[I'd been thinking about this matter, and then blurted it in a blog comment for another overwhelmed person. Further gropings... will be in the next post!]

... human beings are always being presented with an Intolerable Wrong taking place in the world. In my day
it was the war against Vietnam. There was still ongoing mistreatment of
black people, but that was an evil that people felt had been recognized
and felt was being effectively dealt with (mistaken as that's proven to
be.) The war was receiving the official support of all the dominant
institutions of the country; political leaders could and did routinely
lie in supporting it, and no matter how many people knew it for an
unacceptable evil, we could not make it budge. People tried all sorts of
ways of stopping it, from reasonable-but-ineffective protest to
utterly-nuts-but-ineffective acts of desperation. You could blame people
for the corruption and stupidity that made that war possible, but in
essence it was an Act of God, a calamity that for some inscrutable
reason had to happen lest we do something worse to ourselves... (and
when it was over, you still couldn't get the mainstream media to
truthfully call it a national crime.)

Today we've got a choice of such evils. (Maybe I've just gotten more discerning, but I doubt it!) I
see no reason other than the love of God why we should hope to survive
most of them... and history shows that God's love is far from
sentimental! Overall this looks like a 'kill-or-cure' wake-up call for a
population pretty deeply sunk in denial...

If you were expecting to be able to do anything about all these evils, any one of which would
strain our collective human capability, all of which are interlocked
and mutually reinforcing... the stone fact is that the basic causes are
beyond our reach, in the nature of God and our relation to God.

Trying to make a difference in the world-- and all the juice seems to run out
of life if we give up on that-- is anything but straightforward, and yet
we're helped. Sometimes I just give up-- and yet I'm helped. It isn't
about us (even though we experience ourselves as right in the middle and
intrinsically can't avoid it!)

The Basic Cause of Insanity is wanting to be other than we are, either trying to pretend we're who we
think we should be, or blaming ourselves because we aren't. We can't
help it, but after enough hours of Wall Therapy, insight dawns: It'll
hurt less if I stop bashing my head into this! That's how grace sets in,
just coming along whenever we're finally ripe for a little more.