If the people will lead...

Occasionally on my travels I'll listen to the news, but not much anymore because it grows more and more like an excercise in futility with truth as the first casualty.

But the news seems to be teaching one thing. The generation leading us now is a generation of style over substance, emotion over intellect, and selfishness over the common good. They are locked in a permanent childhood and have yet to, and probably never will, transcend themselves. And we're stuck with them.

Until the time the generation that came of age in the 60's passes this Earth and sanity returns we cannot depend on them to morally or spiritually lead us and should not trust thier opinions on anything of substance, and a lot of other stuff as well. The best, perhaps, we can do is pray they will not do so much damage that the years of repair will seem overwhelming.

For now we have to begin to build a new order of life rooted in the very things the hippies turned senators reject, the idea of transcendent truth and unchanging goodness. It will be hard at first because the amoral but powerful have no problem with using force to achieve thier ends when people refuse to bow to thier gods. We'll have to be second class citizens for a while, absorb thier fury, and quietly build behind the scenes and wait.

The demographics are on our side. And so is truth. Already we see the absurdity of a philosophy (if it can be called that) rooted only in the satisfaction of urges. As time goes on the disastrous results we already see will become more acute and the emptiness of people's lives will bear stark witness to the failure of an idea.

When that time comes, and it appears to be soon, there will be something there, deeply defined and already in practice to breathe new life into the corpse of our culture. And it will be beyond mere politics or economics or any of the ways power is manipulated, even thought it will transform them all, because it will be a revolution of the spirit, a reconnection with the wisdom of faith over time, a change in the very heart of people and not just thier environment.

Already every painful headline shouts out the death of an old way of being and a call to something, to Someone who will make all things new.

Take a minute to turn off your TV and you'll understand.