“A brave man is also patient.” Thomas Aquinas.
Those two chairs–bravery and patience–don't go together in most people's intellectual living room, but if you consider them for a few minutes, you see they match. What prompts impatience? The fear of loss: loss of time, loss of opportunity. And fear, of course, is the hallmark of the coward.
When stagnating behind a fumbling shopper at checkout, one thought runs through my head: “I have other things to get done!” It's a perfect snapshot of impatience and the latent life of fear that underlies it.
More than one person has observed that America has become a very impatient place. Material poverty has been practically eliminated, but time poverty is rampant. Charitable organizations can find money (up until October 2008 at least), but they can't find volunteers. Fast food joints aren't fast enough. Op-eds have been slashed from the standard 900 words to the standard 600 words. Everyone's in a rush.
It makes me wonder: From whence this impatience? Aquinas may have offered this observation: “Inordinate fear is included in every sin; the miser fears the loss of money, the intemperate man the loss of pleasure.”
I'd offer the flip-side observation: As sin increases, so does fear.
And as fear increases, so does impatience.
Consider America. We've become a highly sinful place. I'm not going to Cotton Mather all over you, but just pick up the current Sports Illustrated if you doubt me. Look at abortion, the drug use, the violence. Pick your favorite sin. We not only have it, we often celebrate it. My circle of male friends claim they can't even fathom how anyone could think the SI swimsuit issue is not appropriate for grocery checkout counters.
A sense of fear pervades our country. You see it in traffic jams, you see it when someone's computer inexplicably slows down, you see it in me at the checkout counter behind the mother scrawling out a check instead of swiping her credit card. Sin pervades, and it spawns the fear we see in everyday impatience.
You have to ask: To what extent does fear drive our politics and economics? Was the New Deal a policy of patience, of letting the system work out its kinks? How about the Great Society? Nixon's price-fixing? The audacious American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009?
And if fear drives these policies of impatience, what do these policies say about the politicians that implement them? Are political parties that endorse serious sin more likely to be a fearful party, and therefore more likely to be a party that, once elected, implements imprudent and impatient policies?
I don't want to turn this into a party piece. Republicans disgust me, too, and goodness knows, sin pervades the right side of Capitol Hill, too, as do wrongheaded and ambitious policies. But I don't think it's any coincidence that the party of immorality is also the party of legislative trumpet blasts and strobe lights.
It's also not a coincidence that Americans increasingly welcome such things.
We don't want change we can believe in. We want change now.
And that's the sign of the coward.
[Related links: David Warren on the Stimulus Bill.]
