'Faith and Life' column off base

Reading Don Lindman's column, "Hope Is All We've Got..." recently was extraordinarily depressing.

Leaving aside the absurd, and extremely harmful, hyperbole of references to the Great Depression and the mythical "pall of despair over the nation," Lindman imagines (channeling Jimmy Carter's "national malaise" speech, apparently), it is astonishing to this reader that a self-professed minister of the Gospel and the paper's columnist on "Faith and Life" could actually write such nonsense.

First, the simple facts: we are not in, nor have we been in, a Depression, or anything close to it. During the Great Depression, fully one-third of nonfarm workers were unemployed (today: 7.2 percent); gross domestic product had shrunk by 50 percent (today: we've had ONE quarter of contraction, that by a whopping 0.2 percent).

Are things tough right now? Absolutely. Will they get worse before they get better? Perhaps. But to engage in this ridiculous longing for Depression-era pathos risks creating a self-fulfilling prophecy and, what's much more damaging, a panic that blinds us to the risks to our freedom entailed in the cult-of-personality rhetoric Lindman employs.

The basic message of Lindman's column is that we are all helpless and need to look to Father Barack to lead us out of the wilderness.

Sorry, Don, but Americans have always put their faith in God, family, their neighbors and themselves to achieve success, and have been wondrously generous to those less fortunate in achieving that success. The President-elect strikes me as a nice man, and I wish him well. But the idea that a supposed member of the clergy would suggest that our only "hope" lies in a politician - any politician - is just offensive.

I'm not a sheep, Don, except in relation to the Almighty. As a member of the clergy, I would think that HE is where you would place your hope.

Paul Stukel

Geneva