Fear And Trembling

I feel like certain people don't understand what diplomacy is. It's not saying "thank you." It's working with people who don't say "thank you."

— Ben Howe (@BenHowe) February 28, 2025

 I’ve been in church council meetings where one person showed up with an agenda: to attack me (the pastor).

It was always the same strategy: goad me into anger, and then claim I was clearly the problem with the church, because I was so “unpastoral.”

It was a no-win situation because if I spoke up, I was being defensive and argumentative. (The actual line was that I was “acting like a lawyer.” Basically, however you respond proves you are unfit for your office.)

Don’t respond at all? Silence is consent. Respond? Someone else may have started the argument, but you prolonged it. In the movies, this situation always occurs in the third act, and our hero wins with a sharp response or a winning act that defeats the bad guy and saves the day. Movies are not real life.

I was struck by some of the criticism of  Zelensky for “taking the bait”. Such criticism only proves that Trump and Vance knew what they were doing. Conflict wins because we flinch from it and reflexively blame the victim. We do that so we won’t see ourselves as the victim, and so we can insist the “rational response" always wins over the irrational one. I was supposed to be the “pastoral presence” in the room. I was supposed to pour oil on troubled waters and accept the venality of my accusers. I was supposed to rationally overcome my accuser’s irrational response. What really happened was that the attack always became a reason why I was at fault, and some in the church were “unhappy.” Which quickly meant I was the cause of the unhappiness, and what was I going to do about it?

Jesus could give his enemies an undeniable truth and walk back through the midst of them. Even Jesus had better writers than reality. Of course, Jesus also told his followers to just walk away from any town that rejected them. Pastors with families don’t find that to be so easy. Heads of state fighting off invaders have a similar problem. They can’t abandon any potential source of help.

But until you’ve been in that room, until you’ve been in that position, you have no fucking idea how evil people can be. You have no experience with how irrational their hatred is. You think the world is run, despite all the contrary evidence, on reason and common humanity (well, of a sort, and always respectful of you).  Like Mike Tyson said, everybody’s got a plan, until they get punched in the mouth.

And there will always be people who insist you shouldn’t have let your mouth get in the way, because they don’t want to acknowledge the meanness that is also in their world. They don’t want to acknowledge that there are irrational actors who only want chaos because they believe it’s a shortcut to power. Such people think chaos is authority, and that it makes them strong. Churches are not nations, in the final analysis; but there aren’t very many churches, or very many volunteer organizations at all (including businesses)?that are successfully managed by bullies. Countries are not voluntary groups, but international organizations of countries are. We may be stuck with Trump for four years, but the rest of the world can step around him.

And they will. Nobody likes a petulant child throwing a tantrum.

This was a big moment. You could feel the ground in the country shifting. People are pissed.

The energy is moving against the enemies of freedom.

The whole world just snapped out of it.

— Mike Madrid (@madrid_mike) February 28, 2025

I don’t think history really works like that; but, we live in hope.

ADDING: An interesting subset in this is the commentary shaming Vance for saying Zelensky hasn’t thanked the U.S.. This is usually followed with a list of times Zelensky has done exactly that. But Vance’s challenge wasn’t that ignorant: it was a “gotcha!” Because Vance’s specific challenge was, how often had Zelensky said “thank you” in that Oval Office meeting.

If Zelensky acknowledged he hadn’t (should he have kissed Trump’s hands, too?), it proved Vance’s point. If he tried to thank Trump then, it would prove he only did it because Vance called him out.

Zelensky saw that crude rhetorical trap being laid, and refused to step into it. But it’s surprising how few commentators have noticed it. 

The banality of evil, eh?