Common Good, Common Ground, Common Sense
“Our world is like my mother healing from her surgery. It has been badly bruised and broken. We have all suffered. But when we suffer together, we heal together. When we have grace and talk about our experiences, we naturally strengthen each other.”
Our everyday language has been taken hostage by politics. Terms like liberty, freedom, science and love have all been claimed by one party or the other.
Instead of churning out leaders in the model of Penn’s founder Benjamin Franklin, it sometimes feels like today’s Ivy Leagues churn out cogs for the machine of finance capital and consulting.
A dwindling pool of laborers and taxpayers means that our ability to pay for infrastructure, safety nets, and social programs is shrinking, too – and quicker than we think. Miniscule birth rates lead to dismantled welfare states because we simply won’t have the population to fund them.
If everyone is religious in some way, and all people have a part in creating the political environment, there needs to be some way for us to re-evaluate the all-powerful unspoken rules that bind our peoples and collective conscience together. The answer lies in seeking solidarity.
We need God to intervene in our lives and save us, and no human government, no matter how godly or well-constructed, will bring about God’s Kingdom on earth.
If the sickness within modern America is rooted in liberalism’s individualism, then it can only be healed by the solidarity of the civil economy.
Throughout Reconstruction there was effort made to break the dependency of newly freed slaves from the old landowners, but this was repealed in 1876 under pressure from resurgent white supremacists.
We need a shift in politics that considers true freedom as being afforded the opportunity to do not just what we want to do without constraint, but to do what we ought to do; for the sake of healthier families, neighborhoods, and communities—the things upon which our United States of America are built.
Limbaugh’s show (and others like it) created a centroid of ridicule and mockery about important issues that deserve serious consideration and discussion, part of a breakdown in real intersection and trust across the aisle.