The Ballad of the Spineless Society

“Too many people get credit for being good, when they are only being passive. They are too often praised for being broadminded when they are so broadminded they can never make up their minds about anything”- Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen

Across the country, especially in colleges and universities, the mindless chant of “tolerance” and being “open minded” can be heard echoing in academic halls, cubicle farms and city parks. It sounds really nice doesn’t it? Play nice with others; respect everyone’s feelings even if they are doing wrong. After all, it would be impolite and hurtful if I told them abortion was wrong, or that a REAL family is rooted in a marriage of one man and one woman!  That just is not nice, where is my tolerance? Where is my open mindedness?

I flushed it down the toilet along with the Kool-Aid everyone has been drinking.

Wake up people! Can’t you see what we are doing to ourselves? We have numbed our minds with something far more dangerous than any drug on this planet; we have given into “the feel good” culture.

In this “feel good” world, no one argues, no one fights. We all have different opinions but never share them in fear of insulting the person we are sitting next to. In fact, in this culture we are all so ambivalent to everyone’s opinions that we quickly find we hold no opinions at all.

Where does this leave us? Never standing for anything, which means we fall for everything. The newest fad, the latest gizmo, the most up to date news about where a basketball player is moving! All fluff.  We are about as deep as a rain puddle.

Now, this is not to say that tolerance does not have its correct place. That is, tolerance properly understood. But the “feel good” mess that society puts forth as tolerance is nothing more than a mechanism of approval and to get everyone to just shut up.

Sure, it’s easy to slide from day to day never taking a moral stance. You can avoid a lot of tension and conflict. But where will that land you?

“Civil liberty cannot be long preserved without virtue”- John Knox Witherspoon

John Knox Witherspoon

Virtue requires taking a stand for what you believe. For yours and mine sake, I beg you to cast off relativism and attack this culture with a renewed vigor. We have a lot at stake.