In recent years, our nation has been beset with many problems. I’ve written about a few. But I am struck by how consistent we have been, particularly in insisting on notions, ideas, and theories that are at best silly and at worst deceitful. Some of those consistencies are remarkable.
Take for example the consistency in believing that getting something for nothing is superior to hard work, risk-taking, and personally benefiting or profiting—perish the word—from your labor. That the work ethic is a passé notion and that the government is responsible for your success; indeed it’s guarantor against any failure. Never mind that failure can often be the best motivator for success. Or the consistency that the government can spend our way to prosperity. It can’t.
And there’s consistency in believing that elections are stolen as opposed to lost. This silly idea raised its ugly head in 2000 in Florida where those who did not prevail in votes insisted on recounting them until they did. That hobgoblin is with us even now when one side laments its loss by claiming they were robbed as opposed to being out-hustled. Is there fraud in voting? Yes. Have rules been perverted to enable fraud? Yes. But in the main, the losers lost because they did not get out their vote in sufficient numbers to win; shenanigans, bad laws, and shortcuts notwithstanding.
Another consistency is that if you were born male or female that you are not necessarily that anymore. All you need to do is “identify” as something you cannot be, despite the natural and plain evidence of your DNA, and all is well. Moreover, that the politics, religion, business, work, recreation, and social contracts of life must adapt and identify with the new you or you will have some fatuous basis to sue the pants off any person with a countervailing opinion.
Not to be ignored is the consistency in believing that we can ignore bad behavior, indeed apologize for it, and if ignored enough, it will simply go away. That if we adapt to bad behavior and normalize it, we will be able to live peacefully with it and all will be just peachy keen. You can accept rampant crime in your neighborhood, from smash-and-grabs to gang murder, and you’ll be safe if the theft and death is kept apart from you by walls or confined to your television. That “other peoples’ wars” are none of your business and require nothing of you because those wars will never come to your shores. That allowing repeat offenders back in the streets after they have destroyed yet another life is social justice. More foolishness from hobgoblins.
And there is the consistency of belief by some that destroying human life is somehow a way to preserve freedom. That a human is not a human at conception, but rather a “thing” to be jettisoned as simply as a fleeting thought or distraction, like a bothersome gnat buzzing about the ear. That the “thing” is attacking your body as surely as a person with a knife at your throat. That the “thing” won’t grow into a full being like you and me from the time you and another participated in its conception. Human life will not be other than human.
Among the most destructive consistencies, however, is the notion that your example and behavior have no impact on others. That what you do is your business and has no effect on your family, children, community, state, indeed, your nation. That somehow what you do in private is your business as long as no one else is hurt. Until you have become so very hurt yourself that you hurt others by acting-out your dysfunctions. The evening news will then assert that you were a loner, that you kept to yourself, that you rarely spoke to others, until you gunned down an entire room filled with innocent men, women, and children. The penultimate thought process is that you are a victim of your circumstances and deserve to perpetrate violent revenge. No, you were consistently self-absorbed.
It’s all quite foolish as Ralph Waldo Emerson penned in 1841.
“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.”
Yet I think the most foolish of all consistencies is that sin is an irrelevant notion. That virtue is the stuff of prudes. That we can live in a drug-filled world, that crimes can be ignored, that some are exempt from being racist, hateful, selfish, or baneful. The one consistency in all of that is the foolishness that accompanies little minds.
The consistency we need is one that acknowledges that there is a God, a higher power, who orders our lives if we allow that. And that’s very much the opposite of foolishness.
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