Sunday, April 24, 2016
Sunday Reflection: The Way it Is
Five years ago, I first wrote about this song. Here is what I wrote then:
Most of all, though, the song critiques a soul-killing social dialogue that still enrages me. Someone, a child perhaps, asks someone about a social injustice-- endemic racism, intolerance of religion, hatred of others, poverty amongst riches-- and the elder shrugs and says, "that's just the way it is. Some things will never change." Thus ends the conversation.
How many times was I that child, that teenager, that college student, that law student, that prosecutor, that teacher? More than I can count, and every time something in the soul God gave me, the heart of the gospels, the promise of Christ, the rolling thunder of God's own self-renewing world, told me this answer was wrong. It is wrong.
At that time, I was about to enter the fray in favor of same-sex marriage. We won (though I had little to do with it)-- but if you read some of the 15,000+ comments to the the piece linked in the last sentence, you will see that many were saying "That's just the way it is." And then, it wasn't.
A few weeks ago, in response to what I wrote in the New York Times, a new wave of people have been telling me that the desuetude of the the pardon power is "just the way it is." I think they are wrong this time, too.
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