Tani Newton
A cliche, if you like, but I think it neatly summarises all the reasons why Donald Trump is not going to save the world or anything in it: nothing worth doing is easy. Sitting back and waiting for politicians to fix our problems is easy…and it doesn’t work.
No man, even a titan, could begin to fix the problems of the modern world. The size of our problems makes the Titanic look like a bathtub toy and its problems look like mere detail. And what got us into this, to a large extent, is thinking that politicians could solve our problems.
The size and scope of modern governments is staggering. Most of what they do is unnecessary. The bureaucracies that have grown up around them are larger and more powerful than the governments are, deeply entrenched and with deeply vested interests in not solving the problems they were instituted to deal with. All of this has happened, at least to some extent, because we believe that someone else should solve our problems.
Many of my fellow Christians will tell you that our malaise is because we have forgotten God. I wholeheartedly agree. But I would add that there must be a mechanism by which things work out and that’s what this is. When we forget God, we assume that we can collectively solve our own problems, and from there we go on to assuming that the government – as the representative or delegate of ‘us’ – will kindly take care of that.
It might seem to be working for a while. Nice government hospitals looking after all the sick people, nice government schools looking after all the children, nice government departments providing housing and nutritional advice and everything else we need. But when we stop doing these things ourselves, when we stop taking responsibility, we lose both the skills and the attitude needed to change things for the better. We take on an attitude of dependence and entitlement. We do less and less, and expect the government to do more and more. Finally one day we wake up and find that the money has run out, the systems are failing, the people running the systems are corrupt and incompetent and everything is collapsing.
No one can fix this for us, because it’s expecting other people to fix things that got us here. The best idea would be to return to God, but whatever we do, it will be necessary to accept that life is full of problems and not all of them can be solved. You just have to do the best you can. Grow your own food, treat your own health and raise your own children. That’s hard, really hard, but nothing worth doing is easy.
