Wednesday.....Culture.....Tea Parties...And Beyond

Twenty-five years ago I would attend a couple of Christian conferences a year and I'm thankful for them. I learned a lot, bought a lot of books and met new people and gained new friends. I haven't attended such a conference in years because they are primarily designed to encourage Christians to read more, the seminars tend to dwell upon the basics of the topic and they rarely enter into areas not already covered by the speakers in their books. So they proved very useful to me but I don't see them as providing the same function throughout life for they should send us off on our own studies. Another potential problem is that, although they tend to encourage and motivate, we have to move beyond the need for external sources to keep that motivation. Enter the Tea Parties. They are unlike what the media portrays them as for they are everyday people who would most likely get nauseated watching American Idol for they probably spend their free time fulfilling their civic duties. They are mostly spontaneous and quickly organized by non-professionals. They certainly motivate but this motivation must eventually generate its own steam or the people will be so dependent upon external sources that they will eventually become board with the excitement and thus the end of usefulness. Like a child whose parent has a hand on the bicycle seat as they run along, the Tea Party must eventually let go. My encouragement to you is that we must fly on our own someday. This radical progressive liberal of today does not rely on truth, argument, logic or reason. They are dependent on sound-bite memorization. They rarely go off on their own, rarely come up with a new idea and thus rarely question their own teachers. Their great achievements are shouting down Ann Coulter on campus. There are exceptions. A case in point is Saul Alinsky. He did not rely on sound-bites, he gave methods, ingeniously dishonest and very effective but even Alinsky's methods have an Achilles Heel, that being impotence from prolonged exposure to truth, thus we should know what is set out before us to do.