I hate politics. I don't mean the Washington D.C. kind, although that variety is maddening if you take it at all seriously. (The trick is not to.) No, the politics to which I refer are the ones that hit home. The little squabbles between groups, and within groups. Person A doesn't like Person B, and so she tells Person C this. Now Person C just wants to be at Place D, which is anywhere that is not close to A or B's problems. I guess that it just gets me that I can have two friends who I thought were friends with each other, or who used to be friends with each other, and now I'm afraid to put these two people together. And why? There's never a really good reason. "Because he owes me some money." "Because I don't really like the way she talks."

"How often should I forgive? As many as seven times?"
"Not seven times, but, I tell you, as many as seventy times seven times."
I think of this line from Matthew often. The first time I noticed politcal manuvering outside of government, it was in my church. A couple of "church pillars", as it were, did not like a younger Minister that we had. So they just let it slip to a coulpe of their friends that they wouldn't support the church if she were still there the next year. Like, whoops.... So anyways, she got wind of it and was sort of silently forced to resign. And this was a person whom a lot of people, myself included, really liked and respected. To my mind, the church is the LAST place where you should find verbal knives in peoples backs. It's man fucking things up. Frank Herbert wrote in Dune, "The drowning man who climbs on your shoulders to save himself is understandable- except when you see it happen in the drawing room."

And it doesn't always have to involve figurative murder. If one person has the bad taste to play his friends like pawns, that is just as bad. I'm probably guilty of the same, occasionally. But I like to think that I don't have any enemies, and that I like most everybody. I just don't like being in the middle of it, is all.