Hi gerard lynch

Thank you for your comment at Provoketive Magazine (http://provoketive.com). We’re creating a space of rich conversation about life, faith, justice and culture without judgment. Our desire is to provoke the reader’s imagination through conversation and open up spaces of dialogue, learning, and hope.  We want to invite you to come back soon and continue to participate in the conversation. 

Thank you,
Jonathan Brink
Provoketive Magazine

You posted the following comment:
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"Probably any president would have taken out Bin Laden given the opportunity he had. "
From previous statements made criticizing the president prior to killing bin Laden, Romney said he would not enter Pakistan without their approval. Also, the risk was very high and took a great deal of courage. To suggest any president would have done so is, I feel, a stretch. If this went wrong, like Carter, he was done.
 
"Unfortunately, President Obama and the Democratic Party kept “spiking the football,” something he earlier said was inappropriate." 

"These days Democrats and Republicans vehemently oppose anything coming from the other side." 

"However, people who have sincerely challenged President Obama’s policies have been branded as “racists” and that is just as wrong." 

"I believe there was more hatred directed toward the last President Bush than there has been toward President Obama. This is largely because the media was complicit in the critical attitude toward Bush." 

"Perhaps my biggest concern of the liberal perspective is that it preaches tolerance, but there seems to be very little tolerance and a lot of misrepresentation of people who disagree with them." 

"Both the Occupy Movement and the Tea Party are responses by people who are frustrated with the way things are. They each have the right to organize and be heard as long as they are not infringing upon the rights of others by destroying property or something like that."

"...and avoid becoming die hard adherents of either party." If you carefully and open-mindedly re-read your statements above, I feel you may need to question yourself on this advice.

I had written a reply of some lengths to each sentence I cited in your reply to Beverly. I decided to just leave an abbreviated answer to the first statement. The Right wing filtering needed to produce the other cites is self-evident. 

In a hopefully better-thought out commentary on your thread than my first, most of the conflict, to me, arises from the subconscious, the Shadow Self, land of "unaccepted things." 

Lacking a sense of genuineness--in effect being perpetually underwhelmed--I needed conflict to feel alive, the contrasts giving me a sense of identity. At least this is my experience in recovering through the Twelve Steps.From that place, perception is cause. The dark aspects of myself are projected, old wounds seek succor or revenge, past failures look to succeed, mistakes want a fall guy. 

AA has a spiritual axiom, which in my life I have seen to be absolutely true time and time again: Whenever I am disturbed, the problem is in me. Nothing happens to me or for me; it all happens within me. Reality is of the heart, the life I get and share is there.