Check Yourself Before You Wreck Yourself

As usual, Richard Rohr has said some things I needed to hear. Negativity has been wearing me out.  Seriously, I've gotten to the point where the NY Times op-ed page is like Valium.  But I think I might be slightly addicted, because I can't look away from the Trump-Cruz-Rubio circus, or the Mitch, Turtleman, McConnell intentionally announcing that the GOP majority is going to deliberately and stubbornly refuse to do their job, or even, lest you think I'm picking on the Red side, the Hilary-Bernie contest slowly wringing the life out of a hopeful populist movement that for a minute actually had me really excited about politics for the first time since I read Hunter Thompson's Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail about the 1972 George McGovern campaign. Yeah, that happened before I was born, so I just had to read about it and think, why can't we have someone like that now?  Well, Bernie is now, but signs are pointing to the hard cold reality of challenging the establishment: mostly you lose.  McGovern did too, to Richard M. Nixon, and I'm just really hoping that this is not history repeating itself, because let's face HRC very well could be Nixon in a skirt, and all of the Republican possibilities make Nixon look like a paragon of virtue (shady recording and petty burglary are probably low on the list of malfeasance for Trump and Cruz).
See? Less than a paragraph in and I'm in a freaking quagmire of negativity, and feeling like I have taken Barack Obama sorely for granted.
So here, I need to examine myself.  What is it that bothers me so much about this?  I know for a fact that the President is an office that is largely symbolic, with a very limited ability to force changes through an unwilling legislative branch or a gatekeeping judiciary.  If my boy Bernie did get himself in, it would not mean that we instantly flashed back to the Roosevelt years.  He would still have to deal with Turtleman and his flunkies, and let's face it, while I agree with Bernie's principals about wealth inequality and economics in general, I know there is no magic bullet that's going to slay the dragon of human greed, and one man, even the President, can fix this mess alone.
What really gets me upset though is that it all seems so hopeless, in other words I feel like it is utterly beyond my control.  And I don't like that feeling.  It's way too familiar.  Growing up in the 1980's in America, as part of the low-ish middle class, I felt like I didn't have too many choices: go to school, go to college (hopefully without accumulating crushing debt), get a job that wasn't too terrible, and settle in to life.  It wasn't very glamorous, but glamorous seemed more or less impossible, or at least too difficult.  Now as an adult entering middle age, having been blessed to find an actual vocation, I maybe have picked up some delusions of grandeur: that maybe more than just shuffling along the mortal coil is a possibility.
But I need to check myself, and particularly I need to check myself against the only standard that I really can check myself: Jesus.  Did he get upset about politics? No, not really, and let's face it, Herod and Pilate were pretty bad dudes.  Maybe he didn't rail against secular authorities because he was, as Howard Thurman says, "a man with his back against the wall," and he knew how that confrontation was going to go (as it eventually did).  But the more I read the Scriptures the more I'm convinced that it was more a matter of understanding that they didn't matter, even when they could kill the body.  He chose, instead, to take on the religious authorities, who had played the system and tried to put God into service for their own ends and their own glory.  That is idolatry, and that needs to be challenged wherever we find it: church, politics and in our own hearts.  I increasingly mistrust candidates who use their faith as a political tool.
This is not an excuse for Christians to disengage from the political process, but it is an important corrective to our frantic and often decidedly negative political positions.  We do have a voice.  Democracy itself is a metahistorical trend.  As Dr. King said, "the arc of history is long and bends towards justice."  The fact that we haven't perfected it yet probably should not surprise anyone.
I am frustrated by the process because I want us to transcend self interest, fear and hatred, but I just don't know if we can do it.  I am constantly challenged to try and follow Jesus through this mess, because I know he would not avoid it, but I am also aware that he would not try to take the reigns, because his kingdom is not of this world.  That is my hope, and maybe the only thing that keeps me sane.