Some thoughts that might help start a dialogue with those that we think made bad choices in 2016:
Almost all people are carrying a great and secret hurt, even when they don’t know it. This realization softens the space around our overly defended hearts. -Richard Rohr
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. -Upton Sinclair
Here right matters. -Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman
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Being thoroughly Anglican, I’ve often wondered why some actual event among the bounders in Virginia didn’t yield us a national holiday the way a fictional event among the Puritans did. But, then, Thanksgiving never really celebrated Puritanism . . . it celebrated people not letting differences stand in the way of a good party.
If, like mine, your divides run deep, then possibly we both need to re-think how to erect bridges instead of walls, how to party no matter what our party. The last thing Jesus did before the “Passion” was to sit down and eat with people who a day later pretended not to know him and even sold him out. It didn’t take him by surprise. He even predicted it—and served them dinner anyway.
His wasn’t the only party not to end well. Still, coming together across our differences is the stuff of neighborliness, of E Pluribus Unum, of American life as we used to know it before we let the polarizers polarize us.
The October talk at our local Torch Club given by John Falconer built on talks from earlier this year in noting how we demonize those who disagree with us, how we tend to communicate only through the echo chamber of people like us, how we fear people who aren’t like us.
It was a good talk, a worthwhile topic, pertinent to our current national (and often, as in Nebraska, more local) dilemma. We are pretty rigidly divided when it comes to crucial political and cultural issues.
Big money in politics is one of the reasons—forcing elected officials to spend free moments raising money rather than talking to each other, encouraging representatives to abandon the idea of even living where they serve and commuting instead. But then big money is one of the issues over which we are divided!
I was at a funeral not long ago for Wayne Ziebarth—nearby teacher, farmer, public servant. Even aside from the loss of such an acquaintance, his funeral was bittersweet because it recalled a day when Nebraskans were not so divided politically, when both its major parties and even its independents were often considered on their merits rather than on the initial that followed their names on ballots.
We live in a vastly different political atmosphere, poisoned I think in part by what always poisons politics—power corrupts and one of our parties, though not the only guilty one, has been so successful of late that it has tried to make us a one-party state—ironically just like the foreign states they most used to like to criticize. (True, their criticism has become a bit more selective of late!)
At the funeral, a speaker alluded to the “five G-forces” which typified the life of the man we were commemorating: being Good, Grateful, Gracious, Generous, and Glad.
What our divisions often obscure is that all of us know people who disagree with us who are, in fact, Good, Grateful, Gracious, Generous, and Glad people. They lead upright lives, are thankful for their blessings, treat others graciously, help their neighbors, are generous with their churches and charities and communities, and are happy to be alive.
I’ve had a recent exchange on Facebook with a friend of my son’s. We don’t agree on much these days but I know him to be just this kind of person. One of my all-time favorite people, a rancher from the sandhills of Nebraska, is a model of this kind of person—and supported (maybe still supports) Trump. We often gather with a group of friends, a group evenly divided on political lines. Ditto the church we attend. Ditto some of our own immediate family!
This should make us cautious when pronouncing judgment on folks who support Trump.
Not all of them, of course. He also garnered a lot of support from the very wealthy whose vote for him was cynical self-aggrandizement. And he garnered a lot of support from a largely white-nationalist (read fascist) gang of hooligans who were emboldened by Trump’s rallies to come out of hiding and rough up their adversaries, shoot up their schools. And don’t forget how being female counted against Hillary—openly in lots of these folk’s minds and probably subtly in many other minds as well.
So, perhaps the hooligans and the billionaires and the just plain gullible or dumb as a stump made up a large part of Trump’s support, not to mention the party officials and those serving in Congress who either believe they are morally justified in using Trump for their own ends or have joined ranks to detract from efforts to expose Trump’s wrongdoings for fear their support for him will be guilt by association for them and their party.
Nevertheless, he also gained the support of a significant number of people who are not stupid or wealthy or mean or particularly bigoted—who are in fact good, grateful, gracious, generous, glad people. What did they think they were voting for?
From a lot of personal conversations, I gather that:
- He won the votes of a lot of people tired of politicians’ weasel words, voters who thought they were voting for straight talk.
- He got votes from people who live on the margins of poverty because of jobs lost and plant closings.
- He got votes from people who find the global world frustrating, especially after having been raised in an era of unprecedented dominance by the United States, now replaced by a global world in which power is more balanced.
- And, he won votes from those whose support was determined in great measure by a very sophisticated and successful propagation of lies about the world and who the enemy is and how evil anyone or any force that baffles us must be.
His voters would probably be surprised to learn that a lot of us who didn’t support Trump are also tired of ‘bought and paid for’ public servants, of office holders who aren’t responsible to the interests of the people they serve. We, too, are fearful for our country’s future. We, too, sometimes succumb to fake news.
