The American Doldrums

Day after day, day after day,                                                       We stuck, nor breath nor motion;                                               As idle as a painted ship                                                                   Upon a painted ocean.

Water, water, every where,                                                             And all the boards did shrink;                                                       Water, water, every where,                                                             Nor any drop to drink.                                                                     ~ From The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is a poetic voyage across the seven seas of human nature in which Coleridge paints, among other things, the perfect picture of the windless purgatory known to sailors as the doldrums. It dawned on me yesterday morning as I gloated glossed over Tuesday’s election results, that Coleridge’s doldrums are the absolute perfect metaphor for where America has been for the past six years!

“Day after day, day after day, We stuck”…We stuck alright! We’re stuck in Ferguson! 240 years and we still haven’t figured out how to live together? We’re stuck in a GDP stall…and the best our cowardly rudderless leaders can do is print more “fakery”! And we’re stuck in a Godless fog of smoke and mirrors, crying on the outside and dying on the inside for the simple lack of faith…and a desperate thirst for Truth!

“Water, water, everywhere, Nor any drop to drink”…is a great description of their Big Government Mirage if ever there was one…it is the giant albatross around our necks! None of it is real! Our children thirst for knowledge, and we give them Common Core? We pray for health and happiness and surrender our freedoms to Obamacare? They’ve turned the wellspring of America into a noxious swamp of corruption and decay! 😦

So what can the Republicans do about it? They have less than two years to breathe the breath of life back into a desperate and floundering Republic. Will they be able to turn our ship around, or have they become part of the problem. Only time will tell…

My friend and shipmate Clay encourages us with talk of a Divine Wind. That’s almost too much to hope for from this “nor breath nor motion” dead stale hell of sweltering limbo…and an awful lot to expect from a society that’s turned its back on Grace. But this Tuesday past, the passengers and crew registered a level of dissatisfaction one notch shy of mutiny! A welcome breeze, the sweetness of which has awakened the canvas jib and mainsail, causing our hearts to skip a beat! Do we have what it takes to come about…and can this crew be trusted to get us home from here? Could America be the Mariner Coleridge imagined? He surely learned his lesson well…but the question is have we? 

He prayeth best, who loveth best

All things both great and small;

For the dear God who loveth us,

He made and loveth all.

Dedicated to the memory of Sam…