Page 40 - Billy Graham in Heaven

Powerless in Powerland
33
endlessly echoed in everyone’s brain. To top it off, the war had the same name as Gulf, one of the world’s largest oil companies. “Enough proof,” Jake thought. The country can’t ignore the facts that OSR had so effectively advertised.
Jake was worried they were now inciting a riot. The veterans and their families didn’t deserve to be incited. Somebody could get hurt. Cathy could. Suddenly Jake’s own reasons for provoking others seemed very shallow indeed. He wanted to be an Indiana Jones-type historian, using history to manipulate the present in order to alter the future. His guides were two forgotten preachers — A.J. Muste and Reinhold Niebuhr — who lived from the 1890s to the late 1960s. Jake believed that somewhere within their running arguments lay the key to reducing the level of violence in the world. He’d figure out what each holy man would do in a given situation, and work out a synthesis of their viewpoints. Then act.
Now he didn’t want to act anymore on this war. Yet he’d helped inspire Cathy and his other OSR friends to do what he thought was a foolhardy act. Not only was he a nonentity, he was a dangerous one, provoking real people into unnecessary peril.
And did they really believe that the remote possibility of influencing a few people in a backwater mountain town would have a national effect? Weren’t they really just throwing a restrained temper tantrum?
The void began to expand in Jake’s brain. The charges of Cowardice and Guilt added spice to Meaningless Futility. He began to doubt the genius of Niebuhr and Muste. Maybe their obscurity was justified.
Then he rallied. After all, Time magazine had put Niebuhr on the cover of its 25th anniversary issue in 1948,