"To walk humbly. . ."

The grand project for those of us who believe in a high-level, civilized world order is to find ways to restore social trust. It is to find ways to restructure power — at all levels — in order to reinspire faith in the system. It is to find common projects — locally, globally and internationally — that diverse people can do together.

So says David Brooks, whose advice is almost always find worth my time and interest. But I can't help but wonder if he doesn't have us all a bit out front of our skis.

I confess to watching too much TV news, maybe no more than I have throughout my 70 years, but probably too much these days, given the risks of horrifying acidosis. Fox is right there beside MSNBC and CNN on our dial, so I harken to them all; and lately, the differences are such that you could easily believe those networks' devoted viewers hail from different planets. Or should.

To Lou Dobbs, President Trump is the great savior of humankind. To Rachel Maddow--you can pitch them, one against the other every night of the week--he's Old Scratch.

I enjoy history a great deal, but when it comes to this cultural Grand Canyon, I don't know that it helps to retrace how it opened the earth between us. But something split us like an overripe melon.

The more interesting question is what human experience stands behind this un-civil war? How can a people be so radically divided.

I don't know where I got it, but I used to tell my students in early American literature that the Calvinism alive-and-kicking at this nation's birth was something we could most easily identify as an ideology with two deep-set twin towers: one, the sovereignty of God; and two, the depravity of man. For better or for worse, those two ideas are its core principles.

But they create a tightrope. To believe, one-sidedly, in the depravity of humankind minimizes faith in God's hand; the world turns to darkness. On the other hand, endless choruses of kum-bay-ya creates a cartoon vision of the world.

The human dilemma is maintaining balance--everything in moderation--and that's hard work because it requires equal doses of trust and distrust, of faith and doubt to be fair and balanced.

It's probably needless to say that precious balance requires a store of humility reachable, oddly enough, only on our knees, which is not a comfortable position for a 70-year-old man, even when picking strawberries. 

But then, for many of us, being on our knees is never all that easy. For most of us, really. Maybe even for all of us, especially now with the Grand Canyon between us.