Lent & The Crucial.

I, for one, am not obsessed about the 2008 Presidential race. However, Peggy Noonan notes that many are, and in doing so serves up an observation applicable to all of us with information-age obsessions and ripe for Lenten contemplation and self-examination:

Earlier this week I heard a minister quote a spiritual genius: "All the problems in the world are caused by man's inability to sit quietly in a room by himself." We're restless and need action, which in a modern media world means information. We need the busy buzz--the Internet, TV, instant messages, magazines and newspapers, the beeps and boops and bops. Rudy's up in Iowa. Hillary's stuck. We want to be among the first to have this information and the first to share it. And we want it not because it's crucial but because it distracts us from the crucial. It takes our minds away from what is most important. Who you are, for instance, or what we are about. It's a great relief not to think about the important. It's a relief to focus on factoids.

Here's the whole thing.