In the wake of the Union Army's defeat at the Second Battle of Bull Run in August 1862, US president Abraham Lincoln paused to meditate about God's role in the war. The North lost some 14,000 men in the three-day battle, and so Lincoln had a great deal to ponder. Considering the loss, Lincoln wrote, "The will of God prevails. In great contests each party claims to be acting in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be, wrong. God cannot be for and against the same thing at the same time."
In the world we live in, many of us feel much more distant from God than did the men and women of Lincoln's day. In our world, we suffer less from crises of faith than from crises of perception. The reality we inhabit is filtered through to us not simply by what we see ourselves. In our global village, which links us together with satellite images and digital feed, events that occur on the other side of the planet are brought into our living rooms as quickly as events that happened down the street. And yet, our immediate experience is not pure.
In order to see what happens so far away from us, we are at the mercy not only of the photographer who shoots the picture. Our view is further influenced by the reporter who tells us what we are seeing, and the context he or she provides. We are then impacted by the media filters in the places we live. The television producers or newspaper editors decide where to cut the image or the story. Indeed, they decide whether to tell us the story in the first place. And if we are told, we then have the story interpreted for us by a battery of experts, who, like us, were neither present nor witnessed it themselves. But they are paid for their expertise, which they provide with abandon, if perhaps with a deficit of humility.
On Tuesday, in America, the citizens of the greatest democracy in the world will take to the polls to choose their leader. Acting as leaders must, both President George W. Bush, and his challenger, Senator John Kerry, have done their own jobs of interpreting reality for their people. And they have provided contradictory explanations.
Bush tells his people, and the rest of the world, that America is at war. Its enemies are pan-Arab, pan-Islamic terrorists and the regimes that support them. Their aim is world domination and is based on their fascistic, totalitarian ideology which, appropriately or not, they claim finds its roots and justification in the Koran. Bush explains that the war is real and that it cannot be wished away. It must be fought to victory and that victory will not arrive until the terrorists have been crushed and the dictatorial regimes that support them have been transformed into democratic governments that fight them.