Find the good and praise it!
There were many good and original things that came out of Monday’s inaugural ceremonies held on the Mall in Washington, D.C. But, there were also some links to the past and one of the best of them, in our very humble opinion, was Tennessee senator Lamar Alexander’s reference to Roots author Alex Haley’s phrase: “Find the good and praise it!”
It is all too easy to find the bad and highlight it because it seems that there is so much bad to be had in this world. When we look at twenty children killed in Newtown, Massachusetts, it seems to overwhelm the small acts of kindness that go on in this world everywhere on each and every day. The good of this world often goes overlooked as we go about our daily lives in a swirl of activity that often leaves us breathless and worn out at the end of the day.
The good does not ask for any recognition, it just exists!
We were young and at the start of our working lives back in 1976 when Roots, the miniseries startled the world with its story of a people who were uprooted from their world and brought in chains to a land new to them in conditions that were often very, very harsh. Where the saints and sinners who were the pilgrims found a new chance at opportunity on the rocky New England shores far away from the political and religious oppression that they had experienced in the old Europe, those who came in chains to this world as the first generations taken from their African shores, found only oppression and a constant toil early on across every colony of the New World. And even after the northern colonies had consigned slavery to the ashbin of their history, in the south, the practice would continue on for generations and generations as the fertile southern soil provided the genesis to further bring more and more of these subjected people illegally to our shores.
Even the act of coming to America aboard a slave ship was not risk free. Many an illegal slave ship, after the act that prohibited any more from being brought to our shores was passed in Congress in the first decade of the nineteenth century, was sighted by our navy and those who held the slaves simply threw them overboard still in their chains to find a collective and horrible watery grave.
It must have been the shock of all shocks to be cast into slavery on the shores of ones native land and transported to a land that had afforded such opportunity to so many but held so little for so many just because of the color of their skin. And, in so many eyes today, so little has really changed in their minds toward those that they neither choose to accept nor understand or empathize with in any sort of way. As the nation and the world watched the nations first black president take his oath of office and deliver the inaugural address that he might have wanted to deliver four years ago, the man that he had bested the previous November vowed not to attend nor to even do the courtesy of watching what went on. This man had been portrayed to us as an individual, through his Mormon faith, who did so many acts of kindness for so many through his active participation in his church. But, this was also a person who had stood before wealthy donors and singled out forty seven percent of this nation as those who took and did not give.
How profound a misunderstanding of a nation could one man have as Mitt Romney professed?
This writer spends a portion of many of his days among some of the most giving people in the world and, on the surface, it would appear that they would have nothing to give at all because they really have nothing but their kindnesses to offer at all! They offer their love and their charity and, like a Christ who had nothing but the clothes on his back, they live the promise of good each and every day that they walk this earth. And even though most of them have only the clothes on their back and little else, many would share the simple things that they have with even the most wealthy that there are in this world if they thought that there was a need for it. And, they ask for nothing in return! In the pre civil war south, many poor white dirt farmers had far more in common with the wealthy plantation owners slaves than they did with the southern aristocracy and its economic ruling class. Today’s working and other poor go their quiet way doing their quiet kindnesses as they live in a world that the Mitt Romney’s of this world could never comprehend. They are a simple folk who cannot even comprehend that someone would take away from them what little they have to get by on in this world. Most have never had anything so it would be easy to take what they do have from them. They would simply shrug their shoulders and go on their way, trying to get by on what little they could find to eat and wherever they might find a place to lay their weary heads. But, they would still share with one another and anyone else whatever was left. There is the story of the man who worked at his desk far late into the night. He saw a small spider trying to weave a web. Every time that it would try the man would soak it from his inkwell and watch it fall back down in despair. The spider would try and the ink would fall time after time. Finally the man took mercy on the spider and decided that this would be his last soaking. He waited for the spider to try once more but discovered that the exhausted spider and quietly passed away! And, the man looked around at the enclosing darkness and became very frightened indeed!
Jesus Christ talked about these humble people in the Christian Bible’s Matthew’s book, chapter twenty five, versus thirty one through forty six when he made the simple statement that “as yea treat the least of these, yea treat me!” And, in those same verses, he also spoke of bringing the nations together to pass judgment on those who were the givers and who were the takers just as well. He called them “the sheep and the goats”!
Those who would take have probably won the argument here on this earth. With the debt that this nation carries it will soon happen that we will start to have to make choices. And, as president Barack Obama intimated in his inaugural address, we will have to choose between those who so selflessly built this nation and those who have thrust it into a future where such choices have to be made. These people speak of realities when they really mean that there is money to be made and those to be stepped upon in the quest for that greed! They speak of takers as if those who have nothing deserve nothing and even less than that, not realizing that they are the ones who are taking from the common past to fund a future that only a select few will have any earthly blessings in. On January twentieth, nineteen sixty one, John F. Kennedy gave an inaugural address in which he stated that the torch had been passed to a new generation of Americans. He referred to those born out of the depression and the struggles of World War Two. They are about gone now and the torch lies dusty and extinguished on the shifting ground of a future that so many do not wish to contemplate.
One day we will elect another Mitt Romney! It is as sure as if the sun rises every day and sets at night. And when we do, the quiet people of this land will suffer as they have never suffered before. But, amidst the wreckage of it all, there will be many among them who will look up gently from their misery to offer something or do something good, and, will not even ask any praise for it at all.
And, in the heavens above, a watching God sits and waits his day of judgment over it all!
IOVHO,
Regards,
Joe
To say that "God exists" is the greatest understatement ever made across space and time.
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