I addressed the evils of Trump and the ills he’s visited on our country and world in October’s blog (even before the mind-boggling boondoggle in Syria had played itself out or what promise to be very convincing impeachment hearings began or the war criminals were pardoned!), but here I’d like to suggest what we might gain by paying attention to what a lot of very good people thought or hoped they were voting for and against.
Clearly, they thought they were voting for an end to abortion. I happen to think that a lot of candidates and political machines have simply used the misnamed ‘pro-life’ movement as a cover for doing almost nothing about abortion but using their election to make matters worse for people’s income levels and security. Nevertheless, that doesn’t touch on the motives, the sincerity of voters who thought they were voting something they call ‘pro-life.’
That number includes a good many Roman Catholic and Evangelical Christians, of course. And we need a conversation with them about abortion. We need to talk about what the statistics about the number of abortions tell us about the actual social, intellectual, medical, financial, and cultural constraints that lead women to choose abortion—constraints we could actually do something about, something more productive than condemnation and blame. We need to clean up the terms of the debate, and show them what has really been responsible for the decrease in the number of abortions.
But in all that we need to learn that upholding the value of life, even in a doomed or misguided cause, is not all bad. We live in times when life is too easily devalued. In a world where all people could have enough to eat—but don’t because of avarice and injustice and ignorance. We should muster some gratitude for a significant number of people advocating for life in whatever arena is dear to them.
They have, I think, been wrong to throw away their votes and demonize their opponents, but they have not been wrong to insist that life has more value than an often soul-less world grants it. We should tell them so, and if we don’t, then we shouldn’t be surprised to find we never get them to give a hearing to how making abortion “legal, safe, and rare” is the best way to protect life.
Clearly, too, they thought they were voting to make their lives easier. They translated that into voting for de-regulation! I think that, phrased that way, de-regulation is a stupid cause—it is partly why big airplanes are dropping out of the sky—but it isn’t stupid to find how much of your professional life now has to be devoted to filling out forms, to protecting very narrow profit margins, to dealing and arguing with all sorts of bureaucracies that govern the running of small farms and businesses, some in government agencies but just as likely in insurance company permissions and claims offices.
Sure, it is irrational to want the government to get out of your feedlot (which might indeed pose a threat to the folks down-hill from it) and yet want them in someone else’s bedroom. But if we can’t see the legitimate complaint that is raised by over-regulation or stupid regulation, if we can’t sympathize with the effects on livelihoods that depend on production and sales and yields and markets when even good regulations are enforced, then we will not gain any listeners when we call for more sensible and simpler regulations. We won’t help generate a culture which celebrates all sorts of regulations—regarding, for instance, how our food is grown, what it contains, how its packaged, how it is inspected to assure it’s safe for consumption.
And, perhaps the most paradoxical of all, they certainly thought they were voting for decency. Think about it: Here’s a candidate who was running a child prostitution ring out of a pizza parlor while enjoying the favors of Wall Street, and here is a candidate who is the least racist person around, who has been a successful entrepreneur, who is for the little guy. Assume for a moment that those were true depictions—which candidate would you vote for?
Of course, neither of those depictions is even remotely true. The “villain” here withstood days and days of investigation during which the charges against her proved again and again to be untrue (even as the false charges were being buttressed by foreign influence spread on social media) and the “saint” (with the “divine mandate”) has proven again and again to be inept and immoral and adept at nothing so much as his cover up. Ask the people he’s bullied, belittled, and fired! Well, you don’t need to ask: as I write it has been coming out in open hearings.
I think, in many minds, the issue of decency has depended on the catch phrase: the swamp (now sometimes “the deep state”)!
I’ve listened in vain to Trump’s opponents and have yet to hear them clearly and publicly defend those attacked as creatures in the black lagoon. Somebody should be touting the so-called denizens of the so-called swamp and explaining what they actually do. We should in fact be celebrating rather than denigrating those trying to hold together our Foreign Service, our criminal investigation agencies, our quality of life protections.
[Side note: three major debates down (not to mention many other forums from small Iowa cafes to CNN platforms—which, by the way, are far better than the DNC managed “debates”). Yet how seldom have we heard candidates define and defend our State Department or EPA or FBI from the slurs? Who has simply presented the American people with the facts? Do we really believe that people will see through the lies when we don’t spend some money and energy on showing them to be lies? Has it never dawned on the DNC that it might spend money on setting the record straight—especially when others are spending lots of money to distort it!]
Wouldn’t it seem like the lack of any direct address to “the swamp” is due to the inane way we have organized and conduct political campaigns. They are generally conducted by people who have no faith in democracy and so believe the job of campaigns is to manipulate public opinion. Campaign managers and their pollsters have a special place waiting for them, don’t they Dante? Don’t they?
