I’ve been overwhelmed a bit lately with what is going on with the government these days. I listen to the news and it boggles my mind. A group of people are perfectly willing to let people suffer for their own perceived notion of political gain.

And in the name of God.

Doesn’t this sound familiar?

The same people that are quick to blame Muslims for the world’s ills are the very same people that are, at this very minute, holding our country hostage by a completely manufactured crisis. They are the same people that are compromising on the backs of the poor, the elderly, veterans, and the middle class by severely cutting government programs, yet are perfectly willing to keep waging war in the middle east.

Many of the people who are doing these things claim that God sent them to Washington to do this.

Bishop Yvette Flunder, who I saw preach last weekend at New Spirit Church, said it best: what they are doing is wicked and evil and we need to do something about it.

We need to use whatever talents we have to let them know that we don’t like what is going on with our government.

But here’s the problem: I have no faith that it will work. Unlike the UK, we have nothing in our constitution that allows for a vote of no confidence in our government. We have another year and a half before we get vote out the people who are causing these problems, and I’m afraid of what damage will be done in the interim.

And I have no faith that people will actually care or get angry enough to make change.

So, I ask Christians: what are you doing to counter the people that are causing this havoc in the name of Christianity and in the name of God. I know that they don’t represent all of you, not by a long shot. These are the extremists of your own faith, a good many of whom will allow people to suffer, starve, or die, in the name of Jesus.

And I ask the pagans: what are you doing to help the Christians that do care? Do you just grumble about “those damn Christians”? Or maybe rattle something off about the Burning Times? We can’t just assume that all Christians are going to agree with the extremists on these issues. We need to work together because, while we’ve been enjoying some mainstream success, we just aren’t a powerful enough group on our own.

Sometimes I wonder if this is the real consequence of 9/11. It was a gruesome blood sacrifice with the intention of bringing down the government. I think that, in the way blood magic does, it has worked, just not in the way the extremists who carried out the attack did.

As much as there were many of us that recognized what it was at the time, there wasn’t enough magicians to stop it from doing what it wanted. It was just too big.

And, now, here we are. I still don’t know what to do. I know what I think, and what I feel. I’ll try to do my work with the dying and my interfaith work. Some other pagans think I’m weird to work with Christians, but I think that more of us should. We should be learning from Christianity’s mistakes. We should be making a conscious decision to be better than what we’re perceived as.

But we’re human, and what’s sad is that, to some degree, we don’t realize that, as a group, pagans are making the same mistakes.

Extremism hurts everyone, not just “those people” over there.