Keep Right — Column by Ralph K. Ginorio
Just remember that, no matter where you go, there you are!
The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension
What was once often said of Bill Clinton was never true: Clinton’s diehard supporters vehemently argued that his peccadilloes had nothing to do with his trustworthiness as President. Their assertion was that a man who made a lifestyle out of lying to his wife would never betray the hopes of his voters.
“Character is destiny”, wrote wise Heraclitus. It is inexorable, inescapable, and ubiquitous. No man can escape his nature or character. Consider the story of the Old Testament Prophet, Jonah.
The story goes that God called Jonah to go from northern Israel to Nineveh, the bloodstained capital city of the New Assyrian Empire. Assyria was a fully militarized nation who made an art of performative cruelty. There, he would preach God’s warning to these pagans to abandon their vicious ways if they wished to evade a well-earned doom.
Jonah’s famous response to God’s invitation was to flee in the opposite direction as quickly as possible. Assyrian Nineveh was to the east, so he went west and took ship for Spanish Tarshish, on the far side of the known world. Jonah tried escaping God’s call. The finite tried to flee from the infinite.
A vocation is only offered by God when there is something internal to the person whom He calls that is ready to answer YES, to embrace adventure, and to accept a new challenge that will redefine everything in that person’s life. In fleeing, Jonah betrayed everything that was in him which cried out for him to change his ways and lead a wholly better kind of life.
Why flee? Confronting the Assyrian King and people in their own home was logically suicidal. However, Jonah demonstrated physical courage when the ship he was on nearly foundered in a great storm. He invited the crew to throw him overboard to divert what he deems to be God’s wrath against him, personally, away from the ship and crew
It seems likely that Jonah, a devout Jew, deemed the vile and violent Assyrians to be unfit for salvation. Why, Jonah wondered, would the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob wish to do anything to these enemies of His Chosen People other than bring about their utter destruction?!
Jonah fled. Most of us know how that turned out. After being swallowed alive by an undersea leviathan, Jonah achieved in its belly the peace-of-mind necessary to positively answer God’s call.
Released, he travelled to Nineveh and spoke boldly to those beyond the Hebrews whom God also cherished. This was an early indication of something central to Christianity, that God’s interest is in all of humanity.
We believers must remember that we are God’s. He is not ours. Our most cherished concepts of God are merely provisional. When God says no, many feel betrayed. We can forget that He knows better than us who we are, what we need, and how we might best serve truth in His world. Humility and gratitude are the best responses to God’s loving call.
How does this apply to those who deem themselves to be our secular saviors within the international Left? Many of them conduct themselves as if they were self-evidently beyond the petty rules and superstitions that are supposed to corral the rest of us.
Has Barack Obama paid his bills for his hideous obelisk in the heart of Chicago? Did Kamala Harris and Hillary Clinton’s campaigns pay their debts totally and on time? Have California’s Katie Porter and Minnesota’s Amy Klobuchar joined Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris in being toxic bosses who self-indulgently abuse their staff? Did California’s Gavin Newsome and Nancy Pelosi observe the draconian lockdowns that they enforced against the rest of us?
To be sure, there are bad people in every faction within the political debate. However, there is a conspicuous toleration of personal corruption in today’s Democrat Party. This is typified by Maine Democrat Graham Platner, his SS Totenkopf tattoo, and his pernicious and protracted coarse and vile personal conduct.
When confronted, his reply has been to blame his faults on post-traumatic stress earned while fighting in the United States Marine Corps during the Global War on Terror.
Platner’s excuse is an insult to every combat veteran who suffers from spiritual, mental, and physical scars. They do not use their wounds to excuse their own unbecoming conduct in hopes of winning a US Senate seat. To those of us who love veterans, wounds explain, but do not necessarily excuse. Ultimately, we pray that the veteran will find the grace to heal sufficiently so that they will no longer be defined by their trauma.
These preciously elite “special people” include financiers like George Soros, executives like Kathleen Kennedy, celebrities like Robert De Niro, performers like Bruce Springsteen, and politicians like those many who were mentioned above. They treat the rest of humanity with contempt. They are rarely unselfconsciously kind, thoughtful, or humble when faced with genuine human beings who live outside of their chosen narrative.
The crux of the problem with people whose bad character dogs their lives and blights all that they touch is… themselves. Such Narcissists have no interest in recognizing any objective standard beyond their own preferences, or any priority other than their own convenience.
Because of this, they cannot acknowledge their faults, confess them, recant them, and try to atone for them in any process of redemption. Their pride, as well as their commitment to corruption (they would call it ambition or pragmatism,) renders them unwilling to change course and become better people.
What a self-inflicted doom! What a waste of human life! Narcissists are to be pitied and treated with compassion, not elected or elevated above the rest of us.