But if I had bought into the mis-impression that there was a vast swamp to be drained, if I hadn’t had sufficient skepticism to predict that, once drained, we find the strangest creatures we’d ever imagined were what the knight in shining armor (well in a red baseball cap) would bring with him—if I think there is a dangerous deep state our hero would root out, then my mistake would be reinforced by how little anyone addresses this.
(There is just now some public notice of the effects of gutting many government functions such as the State Department, but the gutting has been going on for nearly 3 years and not in secret!)
Strangest of all, Trump supporters clearly voted for family and Christian values—by one of the greatest shell games in Evangelical history, Evangelicals (predominantly white men) bought into the notion that such institutions as marriage were threatened by the increased tolerance of the LGBTQ+ community, that just as God had picked a foreign, pagan King to liberate the exiled nation of Israel, so he was now picking an obviously immoral outsider to restore decency to America.
Really good, sound biblical and historical studies will show that the a bigoted lack of acceptance of LGBTQ+ neighbors and friends has never been scriptural, that there is no parallel between King Cyrus and Trump, that the notion of God giving Trump a divine mandate was a fiction in the warped minds of the most discredited of televangelists like Pat Robertson and the current rantings of Paula White. But such Christians as embrace Christ’s inclusiveness have failed to make a dent in the dominance of white male evangelical message.
We can blame lots of folks for that, but we can’t doubt that the white male evangelical voter thought (and thinks) he is standing for virtue and protecting America. If for a moment we believed any of the fictions that allow him to think so, then that is exactly how we would have voted too.
My point: Two voting blocs who both think they voted for decency should have some common ground to talk about!
If we are to show “middle-America” why hearings into the Presidents performance of his office benefit them rather than threaten their values, if we are to demonstrate why so much that the Trump voter fears is actually of benefit to us, including a healthy role for government and a healthy respect for diversity, we have to start by accepting that we share with them a lot of the same values.
In a word, many decent Americans thought they were voting for good stuff—jobs and morals and America’s place in the world. It is increasingly clear that what they voted for has brought disaster to us and that disaster spreads itself around the globe. It is a mystery why many didn’t foresee this, just as it is sadly clear that these disasters have not dissuaded many from their support. Nor will we dissuade them as long as they know that we see no common ground we share with them, so long that is that we demonize them and they demonize us.
I made a terrible mistake in the voting booth once: disillusioned with the fading stardom of Eugene McCarthy and the assassination of Robert Kennedy, I voted for Richard Nixon instead of Hubert Humphrey. I reasoned that Nixon was as liberal as Humphrey and far smarter. He may well have been both. What I didn’t give adequate attention to was moral character, the area in which, as we all learned, Humphrey excelled over his rival hands down. My terrible vote, along with thousands of others, cost the lives of lots of soldiers and created a constitutional crisis.
It also resulted, however, in my not wanting to ever make the same mistake again. Even at that I don’t have a perfect record. I can tell you there are a couple of other votes in my life where I wish there were “do-overs”! But my trajectory has been kept true by the memory of my mistakes. Over a November weekend at the Bishop Kemper School for Ministry, we heard the story of a fellow Episcopalian who had “gotten it wrong” regarding Civil Rights. But getting it wrong led to him wanting never to make that mistake again. For a generation he got himself elected as a deputy to our General Convention to support the LGBTQ+ community until they were full citizens in the household of God in our faith and practice of Christianity.
‘Converts’ are often sources of future zeal! And there are beginning to be more and more of them, witness the veterans now calling on their representatives to honor the oath they share.
Attempting dialog, understanding, does not mean we have to back away from challenging others to see and act differently. On this prospect, the numbers right now are only beginning to show encouraging signs, but moral persuasion is often not far behind all sorts of numbers. Some indeed have heard poet Ella Wilcox’s challenge and are changing:
To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of [us].
The fact is, there are divides that are not going away. As I write today, just this morning David Leonhardt’s columm referenced a Caitlin Flanagan piece on why, because of their strong arguments on each side, the abortion question is not going to go away—but it need not continue to be a divide, one often exploited for other political purposes. We can, on many issues, coexist.
We all need an ear, a feeling for how folks can mean good and do bad. As we head toward Thanksgiving, maybe we can actually sit down over turkey or tofu and see if we can’t find some common ground or at least enough understanding to live together and where we have common ground work together as well. Maybe we should start soon, before there’s no common ground left. I wouldn’t start with the billionaires or the bigots, but I’m pretty sure I’ll get some chances closer to home.
Happy Thanksgiving to you all from the American Heartland!
Thanks:
ahéhee’ (Navajo)
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blagodarya (благодаря Bulgarian)
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toda (תודה Hebrew)
xièxie(謝謝 Chinese traditional, 谢谢 simplified),
Next blog: the annual Christmastide reflection
capeek 