Daily News Journal Column 8/12/18 I’ve always wondered about the “Red Scare” of my childhood years. I don’t mean our neighbor building a bomb shelter in his backyard. A fear of nuclear war was not irrational in 1961. The prospect may have been unlikely, but who could tell? We were certainly no experts, no prognosticators. Neither do I mean the rush to spend money on the “space race” kicked off by the success of the launch of Sputnik, or even the vast amounts of treasure invested in nuclear and conventional weapons. In an existential struggle, nations don’t count pennies. A bankrupt life is widely considered to be better than none at all. I was so young I have no real memories of the widespread hysteria that percolated down to the everyday American of the time, in the late late forties and early fifties. Alger Hiss, Joe McCarthy, blacklists. And perhaps the putative hysteria is merely the creation of tendentious parties, eager, for their own partisan reasons, to pooh-pooh any tendency to believe that communism was ever a threat to America. Reds under the beds! Hard to tell, now. I am of course a partisan, as is every living and breathing American to one degree or another. To truly have no opinion on political issues is to be in the grip of anomie and by reason of inattention or inability on the side of political entropy and chaos. Some religious folk consider that worldly politics is pointless, fruitless and corrupting. And while politics as idolatry fits that description, as long as we take the words of scripture seriously, love your neighbor, honor the emperor, give to Caesar what’s Caesar’s, clothe the naked, and feed the hungry, etc., we will and must participate in this worldly deeds, and why not let them be for good and not for evil? Like everyone else, I’ve been trying to get my bearings in a new era of a Republican President that many Republican poohbahs repudiate and did not support in the election. Everyone was certainly astonished that day, perhaps even the winner, though I don’t think he’d admit that. Bible readers know that God is not at all averse to working outside the list of the great and the good and the most likely to succeed and use the lowly, the person of no reputation, the unlikely. A twice-divorced philandering billionaire was never on my wish list for president. But, as is said so often, a tree is judged by its fruit, and when we breathe into our paper bag for a bit perhaps we can see that many good things have already been accomplished at the federal level. Accomplishments that have frankly surprised me. The media haven’t reported on many of them, and you have to dig to find them. And the things they cannot ignore they denigrate, like the “crumbs” of the Tax-cuts. The tariff situation makes me nervous, because Smoot-Hawley is not the historical precedent we want to evoke, but I have to plead ignorance on the economic technicalities of this issue. Have our trading partners been taking advantage of us? I just don’t know. Is that a problem? After all, if we buy more of their stuff, they have dollars, but we have cars and smart phones. Like I say, I’m no economist. Mainly what I want to say is that if you’re short of breath just thinking about Trump or hearing his name, someone’s misleading you. We’ve been through this before. There were Republicans who thought, and said, the world was ending back in 2009. Chicken Little is always with us. How much money was wasted by some preppers on guns and ammo and powdered milk because they thought Obama was coming for them? I must confess that it feels like Democrats and Republicans at the Federal level have gotten too comfortable over the last 40 years, and the Great Disrupter may (I say may) be just what this country needs. I know. Crazy, right? Steve Odom does not currently have a bomb shelter and writes his column from an undisclosed location. He is pastor of Central Christian Church on E. Main St. and can be reached at steven.odom@gmail.com