Morality Plays

Reasonable people can disagree on certain things.  My professional journey in ministry has taught me that trying to get everyone "on the same page" is mostly futile and often downright destructive.  As important as consensus and shared vision might be to the life of a church you cannot force it into existence.  I have tried, and I have been on the other side of people who were trying to get everyone to agree on something that was deeply emotional, rooted in tradition and called into question what we believed and how we interpreted the Word of God.
The issue in question was whether or not homosexual people ought to be allowed to be ordained as Teaching and Ruling Elders within the Presbyterian Church (USA).  At the time of the debate I was serving in Western Pennsylvania, not in Pittsburgh, which means it was conservative territory.  My own convictions on the matter were in flux.  Caring for people was becoming more important than theological litmus tests.  There weren't even any out LGBTQ people in my congregation, nevertheless the issue was raised because of the action being considered by the General Assembly that would change our polity to allow it.  People were angry about it, and it was creating hostility and fear.  Ultimately it was the hostility and fear that brought me over the line, those things just seemed wrong for followers of Christ. In the long run, what has proved to be true is what Jesus said in Matthew 7, "you shall know them by their fruit."
I looked at what was going on.  On the side that was fighting for inclusivity I saw patience and a willingness to enter into conversation.  I saw passion but not anger. While those qualities were not absent on the side of those who insisted that the Scriptures clearly label homosexuality as a sin and therefore the church ought not to affirm those who are unwilling to do the same, there was a much more defensive posture to say the least.  It was during this time that the phrase "like minded" went from a term that seemed to define community to one that revealed itself to be destructive of actual conversation.
I am thankful to a few wise, kind people who took the time to help me wrestle through this issue by really engaging in dialogue.  I am also thankful to the people who revealed their anger and fear, even if it was often misdirected, and in a few cases even directed at me (because I was clearly not as convinced of the truth as they were).
The experience taught me to look at the behavior of people and underneath the behavior to the motivations.  It taught me not to trust the echo chamber logic of "like minded" groups.  It actually taught me to seek out the wisdom of those whom I thought occupied the "enemy" position. In that case I found my enemies to be less toxic than my friends.
In the long run, the final healing was not found in what eventually became my position winning the long and painful struggle, it came in learning to forgive those who had hurt me during the battle, and learning to own some of my own bad behavior and repent of my own sin. I'm still working on that.
Recent events on our national stage have brought back memories of that struggle. There are deep divisions and profound disagreements.  I once again find myself conflicted about what to think and what to believe.  Stones are being hurled once again, both sides seem to be operating out of fear, anger and disillusionment. I am personally looking for a way to put down my stone, again.
One of the most hopeful movements I have heard about is the Moral Monday movement in North Carolina.  It has been a gathering of people of all faiths, races and walks of life that gather in Raleigh on Monday and speak about the moral issues facing our nation: healthcare, voting rights, racism, justice, and rather lengthy list of others.  They are not at all satisfied with the status quo of either of the ruling parties, Democrat or Republican, because rather than being an issue of left v/s right is an issue of moral v/s immoral.
This, it would appear to me, is the way out of this quagmire.  We may disagree on how best to solve some of the critical issues facing our society, but we can at least (I hope) agree that it is immoral for a society at our level of advancement to allow a person to face a disease like cancer without proper health care coverage, it is immoral for children to go hungry, it is immoral for people to be denied the right to vote, it is immoral to discriminate against people based on the color of their skin or their sexual orientation.
Neither liberal nor conservative has managed to truly engage the immorality of these sorts of problems.  Shouting at each other isn't getting us anywhere, choosing up sides is dragging us deeper and deeper into the pit of anger and fear and allowing the quicksand of immorality to swallow us whole.  But I'm preaching now and it's Saturday.

The Angry Mob

Woe to you, Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!

For you are like whitewashed tombs, which on the outside look beautiful, 

but inside they are full of the bones of the dead, and all kinds of filth.

- Jesus of Nazareth, Matthew 23: 27 (NRSV)

This morning, before I even had my coffee, I read this account of a Nazarene Pastor who attended a Trump rally in Florida.  You may have read it too, and if you haven't take a minute to read it now. I'll wait.

Done? Good.  We need to talk.

If you are not familiar with the various nuances of Christian denominations, you need to know that the brother that wrote that story is probably much more tied into the Trump nation than I am. You might have read his comments about demonic influence and idolatry as being a bit on the kooky side of the religious spectrum, but don't write him off that quickly.  The Nazarene pastors that I have known are pretty far from the spooky snake-handling end of the baptismal pool, but they are mostly not on the progressive end with us mainline heretics either.  I read his account with a great deal of sympathy and I actually value his assessment of the idolatry of nationalism.  I am also sickened by people using the Lord's Prayer to attempt to bless the hard-hearted and fearful set of policies that assault immigrants, sick people in need of healthcare, poor people in need of support, all of us in need of clean air and clean water.

