Under Pressure

One of the first purchases my wife and I made as a married couple some twenty years ago was a whistling tea kettle. She’d seen one in some movie at some point, and she thought it was just the neatest thing. It didn’t take long for her to realize that the whistle gets annoying after a while, and slowly but surely the whistling kettle got phased out of our morning ritual.

It doesn’t take a genius to know that anything under pressure must either have a release valve or run the risk of exploding. In the case of the kettle, when the water begins to boil, the steam is released through a tiny hole in the spout, which makes it whistle incessantly until it is removed from the fire.

The same principle applies to most human beings. As pressure builds so does tension, and if there is no release valve, if there is no way to depressurize, it comes to a head, most times at the most inopportune of moments, over the most irrelevant of things.

I’m sure we’ve all been there at some point, wherein someone is constantly pecking, nitpicking, over-analyzing our every action, and we keep quiet, say nothing, but the pressure continues to build. Then, out of the blue, just because they said good morning, or waved, we let them have it, and everything comes spilling out at once.

When our reaction or response to something is not commensurate or proportionate, it wasn’t the action but the accumulated pressure that solicited the response.

It is an undeniable reality that this nation currently finds itself under pressure. By all accounts, the societal pressure gauge is redlining, and rather than attempt to walk back the rhetoric, or defuse the situation, gas is being thrown on the fire with an abandon and glee that isn’t just shameful but concerning and outright troubling.

When civil discourse is no longer possible, violence is inevitable.

If the pressure continues to build, and there is no reasonable way of releasing it, the prophetic warnings spoken over a quarter of a century ago will come to pass sooner than any of us had feared.

When you have news reporters calling for physical violence against those they disagree with politically, when you have representatives publicizing the names of donors to the opposing political party, basically painting a bullseye on the backs of average citizens, when you brand some sixty-odd million people as racists and Nazis, eventually the pressure will get to be too much. When that happens, something very ugly, violent, and catastrophic will occur, and once it boils over, there will be no controlling it or walking it back.

It would seem all the adults have gone out to lunch, and the pyromaniac children have been left in charge. There is no foresight; there is no consideration of what the flames they are stoking will lead to, they just want to see it burn, and do away with the orange menace that has been hampering their progress toward globalism. 

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea Jr.