"What Are You Doing?"

I will take a moment to combine this with another regular theme here. Trump wants to watch the world burn, and we have met the enemy and he is us. A surprising amount of our society would like to see it burn, and the corollary of it being less important if I am going up and more important that you are going down. It is to our own peril that we ignore the streak of malice and sadism in our culture and in the human heart.

Even after three and half years, I regularly get FB postings about how both sides are completely corrupt, a pox on both houses, there's not a dimes width of difference between the parties. Conversations yield up a lot of underlying anger and a sense of powerlessness that manifests as burn it down, I want my revolution, tear it down and start all over. When this is coming out of the mouths of your middle class and upper middle class suburban neighbors, it gets to be a bit scary.

I think a key factor is a severe erosion of trust in institutions and our fellow citizens. Our governments, religious institutions and companies have too often failed us, justifying at least a high level of skepticism, but this has all been supercharged by a organizations that find it beneficial (particularly right wing media) to stoke this lack of trust into outright paranoia. Lack of trust in anything forces us to fall back to only ourselves, atomized and powerless in our inability to trust anyone or anything and thereby exercise communal action.

In the last two weeks I have listened to college friends with medical practices describing anti-vaxxers that paranoid about the 5G and Bill Gates, they won't vaccinate their kids and certainly won't be getting any COVID vaccine should it arrive. Patients won't believe a coronavirus diagnosis, the doctor is lying to them, the test is wrong, it's all about money for the hospital and to take down the president. This is happening in navy blue states. Neighbors that in conversations start to relate conspiracy theories about the source of COVID from Chinese labs (it's possible they say!!), mentions of conspiracies by Hillary, Flynn, Comey, it makes the head spin. A 100,000 deaths are politicized and it feels as if it is only getting worse.

Hopefully the symptom of Trump is defeated this fall (I am now registered to vote in a purple state, I am doing my part!), but this disease of the body politic is metastasizing and even a new president is unlikely to bring even remission. We really need to figure out how to start rebuilding some basic trust in each other and our basic systems. We are failing, and failing badly.

I'm moving this back up for reasons I will explain below.

And I will take this as my text and climb into my virtual pulpit and do something I haven't done in almost two decades:  preach a sermon.

Get comfortable, choir, we may be here a while.

I have nothing add to this, other than the usual caveat "be careful what you wish for, you might get it."  Nobody really wants a revolution, because revolutions are when things get turned over and poured out and nobody can put Humpty-Dumpty together again.  They don't really change things, either.  How different was the Politburo from the Czar?  Stalin from Ivan the Terrible?  What has fundamentally changed in Chinese culture since the Maoist Revolution?  The Cultural Revolution?  The Great Leap Forward?  Even the American Revolution was just a re-arranging of the deck chairs, and a mutiny that put a new captain in charge of the ship.  Meet the old boss, same as the new boss.  The Brits tried it, too (everybody else was doing it!).  They ended up begging the King to come back after just a few years.  France came closest to getting it right, but after the Reign of Terror decided incremental change was probably better.  It took a long time for the people to finally be in charge, and even then:  Algeria.

Everybody wants a revolution that leaves everything the same but with new people in charge.  And then they want a revolution from that.

I honestly can't remember a time in my lifetime when American politics wasn't in a constant turmoil of ruthless bastards on their side and well-meaning ineffectuals on ours.  LBJ is more honored in absence than he was in presence.  JFK became a plaster saint because of Dallas; before that he bumbled far more than he succeeded, at least in public perception.  He became valiant because his death shocked everyone, not because he was good in office.  LBJ got the Civil Rights Act passed over  Kennedy's grave, and he knew it.  One wonders if Kennedy could have passed it had the shooter missed.  One wonders how different American history would be (Voting Rights Act, Medicare, PBS, highway beautification, education, etc., etc. etc.) had that fatal bullet gone askew.

People died on the campus of Kent State, and the prevailing public sentiment was "Serves 'em right!" Well, not among the Neil Young generation, but the "older" generation didn't weep much.  Law 'n' order is what put Nixon back in office.  Whatever change has come in American law and society has come without healing all the old wounds of division and dissatisfaction.  I don't know of anybody who was an adult in the '60's who was thoroughly satisfied with the civil rights laws that were passed and enforced.  I know people unhappy with them now, almost 60 years later.  Many people are still upset a black man was in the White House for 8 years, people who will deny they have a racist bone in their bodies.

