Words Don't Do Enough Today

When will we ever move beyond the racial issue? When will we realize that we need each other and our rich diversity to truly be the great people we like to think we are? One of the marks of what makes the United States so unique in our life is the great experiment that allows for ethnic diversity as a mark of being a citizen of the United States. It started when British and Germans and French started living side by side and began to break down barriers that separated them in Europe. Here- they were all Americans!

Then we struggled, of course. As each new wave of immigrants moved into the country they faced discrimination, prejudice, and variations of racism. Italians and Jews, Greeks and Irish were not considered part of the "white" culture, though all were as European as the British, French, and Germans. Roman Catholics were stereotyped as recently as the 1960s and their loyalty questioned because of their religion. We never faced the genocide we carried out against the native populations and kept kicking the can of slavery and racism down the road. But we did continue to evolve as a nation.

Asian immigrants joined Latinos (who had been here before some of the other immigrant groups) as the "color" of our national identity began to change. The richness of many colors and cultures added food and song, dress and language to our national psyche. So much has been assimilated, adopted, and cherished. More came from different religions, nations, and cultures. That wonderful bright beacon of freedom continued to shine, even if we periodically tarnished it or covered it up in fear. People kept wanting to come here because of who we say we are and what we have managed to accomplish. These are things that would never have been accomplished if we hadn't opened up our shores to the many immigrant groups, all of who have added new and exciting dimensions to our national character!

But there were those who disagreed and still do. The Jews and Italians would never be truly American to them. The Germans faced it again in the era of World War I. World War II saw citizens rounded up and put in detention centers because they were of Japanese descent. Even first generation American born individuals seem to want to disagree with the very openness that allowed their parents to come here in the first place. Through some incredible twisting of logic, citizenship- being a true American- is to them based on some ancestry that is not American. What crazy logic insists that someone whose family has been here for 75 years is more American than someone whose family came 175 years ago or even before the American Revolution?

Friends, that is insanity! It is also not part of the American spirit. It is not how we developed and grew into the nation we are.

And now I watch self-proclaimed "patriotic" [sic] individuals marching around Virginia waving the flag of the discredited and widely defeated enemy ideology of the Nazis!

That is where words come to a crashing halt. Emotions, deep emotions, come crashing in. Instead I have an image of my father standing somewhere in Germany or Austria at the end of World War II. As part of the victorious Allies he stands at the tail of a Nazi plane. That swastika over his shoulder is not a sign of white power. It is the sign of a defeated ideology of white supremacy- actually even more narrow than that- a specific type of white supremacy. One of the reasons the Nazis lost was specifically because of their hate-filled, racist, "Aryan"-based rhetoric. It was their inability to move beyond it in any way shape of form that led to their rerouting supplies and trains and personnel to make way for the trains taking non-Aryans to the death camps!

Dad and his fellow soldiers look satisfied. They have won. And they were about to do one of the most incredible actions by a winner in a war- they would help rebuild even those nations they had fought against! That is the American way! Not racism, revenge, and hate. The words of war had always been- "To the victor belong the spoils." We said, "No!" We didn't enter the war to gain territory, to overrun others, to take away their humanity. To us the spoils of World War II were a safer world for people to live in democratic ways!

And now, nearly 75 years later there are people waving that flag of hate and fear as if it was an American symbol.

Bullshit!

Over the past few weeks my daughter has been challenging me to be the person I have always been when it comes to this issue. Racism, based in slavery that we were unable and unwilling to truly work against in all segments of our society, remains our American Original Sin. I have been living with it, fighting it, speaking against it for most of my life. It was part of who I was in 1960 and 1963. It grew deeper as the 60s continued and I discovered my own elements of racism, bred into me by our culture. The work against racism is a deep part of who I am and what I believe.

• White people flying Nazi flags will not make America great again. It will only defeat us as it did the Nazis in World War II.
• Trying to ignore my own benefits of being white (and male!) in the midst of white supremacy makes me complicit.
• Making excuses for silence will always lead to more silence- and my being as much a part of the problem as the alt-right Nazis in Virginia.

I could rant on. And I probably will again. But for today I make my statements as another declaration of my hopes for a better way of celebrating who we are and can be as patriotic citizens of the United States. I will not allow bigots, racists, and hate-filled Nazis to destroy my country- the one my Dad and his generation helped make great!

An Interlude: Dark Night Fears

I know that some of my conservative friends will accuse me of fear-mongering from my side of the fence. Or perhaps that my highly over-active imagination has gotten the best of me. Or even that age has finally caught up with my sense of reality and rational thinking.

Any of these may be true, but I don't think it is my goal to increase the level of fear in the world. In the posts on the Dark Night of the Soul that I have been doing my goal is to alleviate the fears and present ways that I, as a person of faith along with others of faith can find the light through what feels like a dark night. I will get back to that development next week. For now I wanted to take another interlude and talk about some of the issues that bring about fear. After 9 days in office, Mr. Trump has shown some clear directions.

