a vision rendered cruel by its obliviousness...

When I was "called" into ministry in 1968, I was 16 years old, Dr. King and RFK had just been murdered and the war in Vietnam was raging. Now in the swan song days of ministry some 50 years later, I find my homeland to be as politically, racially and morally confused as when I started. This isn't to say that America has remained stagnant. Far from it: we are more racially and culturally diverse than ever before. Two thirds of my neighbors throughout the country support and honor same sex marriage and our air and water is cleaner than ever before (for the time being.)  And yet fear and loathing seethes throughout the American culture and we stumble from tragedy to acts of careless cruelty and senseless violence.

David Brooks recently put it like this in the NY Times. In his critique of the moral abyss the Republican Party has currently created with apparent enthusiasm, he writes that the current Senate/House health plans do not put forth a conservative vision of American society. Rather, they had birthed: a vision rendered cruel by its obliviousness. 

I have been trying to think about the underlying mentality that now governs the Republican political class. The best I can do is the atomistic mentality described by Alexis de Tocqueville long ago: “They owe nothing to any man, they expect nothing from any man; they acquire the habit of always considering themselves as standing alone, and they are apt to imagine that their whole destiny is in their own hands. Thus not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.” 
(check it out @ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/27/ opinion/the-gop-rejects-conservatism.htmlrref=collection%2Fcolumn%2Fdavidbrooks&action=click&contentCollection=opinion&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=collection

This should not come as a surprise to us, of course, as we have allowed the beast to grow and flourish. Check out the way Glennon Doyle Melton puts it. She is spot on...