Those same people would have denied it in the '60's, but they didn't like what that Martin Luther King was saying, and they weren't quite sure the police shouldn't be using water cannons to get those people out of the streets.  A lot of them, too (I grew up in the South, after all) were still unsettled about the "real reasons" for the Civil War, and the outcome (that started in the early 20th century, when people with no memory of the war decided it was a "noble effort" and began putting up statutes to "Confederate heroes," and Memorial Day stopped being a day that united a torn country, and started being a day to praise the Red White and Blue.  And go shopping, and cook hamburgers, and goof off in the backyard.  Yeah, that's part of the thesis here, too.).  And still they resented being told there was a promissory note that was coming due.  They still do.  Never heard Obama mention that, did you?  Imagine if he had.

That's the part of King's "Dream" speech we forget, too.  Easier to make him a secular saint if we don't remember the parts that should still bother us.

Part of the reason people are angry and feel displaced is because they are; displaced, that is.  The economy has been screwing the middle class that flourished after WWII since the '70's, when inflation took over and women had to go to work not because they longed to, but because they had to.  Wages stagnated, and never really kept pace with inflation or output or efficiency of whatever other measure economists came up with, and nobody really complained because we all became white collar workers or part-time hamburger flippers or managers of hamburger flippers and as the left hand took away (stagnant wages, rising costs, no union or public officials to stand up for the "working man and woman."  That latter was a mainstay of Texas politicians from the 19th into the mid 20th century, especially in the first half of the century just gone.  Impossible to imagine it now; they'd be tarred and feathered as "liberals" and "Democrats."  Of course, back then, they were both, but they looked out for the working class.  Not any more.) the right hand gave:  cars, VCR's, cable TV, TiVo, personal computers, eventually the internet and laptops and cell phones and....you get the idea.  More things to spend money on that you didn't have, but it made up (sorta) for the fact you couldn't affor your house or a decent neighborhood anymore or take much time off for leisure activities (my father was self-employed, and took a 2-week vacation every summer, worked 9-5, took time off in December and late November, played golf or did yard work every weekend, made frequent trips to Oklahoma to visit his best friend who had married my mother's sister.  I've never even dreamed of a 2 week vacation.  Couldn't afford to go anywhere if I had the time.).  We've been screwed by the system for 50 years, in other words; a system that rewarded our parents for reasons we never understood but just accepted, has screwed us over for the same reasons and with as much understanding of what happened.

May I modestly propose that the problem is spiritual.

No, not "woo-woo" spiritual, and not spiritual in that if you take a tonic of the right theology, you will live happily ever after.  Not even spiritual that we all need to hasten back to the churches of our choices (anybody else remember that public service campaign?  Don't tell me I'm that old!) and recover.  But spiritual as in what does it profit someone to gain the whole world and lose their soul?  What is "soul"?  I don't care; Plato's definition or Wordsworth's or Nietzsche's, it matters not to me.  That which makes you, you.   What which makes life as a human being worth living.  That which, if you prefer (without the pantheism, please) even animals possess (else they are animate machines, and I don't accept that).  Is the point of life getting and spending, in which we lay waste our powers?  Is the point of life owning and possessing, which as the Native American chief said (sorry, I can't rememer his name), is a disease with us?  I mean spiritual as something very, very valid and very, very human.  As valid and human as the love you have for any one other person.  What is that, if not spiritual?  Are they still young and beautiful, still fair and bright as they were 30 years ago?  No, not really; but does it matter?  No, not really.  That's spiritual, or enough for our purposes here.  The theology and metaphysics (classical or non-classical) of it can be worked out later.

The point is, life means more than our comforts and our gains.  And of course, that's the problem.  If life is a zero-sum game, and I win only when you lose, what life is that?  "What life have you if you have not life together?"  We cannot stop living as social creatures.  We cannot depart to 327 million individual islands and declare ourselves sovereign of all we survey.  For one thing, what's the point of being a hermit sovereign?  For another, who really wants to be a sovereign?  I've seen the boss's job, as Bill Cosby once said of family life, and I don't want it.  A more spiritual life would allow me to admit the otherness of others, and to be more comfortable with that otherness.  Maybe not wholly comfortable, but certainly more comfortable.  And that, I think, is the root of our malaise:  we are not comfortable because we know others are not comfortable, and nothing we find in this world tells us what to do about that.  So we curse them and blame them for our discomfort, our anxiety, our animosity.  We don't need the example of Donald Trump to teach us to be selfish and to shirk personal responsibility. We all grow up knowing how to do that.  We also learn, or we should, that that doesn't get us very far, and doesn't much increase our happiness.  We learn, or should, that sharing and caring do.  But you can't do that, without some understanding of the spiritual.

