Of course, the phenomenon the title of this piece concerns, the public display of ill-disguised hatred, is not new, but in days where death and destruction at the hands of man are more prominently thrust, if not force-fed, into the (social) media-chomping fois-gras geese of modern society, the temptation is keenly felt to shrilly condemn the immorality of others, and evidence of wide-scale yielding to this temptation is on eye-wateringly ubiquitous display.
Of course, bandwagons, like slipstreams, have a pull, and one is tempted to join a side, to leap to hasty conclusions, to express views on the basis of almost entire ignorance, and to cast the other side into hell, twisting whatever facts one has at one's command to suit the plot of the chessboard's play.
Why is this relevant to recovery?
Moral inventory.
My moral inventory of myself reveals the following:
Whilst there are indeed examples of injustice, barbarism, sadism, vengefulness, and other faults in the world, which have very material impacts on the material lives of others, my concern, as a member of a twelve-step fellowship, is my own morality, or lack of it. To rely on God requires me to clean up my moral act, and I discover myself falling short.
When I, myself, become hostile, a political popinjay, conceited in my own, as I believe it, intuitive rather than educated understanding of complex situations, domestically or abroad, a martinet demanding that the world march to my drum, I am engaged in propagating the very evils that lie at the root of the surface evils I see in the world. Others' sins are sins. But so is my anger, my intemperance, my intolerance, my failure to understand, my failure to see that my job in God's universe is to discharge my appointed duties, not to stand in horizontal judgement on others' discharge of theirs, or failure to do so. There are movers and shakers who are enjoined to comment or act, by virtue of their office. I am not one of them.
Worst of all, the virtues that claim to be at the root of my self-righteous condemnation are perverted by the bodyguard of vices they surround themselves with: the compassion for others' suffering is selective; the morality I am vaunting is a morality cheap at the price if it requires no sacrifice to back it up, no action, no distribution of resources, no real work, no self-denial, no extension of one's true self in love, just a reposting of a video, a tweet, an image.
The danger of being a moralist is that the volley of bullets I launch turns in the wind to pepper me with a more intense ferocity than fuelled my initial salvo. For, in addition to the hubris, the anger, the resentment, the sheer lovelessness, I have added hypocrisy to my catalogue of defects. Far from being a moral arbiter, I'm the immoralist, exploiting virtue at best for self-satisfaction and at worst for entertainment.
Many times I day, I shush myself, and bring myself back to the task at hand, to the moment, and to the eternity of God. I pray for my soul as I pray for the souls of others. I pray for the Higher Power to remove all defects of character from me that stand in the way of my usefulness. I extend love, and hope to resonate, in the realm of the spirit, with whoever else is seeking a higher reality. This is literally the best I can do, which is a statement of its exquisite utility, not of resignation at its apparent inadequacy in the eyes of the materialist who does not realise that it is the soul that lies at the root of all.
My mind should be quiet, and, increasingly is. But something must be done the voice cries. Yes. Quietness must be done. On earth as it is in heaven. If that were universally propagated, what mountains would move?