American Sniper indeed

I have only a few rules to live by:

1) Never, never wear black socks with shorts.
2) Always puts on a sock and a sock and a shoe and a shoe, starting with the right foot.
3) Never believe it when the weather folks tell you the worst thing ever is going to hit, but always be suspect when they say it won't.

On all other things, I'm negotiable.

I've learned over time, however, that I am among the few left on the planet who are in the middle. I go to the left on some things. I go to the right on some things. I stand up, sit down, never fight, fight, fight.

So how and when did we get to a point where all things are not negotiable, but rather of such non-negotiable status that we can't get along at all?

I suspect it was somewhere in the Reagan administration, but I could be wrong.

The latest bugaboo is over a movie I can't see though I desperately want to. This whole notion of American Sniper and the left going nuts and the right turning out in groves is amazing. I can't see it, by the way, because we long ago stopped seeing R rated movies though I've never made it a big deal from the pulpit and completely understand if you don't understand that, you bunch of heathens (LOL).

I have read and read and read about the film, though, and understand it to be a fairly neutral look at a very complicated subject, this thing we call war. I've understood that you leave the theater almost in tears. I've understood that Chris Kyle was a special fellow. I get all that. I also get that Clint Eastwood has spent some time as a film maker looking at this very complicated mess we call war in the past.

I've always fairly been against war, except for that time I was for it, by the way. Again, standing up for something or falling for anything is a bit of my lifestyle I freely admit. This being a middle of the road kind of guy can be difficult at times.

How do we deal with war? How do we, as Christians, balance killing our enemy with loving our enemy? Those questions have haunted us for two hundred plus years. I suspect they will continue to

In our public debates, however, as one nation, under God (as it says, I didn't make that up), it seems to me that we need to be learning once again to talk to each other instead of yell at each other or that one nation thing is going to go the way of the white sock.

Till then, I guess we'll just keep sniping at each other.