Guest Post on Palin's Last Day

Nagging Questions....

I’ve decided I need to write, to see if it can help resolve some of the bad taste in my mouth that won’t seem to go away. Actually it feels more like an achy headache, if we’re going to use body parts analogies. So to write, to see if this can help provide catharsis for this person in my head. 

Sarah Palin is quitting today.  Resigning is too nice a word. It’s quitting. As for “reasons”?  If she’d been doing her job, there wouldn’t be any reasons. And if you believe she “has no plans”... Pa...Leeze.... 

This actually brings me to the crux of my problem. How many times can a person lie without it coming back to haunt them? In particular, how many times can a person of faith do that?

It galls me that she calls herself a Christian, a follower of Christ, and tells so many untruths so blatantly. I don’t want to put words in anyone else’s mouth, but isn’t this something integral to being a decent human being, much less a person of faith, that one doesn’t lie?

Didn’t she take an oath when she became Governor? Didn’t she put her hand on a Bible and swear? Is this her best? What was underpinning the faith that the people of Alaska had in her when they elected her? 

A friend of ours suggested having compassion for her. 

I thought, “ok, that sounds reasonable, I’ll give it a try...”  And I did squeak some up, for a small part of a day, sometime after she quit. I thought, “Gee, she must feel a little disappointed with herself” ... but then the compassion fizzled when I read, not much more than a day after she threw in the towel, an article she wrote which was published in the Washington Post, criticizing the President. Yeow, this woman has gall. 

How is it that the country is still talking about this woman, this person of lies and gall? And how is it even legal that she is collecting money from all over the country to pay her bills? Bills that wouldn’t be an issue, again, if she were doing her job. So people are paying her because she wasn’t doing her job? Ha, YEP, ye ssiree, that’s sure what it looks like. 

Last night on Shannyn Moore’s talk radio Shannyn expressed a feeling welling up, a feeling that soon we (the collective we) would be able to talk about the things that really mattered, like the environment, like moose hunting or berry-picking, like health care. And this morning I think, “This is it” - this is how to be healed from SP, from the media surrounding her - to start letting her go. I need to turn a blind eye and a deaf ear, to her, to the media, to the lies, to her spokespeople. How can anyone take what she says seriously? We can’t. She’s in it for herself, not for anyone else. Certainly not for this great State, where leaders typically knuckle down when the times get rough. Certainly not at this crucial time. She’s quitting, pure and simple. There is just no other way to slice this cake. 

Instead I will focus on what I usually focus on this time of year... putting up food for the winter, gathering my berry buckets and heading out to pick, thinking of catching a few more fish, watching the birds migrating to their winter homes, and hoping the first killing frost is still many weeks away. 

Catherine Senungetuk