Another Bullet Dodged

What I sense in the country –from listening to news, listening to people, reading blogs and papers – is that a big, heavy object has just missed us. There’s a nasty hole in the sidewalk where we were standing a moment ago, but we made it. The bailout has passed and been signed into law.
Everyone who cares to comment or write about it admits we have no idea exactly what effect it will have on our lives, on the country or on the world economy. But it passed and, somehow, we weren’t under it when it landed. Time to start breathing again.
Don’t expect any improvement before late next year at the earliest. Unemployment will definitely get worse to much worse, we are assured. Housing prices are still going down. But the bailout has passed and panic is assuaged.
That, we may take as a given, is a good thing. Getting rid of panic, if that’s all it’s done, may possibly be worth three quarters of a trillion dollars. As Frank Herbert writes in his book, Dune, “Fear is the mind killer.” Now we can think again.
We can return to our normal, petite worries like how to pay for the mortgage, college, gas, groceries, the new hybrid automobile, and so forth. We can even try to figure out which presidential candidate offers the most likely cure for our economic malaise.
Which one has the magic? Which shell is the pea under? Obama or McCain? Biden or Palin? Who can be trusted to lead us into the promised land? Does either of them have even the faintest glimmer of an idea as to what’s going on or what to do?
I listened to a pastor preach this morning. He warned about the crippling effects of fear. He insisted that it is not Christian to give way to fear. From a Christian point of view, he said, there is a God who controls even the economy and the markets.
That is a comforting thought for those who believe in such a God. Unquestionably our founding fathers were closer to that belief than most of us are. Sarah Palin, according to what she professes to believe, should share that belief.
There are Christians who would suggest that rather than looking to a political party or candidate for economic salvation, we should look to the “God of our Fathers” (if anyone remembers that old patriotic hymn). Maybe this is a time to look back to Irving Berlin and Kate Smith.
Berlin wrote “God Bless America” in a time of crisis, during World War I. He sensed that that crisis was not sufficient so he tucked the manuscript back in his trunk. In 1938, with an unending Depression upon us and Hitler looming over us, he brought it back out. Finally, a big enough crisis.
Are we in a big enough one now? Is it time to ask the one of whom we used to sing, “My country ‘tis of thee” to bless and guide us now? It wouldn’t be politically correct – it wouldn’t meet the standard of diversity. But it might be comforting.
And, if as many of our forefathers believed, it is true, it might be far useful than fear – and far more helpful than trying to guess what this or that candidate might do.