This post is named after a Jane Siberry song that was used in the movie Pay it Forward to provide foreground music for the film's powerful ending scene. However, I'm really using the word angels to refer to our "better angels" as Lincoln did in his first inaugural address, about five weeks before Fort Sumter was fired upon. These were the closing words of that speech, "We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory...will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature."
The battle between our demons and our better angels is one that is constantly being waged within each of us on a personal level, and by our society on a broader level. Over the long haul our better angels tend to prevail, at least on a societal level, but how much misery we inflict upon ourselves and one another in the interim depends on how much we indulge our demons. I'm saddened by the way we have given in to our worst selves lately. There was a lesson in The Karate Kid that, while given in reference to martial arts, can just as easily be applied to politics or how we shape our society. Mr. Miyagi's said, "Karate here" (pointing to his head); "karate here" (pointing to his heart); "karate never here" (pointing to the pit of his stomach). Sadly, we are going in the opposite direction with intellectual rigor, compassion and empathy too often being unseated by anger and bile as the locus of our public discourse.
What ever happened to the benefit of the doubt? Right now, if a statement can be taken two ways, one of them benign and one not, we not only assume the worst, but we take it and run with it, attaching a series of things that will follow as a logical consequence, then scream at the top of our lungs, we're all doomed, doomed I say, doomed!! Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck are literally making their living at the moment by swearing that an Obama administration means nothing less than literally the complete and utter annihilation of everything America has ever been. While most of us, even thoughtful conservatives who disagree with the president, can laugh off the absurd hyperbole, the number of people who have come unglued by the endless ranting of doomsayers is probably in the millions. Fox News Channel should change its motto from "Fair and Balanced" to "Keeping Angry White People Angry Since 1996." Of course, Fox News has branched out and they now keep angry white people angry and scared.
I'll leave you with an illustration of my point. We grew up venerating Kennedy's "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country." Now imagine Obama saying the same thing. Talk radio hosts and listeners would be in a blind rage, and in some cases literally crying, over this indisputable proof that Obama's true agenda is to dismantle the America our forefathers fought and died for. Here's one possible example of the blathering, "See, this is what I've been warning you about ladies and gentleman! This radical communist is showing his true colors. This guy wants to throw out 230 years of the rugged individualism that made this country the greatest the world has ever known. Comrade Obama doesn't want you to keep the fruits of your labor that you so richly deserve from your blood, sweat and tears! He wants you to ask yourselves what you can do to contribute to his statist agenda. I swear to you ladies and gentleman if we don't stand up and stop this radical now, the American dream will be dead and the country we love will no longer exist." Kennedy's words would be the same whether spoken by him in 1961 or by Obama 2009, but the meaning we would give them depends on whether we accept the translation of our demons or our better angels. The choice is ours.
