A Rant

I’ll just concede on the front end, this is a rant and there will be nothing theological in it. But I wish to vent my spleen about conservatives commentators picking stupid hills to die on to fill time.

I have gone down the Daily Wire/The Blaze, and a few other similar style podcast rabbit hole over the past year to see if it is as bad as my pastor says. And while I can report they are not exactly the cesspool he thinks them to be, there is plenty to wrench at your head over. Mostly I blame the format that is very heavily based out of talk radio. Proverbs speaks of fools and heaping up words and that is the flaw. If you run your mouth daily for hours on end by contractual obligation you inevitably will have to scrape the bottom of the topic barrel from time to time and the odds are not in your favor that you won’t say stupid things at higher rates. 

For example, Matt Wash filled fifteen minutes griping about the new statistic that a quarter of toy sales are to adults. Walsh saw this as a wholesale refusal to grow up. And while I can think of some people whom that would apply, it does smack of a generalization based on very little thought. 

First this is not a new charge, Driscoll was making it nearly twenty years ago. And the basic gripe has not changed or grown, it remains the same flat chest thumping. 

Second the basic premise fails to account for the fact that adults have played with toys for generations, they were just called hobbies and the toys were different. A model train layout or the building of model cars, boats, spaceships or airplanes, were still toys. Even woodworking frequently involved the building of toys. What makes collecting stamps, coins, or baseball cards distinctively adult? So the fact that the models are not manufactured by Lego instead of AMT is not that big of a difference. 

Finally, at the end of the day, it really does not matter. As long as I take care of my responsibilities honestly one of the more mentally engaging hobbies I can participate in is designing and constructing new Lego building as opposed to sitting on my porch with a cigar and whiskey. One is certainly more adult in nature, but also has the potential to lead into mental laziness. 

There is a place for rebuke of sin, but really what most of these news opinion sites are doing is preaching to their own curmudgeonly choir. And that is the problem, feeling put upon and like the only adult in the room is fun for a while, but it makes you into a prig. Matt Wash has said some good things, but they have not stuck with me in the same way this one ridiculous thing has. And this is why I think my pastor and others dread their conservative parishioners who are hopped up on these kinds of podcasts. They may be right most of the time, but they only have a rote understanding of why they want to die on particular mole hills.