Twenty-Five Year Old Rant

I wrote a lot of songs in my teens and early 20s. I've had one bit of one of them ringing through my mind quite often recently in light of recent political messages I've heard and read. Consider that I was all of 15 when I wrote this, and was all intense about social hypocrisy, including that in my own life...

Falsehoods floating in an aluminum can
Smoking cigarettes, promote the nuclear ban
Thinking humanly won't get you too far
Hate a nation, save a dog hit by a car

Walk a mile for what's behind your back
Say you're cautious when your mind has just one track
Hear what you want to hear 'cause it's all you'll hear anyway
'Cause man you've got it wrong and I'm not gonna stay

I'm goin' where the Lord is 'cause I know He is real
You say He's for the fool, base your facts on what you feel

Turn on the radio, hear the crazy preachers yell
Flip to a rock n' rolling song to praise the lord of hell
Look in the mirror, you think you're so good
You'd see you're so diseased if you only would

Go where the Lord is, 'cause I know He is real
You say He's for the fool, base your facts on what you feel.

Declare reality, invent your fate
Now if you're listening to me it's not yet too late
Jesus wants all of you, soul body and mind
You cannot see Him now 'cause you are blind

So go where the Lord is, 'cause I know He is real
You say He's for the fool, base your facts on what you feel.
I dare you, base your facts on what is real now.

I will admit that listening the sea of political commentary voices can make me want to rant like my 15-year-old self. The part of this song that keeps repeating in my mind is "hear what you want to hear..." and the refrain. Why? You watch a debate, then you hear Republicans saying the Republicans were great and Democrats saying Democrats were great, and they both point out how the other guys really are doofuses. You hear socialists saying that governments are the savior of mankind and you hear libertarians talk as if countries had no people in them to be concerned about. You see some Congressional representatives being bribed -- and accepting bribes -- to vote hastily for a catastrophic amount of money and power to be placed into hands that are not elected by citizens of this republic. I have been having flashbacks of my days working for Wisconsin Right to Life where I was the phone recipient of death threats, bomb threats, angry people trying to justify abortion and grieve the loss of their grandchildren to the same, evil taunts and gloating when Bill Clinton wiped out a decade of pro-life gains immediately after his inauguration.... all when I read of Catholics trying to say that abortion is not a significant enough political issue. All of this makes me want to scream.

But in the end, of course, my answer to my own tirade is the same now as it was 25 years ago. The Lord is real, and to Him I go. That too seems so much more complex now than when I was a teenybopper. Not more difficult (in fact, it is easier for me now). But the "real" is more real, I guess. I see now that there truly is no other answer to human needs. I don't go to the Lord simply to be sheltered from turmoil. I go to the Lord because He alone has the words of everlasting life. We desperately need somehow to pick up the shards of truth that get trampled underfoot in the public arena, or at least draw attention to them, while pointing to the coherent Whole who alone can give meaning to human life.