No one wants the firefighters playing lawn darts
Stay in your lane. I’m not always a fan of that – rebels can have a positive impact, and creative people don’t do well in lanes – but in much of life we count on people to stay in their lane.
—GAINS & GLEANINGS—
By J. Hogan
People talking about Kenny Pickett – the Steelers first round drafted quarterback from Pitt – want him to be a great quarterback just as they’d hoped Mason Rudolph and Duck Hodges might be, and are holding out hope for Mitch Trubitski, a former first rounder for Chicago who recently signed with the Steelers.
No one wants them to focus on selling hot dogs in the stands, create a hey-look-at-me platform online that overshadows their play, or designing defensive plays for the team.
Stay in your lane. I’m not always a fan of that – rebels can have a positive impact, and creative people don’t do well in lanes – but in much of life we count on people to stay in their lane.
President Trump didn’t get this. Fight like an angry tiger if you must during the election, sir, but once you’re in office, your lane – an elevated one, like a highway overpass – is the one marked “President of the United States” and denigration, childish and vulgar attacks, and an onslaught of tweets lashing out at perceived personal enemies is beneath that lane.
It caught up to him. Many folks – Republican and Democrat alike – who spent years lobbying for things he accomplished ultimately rejected him.
The first real wage gains in 30 years, the best economy in 50 years, the southern border under control… none of it outranked the petulance they saw in the man and they walked away from him.
Right now we don’t just have a failed Democrat administration in D.C., we have a wandering Democrat party.
Why?
Because they decided years ago to add a bunch of ancillary focuses to the party platform which then became the party’s platform, and now the jobs/security/safety/ free speech platforms of old got pushed to the back burner, hampered, or downright attacked in the new regime.
I registered as a Democrat years ago because reading about two great presidents created a tug-of-war in me as a youth. Lincoln had freed the slaves and fought to save the union. Kennedy stood up to Russia over Cuba, lobbied for lower business and corporate taxes to enable business to thrive, and also supported high-paying union jobs.
Ultimately, Lincoln’s misuse of martial powers to jail journalists and imprison political opponents in Union States decided me. Great men aren’t perfect, but the Libertarian in me was appalled.
Now, my party has left the lane. We’ve picked out the deck chairs for the Titanic we’re supposed to be steering, but the iceberg of hyperinflation and hard recession - or, God forbid, Depression – drifts just ahead.
Right now the only lane the president and his party should be in is the we’re-in-control-and-everything-just-went-haywire mode.
Fix it before families lose everything! All the leftist wants and christening new categories of human types won’t pay the bills… we’ll talk about those later.
When the house is on fi re, no one wants the firefighters playing lawn darts. I’m mulling this over primarily because I have my lane as pastor at Faithbridge, and I’ve been pulled for years to add things I didn’t see as my lane to my purview.
Now I find myself being pulled harder. This is my case to me for the cons of prioritizing ancillary matters over primary ones. I still have the other half to mull over.
Rev. James Hogan is a native of Stowe Township and serves as pastor of Faithbridge Community Church.