, a tearing of our souls, and a crack in the spirit of our country that may never be repaired.
I believe that there is good and evil in the world, and that they are constantly opposed to each other, in every step of life. Our lives are touched by it daily, in small doses, and in small doses it is easier to see it, to fight it, to pray for the strength to overcome it.
Occasionally the influence of evil swells to proportions that we are unable to control. It changes our focus from the spiritual battle all around us to a worldly battle over issues of imagined importance. It distracts us from the truth. It pulls us into worldly considerations at the expense of our faith. Once the crack is there, it is easier for hatred, doubt, suspicion, and disregard for each other to take root, to fester. It is a trap, laid for us by evil to keep our attention on the physical world, to forget that there is a life after this one for those that would accept its terms. We become trapped in the fleeting concerns of the physical world as if our eternal lives depended on them.
It is no longer about what we say and who we say it to, or what the effect of our words are but only how loudly we can scream them, how embellished we can make them to prove our point, how much we can hurt those that disagree with us.
This evil is giving birth to hatred and bitterness in our country, more now than ever. It is causing us to treat our neighbor as the enemy if they come to a different conclusion over some irrelevant, mundane (worldly) issue.
We must not let this evil win. We must not let it divide us, conquer us, destroy our spirit. We must not let it kill our joy at living in the greatest country in the world. We must not let it turn our freedoms against us, and in doing so turn us one against the other.
