Sometimes I wonder if I’m cutting weeds near the surface, something I would never do pushing a lawn mower across my yard on a hilltop in Soddy-Daisy. I always run the blade snug against the ground.
By David Tulis / 92.7 NoogaRadio
My work as broadcaster and journalist is taking a strong direction toward legal reform and reform of police practices.
When I left the newspaper business in March 2012, I thought that I would be making a gentle defense of liberty the marketplace and defending God’s law and constitutional government in my coverage. I did that without profit for a year on the Internet. I entered the radio field in March 2013, and am uncovering multiple abuses of the people by the state and have cut for myself a role as critic and reformer.
Am I cutting the weeds at the top or my cutting been near the root? As I pursue my calling, I wonder about this question.
I have a 16-year-old son who shares lawn mowing with me around a house on the top of a hill in a small town neighbor to Chattanooga. Jacob cuts the grass rather a high level.
The results of his mowing leave me dissatisfied. To me, it makes much more sense to cut the grass as close to the ground as possible. Jacob objects. He says that the yard looks denuded — threadbare — when I’m done with it. When I run the more over a bump in the ground, the low-lying swishing blades leave a bald spot under my feet.
You can tell my desire is to get as close as I can to the surface. And, maybe, if I could, lower than that.
Deracination vs. trimming
When covering news and seeking to bring more righteousness and justice into one’s hometown, one surely must cut the weeds. But how do we go further?
How do we deracinate them? Kill them down to the roots? Don’t want to use gasoline to kill them because that damages the Earth itself and makes it sterile. I don’t want to use Roundup weed killer because this product leaves behind poisons that are a long-term danger to animals and people.
How do I kill the weeds? I think the job requires pulling them up one by one. And that would be consistent with my arguments for Christian rebuilding and local economy.
Local economy is in some ways a secularized framing of the work of Christianity. The work of Christianity is about saving individual souls, and having those individual souls move out into all the parts of society and redeem those various parts.
We have to pull up the weeds directly in front of us so we can plant good flowers or wonderful grass.
The ideas of local economy are that we fight for liberty and to end injustice one person at a time, that person whom God puts in front of us to hear about, learn about, pray for and assist, as we are able. So I always take meeting for people as providential and never as luck or as matters of indifference.
The idea of local economy is that we personalize our labors to assist other people. I always view people I meet as providentially put in my path to help and to find out about, with a spirit of charity and mercy. Whether it’s Diana Watt, Gregory Parker the welder or Jimmy Lee Moore or John Luman, all recent defendants in court, I try to understand these people’s problems and to write about them and give them ideas for their own benefit.
One weed at a time
It is not happenstance to meet Samaritan women, pharisees and cops and ministers and moms and others and try to help them.
The idea of pulling up the weeds means that I don’t have to worry about the whole yard. I don’t have to have a comprehensive solution. I have only to provide a benefit to that party in front of me, thinking that every person I encounter as a Christian represents other people. We help one black man fight his oppressors representatively. We represent the white race. He represents the black race and so we offer succor to all.
As the “get the heck out of my face” administrative notice project develops, I will bring together plaintiff and attorney, political challenger against an incumbent, a faithful gospel minister and people who want really to hear the truth about the Christian gospel’s total claims.
The reforms I have in view are pushed personally by MWs, or Miracle Workers, who stand their ground, hold their tongues before cops, demand right to indictment, refuse to plea bargain and insist on their constitutional rights.
