Whine Flu

Did I purify my heart and wash my hands in innocence for nothing?
For I am afflicted all day long, and punished every morning.
If I had decided to say these things aloud,
I would have betrayed Your people.

When I tried to understand all this,
it seemed hopeless until I entered God’s sanctuary.
Then I understood their destiny.
Indeed You put them in slippery places;
You make them fall into ruin.
How suddenly they become a desolation!
They come to an end, swept away by terrors. – Psalm 75:13-19

This is one of those days when I want to say things out loud about the futility of doing good. Some months back, I think it was the lovely QP who put up one of those tests that you can take, in that case it was something like “which card in the tarot deck are you”? I was the Tower, not too surprising after I thought about it, given my avatar. I am rather susceptible to getting indignant over injustice. I don’t worry much about injustice in the American legal system where a lot that is right is illegal, and a lot that is legal is not right. If Congress wants to reform a system, let health care alone and do some work on “justice”.

My indignation is much more likely to be stirred by bullies, liars, and those who are willfully obtuse toward the true and the righteous. Sometimes I feel like the kid in The Sixth Sense, except, “I see stupid people”. In fact, I think I said that yesterday, but no one got the reference. I’m not talking about that small percentage of the population who are, to use the poetic term, simple. The genuinely simple are righteous more often than not. My quarrel is with those who are stupid by choice.

Why would anyone choose to be stupid? Stupidity relieves a person of a degree of moral responsibility. Their immoral behavior is no longer immoral, just stupid. They can distance themselves from the consequences of their actions with the claim that they “had no idea” such a thing would happen. They can become politicians and work for the government. They can drop non sequiturs, change the subject, and make baseless personal attacks.

Stupid people can compartmentalize their lives, enabling them to disregard contradictions and irony. They can claim the moral high ground on a moot point then make the sweeping statement that their opponent “isn’t perfect either”, or claim that he has no standing to judge them. They can think that they have won a debate when, in the view of any non-stupid, objective observer, they had not even shown up.

But a tirade against the Stupid By Choice was not my intent. It is easy for indignation, however righteous, to turn into bitterness and cynicism. See the paragraphs above. Stupidity is contagious and raging cynicism is a form of it. I haven’t yet figured out how to completely immunize myself against cynicism, but I do know the cure.

I have needed to be humbled, and the Lord knows how to do that. The difference between me and the Stupid By Choice is (I hope always) that I am willing to see my getting taken down a notch as the grace of God. The SBC see only the secondary agent, the tool in the hand of God, and no tool is perfect. When I have been SBC myself, I have even questioned God’s power and/or goodness. I assume others do the same. If I say it is God’s fault or if I say it is the fault of another, I am being stupid. If I say the wicked prosper, I am being stupid.

Oh, yeah, the cure – God is on call all day, every day. He neither sleeps nor slumbers. He makes house calls. It's a kneel-in clinic.