What I see is an almost perverse style that wants to create chaos. The immigration orders from Friday are an excellent example. It appears on the surface that he simply put this executive order out and signed it without thinking through what needed to be done to implement it. Did it go into effect at that very moment is pen lifted from the paper? Was there any process of informing immigration points at busy airports what they should be doing? Was there any earlier consideration about what happens to individuals who are already here on green cards? What about those who had been here and were now overseas? Or those that were in the air at the fateful moment of signing? So far, I have not seen any information about that. (I hope we will get some answers to that!)

What happened was that somehow or another customs agents at places like JFK airport in New York just went ahead and implemented the order. The result was the chaos and fear at the airport. People who had already been upset by the order itself were mobilized through their networks of friends and family and protested. The court stepped in and put a stay on the order, as the courts had done with Obama's immigration order previously.

So, hold on to that image of chaos for a moment.

Something else has been happening in D.C. A pattern seems to emerge that when a highly public-impacting order comes out, there is also one that is more shadowy, that will get less publicity. In this case Mr. Trump also signed an order changing the personnel make-up of the "Principal's Committee" of the National Security Agency. Dropped from the committee was the Director of National Intelligence and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Huh?

Added to the Committee was Mr. Trump's controversial chief strategist, Steve Bannon. Double Huh?

Even George W. Bush knew better than that. He clearly instructed his chief strategist, Karl Rove, to never attend such meetings. It is not the way things should be done. Oh, I am sure Mr. Bush shared information with Rove. Of course he did. But Rove did not have a direct voice at the NSA table.

So then, these two things happened in the past 48 hours. In the midst of the uproar and chaos from the immigration order it may be hard to see the slippery move with the NSA. The immigration order impacts many, many people. It goes against the law passed by Congress over 50 years ago. (That says if the President doesn't like a law, he doesn't have to follow it?) It is probably unconstitutional even though it may not be as obvious as we think it is.

Hence, the NSA order doesn't seem to have the greater impact. Some might even be able to argue that removing the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs enhances the civilian control of the military. Sorry, but national security is one of the important aspects of the military.

Some have used the word "coup" to describe what this means. I am not ready to go that direction yet.

Let's add another request by the President. He wants data that shows how criminal refugees and immigrants are. He wants a weekly report on that. Legal or illegal immigrants or refugees? It doesn't matter. These foreigners are a threat, is the message, even though statistics readily available seem to indicate that these groups have a lower crime rate than the national average.

But there have to be "alternative facts" and the President wants them. I am sure there may be those who can "find" them for him. This announcement came under the radar of his order to build the wall that Mexico will pay for- by Americans paying 20% more for goods made in Mexico due to a tariff. The wall made the news; the request for criminal data was secondary.

There are a number of possibilities of what could be at work here. He could be as clueless as these things indicate about what the repercussions of his orders are. I doubt that. He could be ignoring any advisor who warns him about these repercussions, because, Damn it! He IS the President of the United States and whatever he does is "legal."

He could also be attempting to satisfy his followers and will one day "pivot" and begin to make sense. We have been waiting for that since the nomination. I will be surprised if it happens in any significant way. Maybe he will step back some on the highly public issues and the other ones will have been slipped into place. Hardly noticed. Maybe he will "allow" his GOP Congress to turn these into some more sensible law as they seem to want to do in their own way with the Affordable Care Act. (By the way- I think all Democrats and Progressives should always refer to it as the Affordable Care Act. People don't want to repeal that. They want to repeal Obamacare!)

Here then is where the shivers begin to creep up the spine of many of us who know history, specifically the history of Germany in the early- to mid-1930s when Hitler could conceivably have been stopped. Some of this looks all too familiar. Most clearly the demonizing of a group of people. Hitler had his police report to him with all the crimes of Jews and these would be  posted. The Jews were not safe. They were criminals- even when they weren't. Before you knew it "everyone" believed that the "Jews" were bad for Germany.

The result was Kristallnacht.

But before that even happens, let's think for a moment about chaos. As protests increase- and they will- chaos will become more common. Already some state legislatures are eyeing laws to curtail the right of protest- even peaceful protest. Some of that already exists as a friend fond out when he and others were protesting the death penalty at the Supreme Court. They were in a very public area where no protests are allowed. He spent a night in jail. More of that will happen.

Chaos will increase because, as we have seen too often, there are those who use a protest to cause trouble. Riots make the news; they increase fear; laws will be enacted; protests will increase; etc.

The answer to chaos?

Martial law.

