"Put not your trust in princes"

Psalm 146

Praise ye the LORD. Praise the LORD, O my soul.

While I live will I praise the LORD: I will sing praises unto my God while I have any being.
Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help. 

His breath goeth forth, he returneth to his earth; in that very day his thoughts perish. 

Happy is he that hath the God of Jacob for his help, whose hope is in the LORD his God

Standing in line to vote yesterday, contemplating.

I, as well as the other people in the line, were concerned about the outcome of the presidential election. I recalled a comment that I read recently that it is too bad that we should care so much about the person who’s going to be the next president.

 

In a country called America a few generations ago, the president was a guy in the White House many miles away from us who had almost no impact on our daily lives. He was in charge of the federal bureaucracy; he picked his department heads and talked with members of congress. He was an administrator, the “commander in chief” during wartime, not a “leader” in the style of the dictators of the 20th century. The president knew his place and left the people to run their lives the way they saw fit. Today we look to the president to dispense birth control pills, pass out free cell phones and decide what’s on school lunch menus. On some days he picks a name out of a stack of cards and orders drones to kill specific people around the world. And when he’s not busy doing that his appointees tells your doctor how to treat you aching joints.

 

All with borrowed money.

That’s when the verse from the Bible bubbled its way to the top of my head. I’m sorry that Romney lost. But it isn’t because I wanted Romney to be my leader. It’s because I reasoned that Romney would be less likely than Obama to want to run my life. I had hope that some of the tentacles of the creature called “The Presidency” would slither back and leave me alone.

I went to bed early last night because the process of watching the election returns is not something that entertains me. The only things that count are the results. This morning I found out and I am temporarily gloomy. But this mood will pass because life goes on. My parents and most of my family experienced much worse that this in Nazi occupied Europe when death surrounded them like a blanket. They survived, persevered and thrived.

There is a spirit in America that has been all but extinguished in Europe; the spirit of free men who escaped Europe, the province of kings, princes and “leaders” for centuries. It will take more than 8 years of Obama to quench that spirit as long as we remind ourselves that we should not put our trust in princes.