Letter to the editor: The words we pick and choose to assimilate can define our lives

Do you have enough to worry about? Dumb question, I know. Take the Middle East. Just spend a few hours reading even in Wikipedia about Iraq, Libya, Iran, Egypt, Lebanon, Israel, etc., and your eyes will water and then gloss over. Or think about our debt, and wonder if the Fed really gets it, or the border and just how much danger we face because of the open border of recent years. But you know what, the thing that gets me today is the traffic in Sumter. I never thought that would be an issue for me. It is now, and with new ground being opened in every direction, this is a problem we will have as far as the eye can see.

Of course a grand bypass around the city could have been completed a generation ago when the one on U.S. 378 was done. But that could not begin to solve our problem today if construction started today. The chicken has already flown the coop. And now that she has returned to roost, the problem is here in all its glory. How some who have just moved here in the last 10 years or so simply see the traffic as a minor version of what they have seen in other places is understandable. But for those of us who have roots back to colonial times, it is a problem we could appreciate when we went to a big town or city, but not so much here.

So I suppose patience is a virtue I and many will have to cultivate. Bad drivers who sleep on their phones at intersections or those who do not yet know that one can take a right turn on a red light unless otherwise designated, or that particularly noxious group who insist on riding bumpers, will always be with us, which of course requires supernatural patience.

I would prefer to worry about the really big things, like why I can hit any shot in golf but only every so often, or whether my team won the cup or the series or whatever. Or maybe I could worry about something that really should cause me worry, like the fact that I will not live on this planet forever. One of the negatives of living in this century is that we are surrounded by so many words that we cannot assimilate them in any meaningful way. The ones we pick and choose actually define our lives more than we think.

Along that line I think of young beautiful and handsome reporters on TV who pretend to understand things it would take a minimum of ten years of non-stop reading even to begin to grasp. These savants of knowledge really expect us to appreciate their wisdom which has not yet been born. And to hear them hurl their questions with such self-assured aplomb is, well to be gracious, off-putting at best. So I really do worry if folks are getting enough of the facts to make informed decisions about the issues we all face, whether traffic, local designs to raise the millage, nuclear proliferation, DEI or whatever else is the topic of the day. If one follows polls, the answer sadly is no.

In the one thing I have followed very closely since 1971, I would say that most people I know including church goers and various professionals who should be well read simply for the sake of being able to communicate with others on many levels, that one thing would be this: knowledge of the Bible. It's one thing to be able to understand genetics or physics, but to have no appreciation for first causes is inexcusable. We humans are either special acts of Creation by One we would call God, or we literally have no meaning. Make your choice, and if it is the former and not the latter, you have in all of world literature and philosophy only one source. That source is the Bible. And if you really want a cure for worry, that is where you start, and end.

JAMES R. CHANDLER JR.

Sumter