When will something occur that will be our equivalent of the burning of the German Reichstag?
I know that I am sounding like some of the more extreme critics of Mr. Obama over the last 8 years. I am very aware of that. As such, I DO understand where their fears came from, even though they were clearly unfounded, as history has shown us. These things did not happen. I hope and pray that in the end I am just as far off base as they were.

Okay, but now that I have gone this far down this dystopian road, let me make a few things clear.
First, I am not ready to say these things will happen. History, though, does have a way of following patterns and events. These are all way too much like what we saw in Germany in the 1930s. As such they can become a warning to us, not a prophecy. These events do not have to happen, but it is up to us, the people, to work as hard as we can to make sure they don't.

Second, a couple of my thinking conservative friends will tell me that this can't and won't happen here because of the way our laws and our checks and balances work. In theory I am in 100% agreement with them. Our Constitution and governmental form is set up to make sure these things do not happen. We have seen how it does work- and work well- many times over our 241 years as a nation. We came close in the Civil War. We came close in the 1960s and early 1970s. In the first it took a war. In the second it was a free and independent press and peaceful protestors being attacked that woke the nation up. In political theory, we should be okay. But theories can never take into account the insane ways we humans can find to screw things up!

I come back, then, to why I am working on the Dark Night of the Soul. This seemed like as good a place as any to enumerate some of the fears that underlie my search for direction. For me, any response and approach to these issues must be based in my spiritual life and my following the God I believe in, who can restore me to sanity if I trust that God with my will and life. The principles of the spiritual life must have something to say to how I respond to the concerns of the world I live in. If those principles are irrelevant to these, they are probably not relevant at all.

I believe they are. Thus the spiritual crisis, wrestling match, and ultimately pilgrimage of this series of posts.  I am working this out as I go along; I have no idea of where and what I will discover. I expect to be surprised when the light grows and I awake to what has been in front of me all along.

Back on the journey with another post in the next week.

I Can't Believe THIS Is News

From time to time I like to find those really stupid, offbeat, or out in left-field kind of stories that I just shake my head at. I then respond, I really can't believe THIS is news. Here are a few I have found recently.

• With the Fourth of July just past, there were two that won my disbelief- and possibly even a Darwin Award.

  There were two, yes, two, separate stories of people men, in different parts of the country, dying over the holiday when they put fireworks on their body and set them off.

  Alcohol was involved in at least one of them. Why does that NOT come as a surprise.

• Here's one reported on the Huffington Post:

  A man at a Broadway show desperately needed to plug in his phone climbed onstage before a recent performance to connect his device to the nearest outlet, according to Playbill. Unfortunately, that power outlet was a part of the set, and very much fake.

  Maybe he wanted to call his agent about a job in the play.

•  ABC News found this one:

  Police in New Jersey say a drunken man twice called 911 to report a fake accident because he wanted officers to give him a ride home.
  
  Hackettstown police say the initial call from the 38-year-old man came in Tuesday night around the same time the department received a domestic violence call. Some officers who were headed to the domestic violence call instead were diverted to the reported accident.
  
  While officers were en route, the man called 911 again and asked the dispatcher "where the police were."

  Alcohol again. Something's never change.

• From The News of the Weird:

  The federal Medicare Fraud Strike Force obtained indictments of 243 people in June in a variety of alleged scams and swindles, and among those arrested was a doctor from Fort Worth, Texas, who once billed the government for working 205 hours in a single day (October 16, 2012)

  Come on! Don't you know everything is bigger in Texas- even the length of the days?

• Finally, one that I would be very remiss if I didn't post. It comes from everywhere on the news these days.

  Donald Trump says Mexican immigrants are rapists, etc.

  Actually, maybe the real story is that the news outlets are still reporting it. OR, at least one of the other candidates seems to think Trump is a hero.

The End of the Church Year: The Servant King

Today was the last Sunday of the Christian liturgical year. Next week the cycle of the church year starts over with Advent. But first, on this last Sunday, our ceremonial "New Year's Eve", we remembered that Jesus is in charge. Period. End of discussion. Well, sort of. Especially on the years in the cycle when we read the assigned Matthew scripture:

Matthew 25:31 - 46 “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of his glory. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, and he will put the sheep at his right hand and the goats at the left. Then the king will say to those at his right hand, ‘Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.’ Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?’ And the king will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.’ Then he will say to those at his left hand, ‘You that are accursed, depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels; for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not give me clothing, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.’ Then they also will answer, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not take care of you?’ Then he will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.’ And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”

This happens to be the Scripture passage that has been my watchword practically since I first heard it well over 50 years ago. I find it the perfect ending for the church year because it reminds me again of what it means to be a Christian. In this remarkable parable Jesus doesn't ask what you believe, whether you have been "born again" or have accepted him as your savior. Rather he simply tells them what he has seen. That's it. Forget the words. Forget the preaching.

Here, Jesus says, let me tell you when you served me.

