The agenda of disgust

It’s trendy this season to talk about how unhappy voters are with their choices for president. After listening to candidates and pundits hack the president and his aspiring opponents for the 2012 presidential election to pieces, some are calling for someone else to step into the race—someone we can get excited about. I seem to remember a good bit of excitement about several candidates, including the sitting president, over the past three years, but it was always short-lived when we discovered failings and mere humanity in our flavor of the month. How silly to think that another candidate would energize this capricious culture for months at a time. We’re basically unhappy and determined to make that undefined unhappiness known to all who cross our paths.  

I write this only a few weeks after Time magazine selected The Protester as its annual “Person of the Year.” The lead article begins with poignant stories of those in North Africa who became fed up with the tyranny in their countries and used social media to spread a spirit of dissent throughout their region. That unrest burned through several countries in that corner of the world and resulted in the downfall of more than one dictator. As some in Europe and the U.S. saw the Arab Spring protests succeed, milder versions spread through Greece, Spain, and across our own nation in a movement called Occupy Wall Street or just Occupy.

Time’s writer did not say often enough or clearly enough that the Occupy Wall Street protests that popped up all across the U.S. were not morally equivalent to the Arab Spring. One participant in the OWS protest in New York noted with sorrow the empty (though trashed and filthy) park the protesters left behind because the police forced them to live somewhere else. Note that he was not talking about bloodstains on the sidewalk as might be the case in Syria, Libya, or Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. Those who were willing to go to the wall for basic liberty and free elections are people of more serious and clear intent than those who only know that they don’t trust our leaders, or dislike having to repay student loans.

Disgust with our political system and unhappiness with the circumstances of life in America is not a 2011 or 2012 phenomenon. “Voter disgust” was a lively topic during the Clinton and Bush administrations. My first presidential election was a choice between a man who became arguably the worst U.S. president of the past 100 years and a moderate Republican incumbent. While “disgust” was not the word of the hour in 1976, neither was “enthusiasm.”

Unhappiness with available choices is in the water supply I think. Our own Southern Baptist Convention has heard several pastors and would-be leaders suggest that we should demolish our convention and start over in some better way they can’t spell out. We all know those who have abandoned church attendance with a facile “I love Jesus but not the church.” Again, they know what they are against but not what they are for.

Those who see the status quo as inadequate may be worthy of respect, depending on what they’re willing to do next. Those who can only quit or carp or corrode when faced with a man-sized problem are of little interest. Serious people are those who settle in and seek a better way. That is the way our American founders thought. They not only had a self-sacrificial response to clear tyranny, they had a workable plan upon which they were willing to pledge their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor.

In a flawed or failing marriage, the admirable person seeks the long road back to a healthy relationship. If repairing a struggling marriage is the work that takes the remainder of your life, it is worthwhile. The promises you made are worth your remaining years.

In an imperfect church, the man who really loves Jesus will find a way to build up his fellow believers rather than be the first man off a sinking ship. The command of Christ does not give us the option to cut and run. If you believe that this is a body for which Jesus died and that these people will be with you in Heaven, why not adopt the mind and love and humility of Christ now rather than in some other place or time? Again, this is the work of a lifetime but still the right work.

Of course our country has its faults. But I know the source of that imperfection. We elect men and women who are generally better people than we are, if only by a little. We find their faults easy to spot because they came from us. Do we only disdain politicians who break promises or does it apply to you and me also? Are our elected leaders the only ones who should be loyal to their spouses or generous in charitable giving? We may send a better sort of person to Washington or Austin when we are ourselves a better people. The response of the habitually disgusted person implies that the system has somehow become unworthy of him. That’s not true of many of us. And yet the disdain we express for our elected leadership is so ubiquitous as to become background noise.  

Disgust and general crankiness is a lazy way of thinking that leads to much worse things. The growing anger that erupted violently in London last summer began with this “they are to blame; I am entitled” mentality. It was also too much a part of the less-violent Occupy protests. American Christians must recognize runaway cynicism as toxic in their own lives. It is a wicked habit that makes us ungrateful, ungovernable, and unbearable.