My instructions are clear

Once in a while, I'm sorry, we just have to talk about the president.

News stories tell us there has been a debate among his advisors as to whether he should address the nation on television with a unifying message of some sort. Play the role that so many other presidents have played in times of crisis: the calm (but never weak) father-figure.

But some of the president's advisors (and this is the group that seems to have won out) have thought differently. For them, this may be a crisis he can put to political use. The politically useful message, then, is not one of unity, but one of us-against-them. Not calming, but the careful promulgation of targeted fear.

I just want to go on record that I don't need the president to speak to me, and if he went on television to address the nation I would probably not even tune in. He is not my father-figure. I do not look to him for wisdom or balm or leadership of any kind. And I don't think many other Americans do either.

Politicians gonna politic. It was a Democratic party activist who first said, "Never let a crisis go to waste," but both parties practice that maxim with assiduous consistency. That is, in fact, what politics is all about.

The political spectrum of right vs. left, with the hapless centrists floundering in the middle, is a warfare spectrum. It is all about confrontation. Peace does not exist on that spectrum. Peace has no place there. 

Politics is the way we organize the contest for power within our governing system. Peace is manna from heaven. Justice, too.

We should expect very little from politics, and thus also from political leaders. You can't abolish politics, but you must keep it from becoming the all-in-all.

Then there are the people the Bible calls "the quiet in the land." They do not seek power. They only want to plow their field, and take their produce to market, and worship their God, and raise their families. The idea of a photo-op seems silly to them. They are not a brand, they do not have an image, they do not seek the cameras. Since they are quiet, they are mostly overlooked. But perhaps there are more of them than we realize.

All I know is that as a Christian my instructions are clear.

"Turn away from evil, and do good. Seek peace and pursue it." Ps. 34:13

The rest is just noise.