And they were all surprised because they never noticed they were (or weren't) doing these things. They just went about their business each day doing what they felt was the next right thing. It turns out that in so doing some were actually serving Jesus- and some were outright ignoring him.

Jesus is rarely this clear in his proclamations. Most of them can be open for interpretation. This one leaves very little wiggle room. (I know there is some, but it is built on very shifty sand!) When I get this kind of message from God, I really do try to follow it, though very imperfectly, I must admit. I am sure I have passed Jesus by often this past week when I didn't stop for the homeless guy at the highway ramp. That's one I am still working on.

There I sat this morning feeling pretty damn good about what I was hearing. I started thinking about some of the stuff in the news over the past weeks- the guy arrested in Florida for violating the law that forbids feeding the homeless, for example. But the one that kept running through my mind was the big explosion over the immigration issues. I wanted to do something like the following:

When you don't take care of the least of these, you are not caring for me.
--Jesus


My mind then went to all those politicians who have been using this issue- and these children- as a political football. Many of these have professed to be real Christians (as opposed to us "liberal" Christians who really aren't.) They even found it disgusting that Obama would stoop so low as to quote the Bible about this issue. After all, doesn't the Bible only care about abortion and condemning gays?

In short I was feeling quite smug and secure. (Okay, self-righteous might apply.)

But one thing I do try to do is prepare myself when I go to church to be made uncomfortable. I really believe that "comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable" is a basic standard of Jesus. Even so, I wasn't prepared for it when it happened. Why would I be? All I was doing was praying the liturgy. When along comes the Lord's prayer:

...forgive us our trespasses,
as we forgive those who have trespassed against us.
And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil.

Who me? You talking to me again?

Of course Jesus was. I suddenly realized I was treating those "other politicians" in a way that I wouldn't treat Jesus. What might Jesus say when he came upon this part of my story?

Ouch. That hurts!

But it is not in comfort that I learn how to be a better person. It's when the shoe pinches, the message gets too close to home and the metaphorical 2x4 connects with the metaphorical side of my head.

I need to do something differently. I need to stop doing what I am "accusing" those others of doing- judgement, self-righteousness, and treating others less than I would like to be treated. In that sense it doesn't matter what they are doing (or not doing). What matters is what I am doing since I am the only one who can change me.

Therefore I'm going to use an old recovery meme. I am going to take two weeks to pray for those I am judging as being on the "wrong side" of the issue. I am going to ask that they be blessed and supported. No, I will not pray that they change their mind or heart. That's not mine to decide. But I am going to spend the time simply asking that the grace and spirit of God bless them. Period. Nothing more and nothing less.

After all, when the King comes in all his glory I already know what he's going to say. He told me this morning.

As usual I was brought up short and reminded that humility is something I should think about practicing more often.

The Immigrant Experience

“Remember, remember always, that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists.”
― Franklin D. Roosevelt

I have just finished reading The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri. One of the things I kept thinking about as I read the book was "the immigrant experience." The Namesake is the story of one young man, son of a Bengali couple who immigrated to Massachusetts in the 60s. He's born in 1968 and we jump through his next thirty years of growing and wrestling with both his heritage and his Americanism. At the same time we see his parents and their friends clinging stubbornly to their old ways from India. They make few friends outside the Bengali community and can't quite get the hang of what this American Immigrant experience is supposed to be.

Flag of faces, Ellis Island

As I read it I thought back to what it might have been like for my father's great-great grandparents to come over from Germany in the early 1800s. It was a different America then. They came to a place that was not unlike where they were from. The river valleys of Pennsylvania looked more like the Rhine Valley than Boston looks like Calcutta. They farmed and lived a life that in many ways looked just like the one they had in Germany. Perhaps better with better land and more space to live. They were surrounded, in most cases, by other Germans still speaking the language of the Motherland.



Or there was my mother's parents, refugees from Russia in the early 20th Century, escaping the pogroms that were far more brutal than portrayed in Fiddler on the Roof. They landed in New York City and built a new life, a free life, surrounded by other Russian Jews. This extended to the point where I once heard that my mother, born in Brooklyn in 1913, spoke Yiddish and didn't learn English until she went to school.

With all this talk we have been having about immigration reform, "illegal" immigrants, etc. and the huge firestorm it engenders, it might be good for all of us to pause and consider what the immigrant experience was like for our ancestors, how they were treated by the ones who came before, and then seek to keep that from happening. And I'm not even suggesting we ask the earliest inhabitants to the land what they might have felt when the Europeans showed up.

This is a nation of immigrants. We are not a melting pot in the sense that all of us end up as a homogeneous group. We maintain a great deal of our heritage, but in the end we are more and more that mixture of many ethnic and cultural stories that merge into a beautiful tapestry, a kaleidoscope that we can call the United States.