Moderate By Comparison

The concerns of a radical Harper Conservative Government have been much trumpeted by Liberals, Bloggers and doomsday prophets (including at times myself).

Anyone who's tempted to complain about the "radical" outcome of our election might want to check out the electoral results out east. The electoral success of a party who's charter calls for the destruction of a neighbouring state with perhaps the best trained army in the world. That's a new kind of radical.

The middle east peace process is one of those topics that confounds the mind. It continually brings to mind a passage in a book by Henri Nouwen called Reaching Out:

...All of the 'news' is simply mentioned as secondary items whereas the headlines speak about break-ins, lies and the use of huge sums of money by the highest officials in the government, an event desribed as the greatest tragedy in the history of this country. And today's newspaper is not any different from yesterday's and is not likely to differ much from tomorrow's.

Shouldn't this crush our hearts and make us bow our heads in an endless sorrow? Shouldn't that bring all human beings who believe that life is worth living together in a common contrition and public penance? Shouldn't this be enough to force us to break out of our individual pious shells and stretch out our arms...

...What keeps us from opening ourselves to the reality of the world? Could it be that we cannot accept our powerlessness and are only willing to see those wounds that we can heal? Could it be that we do not want to give up our illusion that we are masters over our world and, therefore, create our own Disneyland where we can make ourselves believe that all the events of life are safely under control...It's hard to allow these questions to go beyond the level of rhetoric and to really sense in our innermost self how much we resent our powerlessness.

I guess I wonder if there is a solution.