| Hannah Anderson was in middle school and high school during the 1990s. Like most who grew up during that decade, she enjoyed, as she puts it, her “fair share of both fashion blunders and culture wars.”
Mile-high bangs and a cropped bob defined the 90s for Anderson. So did the thrill she felt when Kenneth Starr led the investigation that resulted in Clinton’s impeachment—a rush of relief that her beloved country was now a bit less under siege from the “godless Left.”
As years passed, though, politics took up less space in Anderson’s mind and life. Priorities like writing, local church ministry, and family began to occupy more space.
But now, political vitriol has reached a cultural fever pitch.
“While the current clashes express themselves slightly differently, I recognize the basic outline,” Anderson writes. “I also experience a kind of secondary discomfort when I hear talking heads on both the Right and the Left replicate my youthful certainty, self-assuredness, and audacity.
Anderson sees her teen self as “a young culture warrior” who enjoyed the fight. She loved the “hit of righteousness” and the affirmation she received from those who agreed with her.
Sounds like the news and social media today, doesn’t it?
It doesn’t have to sound like our lives, though, and Anderson explains why not.
“I no longer need the fight,” she writes. “And I don’t need the fight because I don’t need to prove anything. Safe in the goodness of God and the righteousness of Christ, I’m free to work for goodness in the world around me. I’m free to love my neighbor as I love myself and struggle for their good, not my own.“ |
