Missing the Pre-Internet Amnesia Days

Meyers-Bridges has me as INTJ, the J for “judging”. That seems a particularly bad fit in the internet age because I can easily get stuck with nursing injustices simply by the transparency of google searches and social media. The evil thrive, the psalmist says, but before the ‘net I could always assume that justice had been done and I’d missed it. It’s hard to imagine now, but one couldn't simply type into a computer and find out, for example, how the career of Cardinal Farrell is going after his being mentored and living with disgraced Cardinal McCarrick and proclaiming he hadn’t a clue about McCarrick’s proclivities (answer: swimmingly, Pope Francis’s right hand man). Or how Cardinal Toobin of “nighty, night!” fame can be googled and found immediately that he says, “hey you can vote for Biden with a clear conscience!”. Or you could obsess (er, I could obsess) over how it was that Epstein got the sweetheart immunity deal which let him off the hook for years and abused countless other young girls. The people most responsible for that, of course, are doing just fine as Google search will attest. Pre-Google I could assume they were living a chastened, austere life in the metaphorical equivalent of upper Siberia.

So there’s an upside to the forgetfulness that the old media environment induced. A little amnesia is a good thing. Because justice in this world is rare enough, and my own thirst for justice isn’t a good thing for a Christian who believes in forgiveness. One translation of a line in Romans 3 is: “God sacrificed Jesus on the altar of the world to clear that world from sin.” And another translation Rom 2:1: “So, friend, if thou canst see thy neighbor’s faults, no excuse is left thee, whoever thou art; in blaming him, thou dost own thyself guilty, since thou, for all thy blame, livest the same life as he.”