Who's side are you on?

There is so much talk these days about identity. Who am I? What is my group? What is my affiliation, were do my roots reach? This isn’t something that I’ve spent a lot of time fretting about, I am a country boy from south Alabama, after all.


However, in our world, affiliation appears to be very important. It isn’t a new thing, people have always chosen sides or aligned themselves based on race, tribe, regional identity, etc. Many people have made themselves very powerful propagating the idea that like needs to be with like. Germany in the early Twentieth Century comes to mind. Of course, one mustn’t forget the Romans, the Greeks, the Jews, the Arabs, the Persians. In Africa, the rape and destruction of fighting tribes still makes the news. Here in the South, where I grew up at the end of the segregation era, memories of whites only facilities and the lie of separate but equal still stir in my memory. All of this for what?

It is my opinion that where there is segregation and animosity, there is no God. Yes, religious differences do account for a lot of violence and destruction over time, but this is the work of desperate, fearing people.

This, asinine factionalism in politics? My theory is better than your theory? Yeah, and my Dad can buy me a better bike than yours. Please. There is no good end in that, it always boils down to who gets to control and receive the money.

I used to be a devotee of talk radio, listening every day, even to the point of hungrily scanning the radio dial for my favorite programs when on the road. That is until one day I found a broadcast emanating from the “other side”. After listening for awhile, I realized that, with very few exceptions, the vitriolic verbiage I was hearing on that program was almost exactly the same as what I heard on my favorite programs. Substitute a couple of nouns and adjectives, and everything else was the same. I realized that this was nothing more than third grade level grandstanding by both sides- accusations, ad hominem presumption, nothing that served any purpose other than keeping both sides angry at one another, which of course leads to ratings, which in turn leads to huge salaries for the talking heads. Where ever we are on the political or denominational spectrum, we are all being played like dime wax whistles. I vowed then and there that I will never listen again.

The realization also came that, as spiritual people, we have to move beyond this silliness. As a professing Christian, I can’t be part of this. Jesus instructed me to love my neighbor. Who is my neighbor? He answered that too. (Look it up if you don’t know.) If our goal, along with every other religion is not to bring all people together in God, then God is not in the plan. If our goal is not to able to exist together on this small planet , then what have millions of years taught us?

Being the one who refuses to cross the line drawn on the playground sand is not the one who is weak. That person is the one who knows him/her self and knows that God is greater than anything we can argue, maim or kill over.