I had a neighbor once who was the kindest, most generous, most selfless person I ever knew.  He was practically a spiritual teacher.  But he eschewed the spiritual (gently, as was his nature), and professed nothing more metaphysical than atheism.  It is, truthfully, the posture of the most spiritual people the world has ever known.  To the mystics, God is not at all whatever you think God is; and to even speak of the spiritual is to chase the wrong understanding down a maze of rabbit trails.  But I am convinced, and always was, that he was a spiritual person, as comfortable in his skin as any saint who achieved the greatest blessings of this life.  I don't want to put boundaries on "spiritual" so someone can claim it as their own possession, and deny it, however obliquely, to others.  But the simple truth is true: we must love our neighbors as ourselves.  And we can't do that by achieving Rawls' "original position," or anything close to it.  This is not a path begun in denial, it is a path begun where you are, and by including.  But how can you take the first step on that journey, and it not be a spiritual journey?

And who can you take with you?  Whoever will come.  It is not your responsibility to shanghai them, to drag them along, to make them follow.  It is your responsibility to not leave them out.  Truly, that is the original sin.  Truly, that is where the trouble starts.

So if you see it as a spiritual problem, a spiritual matter, a spiritual journey, you will see them, everyone, all others, as spiritual beings, too.  As one of my favorite self-generated lines used to say, but in a variation on it now, it could be God is already among them looking for you.  What are you doing?

What happened to marriage and family that it should have become a travail and a sadness?...God may be good, family and marriage and children and home may be good, grandma and grandpa may act wise, the Thanksgiving table may be groaning with God's goodness and bounty, all the folks healthy and happy, but something is missing...What is missing? Where did it go? I won't have it! I won't have it! Why this sadness here? Don't stand for it! Get up! Leave! Let the boat people sit down! Go live in a cave until you've found the thief who is robbing you. But at least protest! Stop, thief! What is missing? God? Find him!

--Walker Percy

The questions we are facing now are:  who are the "thugs," and who are the "protestors"?  I saw a report from the protests in D.C. last night where a Secret Service agent said something like "When I take this uniform off, I'm still a black man."  He was expressing solidarity, to at least a degree, with the protestors.  The President, of course, had other ideas:

It’s ANTIFA and the Radical Left. Don’t lay the blame on others!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 30, 2020

He has a point:  don't lay the blame on others.  Which means we should take the blame on ourselves.  On "Washington Week" last night Margaret Brennan (IIRC) said the pandemic had exposed the inequalities in our society, and now they were exploding over the death of George Floyd.  It was an insightful point.  This is not just another case of police murder (although it is certainly that); this is also a matter of inequality, of racial violence (would Chauvin have treated a white man similarly?  Even his wife doesn't think so.), of the structural injustices which we have permitted in America because they serve us, or at least serve the people with more power than the people with less power.  And who are those people?

Us.  All of us.  We have no sovereign to blame for this, no government bureaucracy, no "deep state."  This is us.  And we can fix it.  But right now, we have to recognize the reality of it.  These are not thugs.  These are not people "out of control" (well, some are, but is that the fault of police brutally imposing order on anyone on the streets, including camera crews?  Or is that the fault of a handful of people?).  This is us.  Time we faced it.  Time we did something about it.  Now:  what to do?

Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms says the violent demonstrations in Atlanta are “disgracing the life of George Floyd”: “When you burn down this city, you’re burning down our community. If you want change in America, go and register to vote.” https://t.co/N5oZfxvFs3 pic.twitter.com/us3whIQnqu

— CBS News (@CBSNews) May 30, 2020

Perhaps that will be good advice in November; but this is now.  This anger is destructive; but it is also illuminating.  We have danced to the music; now we have to pay the piper.  Will we pay in justice?  Or will we pay in punishment?

What to do?