Principalities and Powers

There is a proclivity among people, and a distinctly modern one, I think, to see others, especially those possessing money or power, as sinister, devoid of natural affections or a common moral sense. These are the puppet masters, who scheme and manipulate from high places, with a motive to betray and control through any and every means. To me, this picture is fatally flawed on a number of levels. It demands an intricate cooperation in the face of the chaos represented by the stubbornness, the contrariness of the individual. It requires us to believe that mere power and riches have the ability to unite, to suck the very essence of a man's soul from his person, such that he may become, in order to be truly sinister, devoid of the most basic components of civilized existence - love, compassion, community, conscientiousness - a mutual agreement that we must survive not alone but together. We may disagree politically, but that doesn't make our opponent a monster. It merely makes him a Republican ( ;) ). We may define the fine points of morality in different ways, but we do so from the inescapable basis that there is such a thing as morality to begin with, and that its key components remain eternally intact. There is no living person, man or woman, rich or poor, strong or weak, who doesn't know what love is. The power of evil, with which we are at war, resides not in man-made plans and institutions, but in high places, in cosmic principalities and powers that are far beyond the ken of mere men.