YOU CAN'T BE NEUTRAL ON A MOVING TRAIN

Howard Zinn, the late emeritus political scientist at Boston University and sometime academic radical of the '60s, in You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times, says this:  "To be helpful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness."

He goes on: "What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we only see the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places – and there are so many – where people behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.

"And if we do act, in however small a way, we don't have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an indefinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous thing." It certainly is!

Zinn was Jewish and not especially religious, but what he says, implicitly, is what people of faith are to be about, is it not: “to live now as we think human beings should live”?

The train is moving and yet so many of us try to be neutral about it. The temptation is to want to run and hide. Or it is to throw up our hands in disgust and honestly want no part of it. Yet either way we are missing our calling and we are missing the point.

The world is redeemable, slowly, surely – compassionately, sacrificially, courageously, kindly – by you and by me: one-on-one, one day at a time. If the world is indeed in a mess, it did not get that way overnight. It certainly was not created that way. And it did not just happen. It took a very long time for God's good creation to become as it is. And it is the way it is not because too many were too cruel to one another. It happened because too many turned their backs.

Holocausts don't just happen. Neither do wars. They are the result both of deliberate cruelty and deliberate lack of compassion, sacrifice, courage and kindness. Bad times and bad deeds are always evident. Sin and selfishness are almost always evident. They become worse when good people do nothing.

We are on that moving train and we always have a choice about what we are going to do. Neutrality is not an option. Not to decide is to decide. It is what we decide to do that is ultimately important. We can add to the cruelty by doing nothing or we can be part of its removal, be part of the problem or part of the solution. No, not can: are. We are one or the other. We have a choice about which part but not about being a part.

We're on the moving train. There is only one gear, straight ahead. And there are no brakes, no turning back and no escape. How are we responding?