I get the impression that perhaps Joel was a bit more optimistic about the general direction of politics at the start than I can bring myself to be.  Say what you want about all of that, disagree with me and my "liberal agenda." But do not try to smooth over the demonic forces that are part and parcel of the zeitgeist of this moment in history.  The idols and the demons drop their masks in moments like this.  I have an eleven year old daughter who would have been shaking behind me at a moment like that as well. And that is what hit me in the guts about this story.

I like to think that I would have stood with Joel at that rally, but the reality is that you couldn't pay me to attend a Trump rally, because the mystique of the POTUS is not enough to draw me there out of respect or even curiosity.  I certainly wouldn't take my daughter.  The demons of fear and hate are out to play in this nation right now.  The idols of power and greed are unabashedly at the helm.  The Lord's Prayer in that setting is mocking the Holy.  God Bless America, when America does not care for the poor and the vulnerable is nothing but hollow and empty words. Woody Guthrie hated that song, that's why he wrote This Land Is Your Land.

There's a verse of that song that doesn't generally get taught to children that reflects something powerful about our nation at the moment:

In the shadow of the steeple, I saw my people

by the relief office, I seen my people;

As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking:

Is this Land made for you and me?

I want to believe that we are better than what we have been showing lately, but my faith in us has been strained to say the least. I suspect that those people who screamed obscenities at a Pastor probably consider themselves Christian. I consider them whitewashed tombs.

The good news is that they can be redeemed, because God is not done with them or us just yet, but we really need to remember that exile and destruction are definitely on the menu of divine remedies for arrogance, greed and idolatry.

Something to keep in mind the next time you say, "Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven."

The Prophet's Tongue

Don't be like this people,

Always afraid somebody is plotting against them.

Don't fear what they fear.

Don't take on their worries.

If you're going to worry, worry about The Holy.

Fear GOD-of-the-Angel-Armies.

The Holy can either be a hiding place or a boulder blocking your way.

- From Isaiah 8: 11-15 (The Message)

I had a peculiar time this morning as I was preparing the bulletin for Sunday.  I was looking through the prophetic book of Isaiah, and as I searched for a piece to use as a call to worship I kept running into stuff that, at first glance, and then also at second glance would just sort of come across as blatantly political. I'm maybe getting a little hypersensitive about how things might be taken, because we're so divided and so full of bitterness these days.  It also wouldn't be the first time that the prophets and Jesus have rubbed folks trying to hold on their ideology the wrong way.

I don't like it when people use the scripture as a bludgeon to support their ideology, and so I'm conscious of trying not to do it myself.  I wish I could always be as clever as Nathan was with David when he criticized his adultery and murder by using that little parable about a man and a sheep, but most of the time, I'm just too transparent.  The actual Bible was plotting against me this morning.  I was going through Isaiah, looking for a nice little word of praise and I kept finding stuff like this, my eye just kept falling on it (all from The Message):

Doom, rebel children! God's decree. You make plans but not mine.  You make deals, but not in my Spirit. You pile sin on sin, one sin on top of another. -30: 1

A people unwilling to listen to anything God tells them, they tell their spiritual leaders, "Don't bother us with irrelevancies." They tell their preachers, "Don't waste our time on impracticalities, tell us what makes us feel better, Don't bore us with obsolete religion. That stuff means nothing to us. Quit hounding us with The Holy of Israel."

Therefore, the Holy of Israel says this: "Because you scorn the Message, preferring to live by injustice and shape your lives on lies, this perverse way of life will be like a towering, badly built wall that slowly, slowly tilts and shifts, and then one day, without warning collapses - smashed to bits like a piece of pottery, smashed beyond recognition or repair. Useless, a pile of debris to be swept up and thrown int he trash." -30: 10-14

So you get the idea.  When I know where the prophet is going with all of this, and when I consider that the prophets often shared the fate of the people they were trying to warn, I get a little nervous, because I feel like if this ship goes down we're all going with it.  The Holy not only seemed like a boulder blocking my way, but maybe about to roll after me like that stone in the Mayan Temple in Raiders of the Lost Ark.  Did I mention that I'm preaching about loving your enemies on Sunday?  Well, yeah, of course I am, because the lectionary is trying to kill me.

Yep, God makes the sun rise on the evil and the good, the rain falls on the righteous and the unrighteous.  That is not at all helpful to my sense of righteous indignation at the lies and general toxicity taking place up the road a ways.  I want the prophet to be on my side, there's so much stuff about the arrogant and the proud being kicked in the teeth, and the rich oppressor going beggared in the street. I could really use some of that sort of justice right now. Instead what I get is stuff that can point at me with every bit as much sting as it points at Donald Trump, maybe me even more because I actually care about The Holy.

My point is that I was looking for a hiding place, and I found a boulder in my way.  I wanted the rebel children to be those I disagreed with, and the badly built wall to be, well, you know what wall I wanted it to be.  But when you start living with the Word, The Holy isn't going to let you do whatever you want to do, it's going to challenge you to do something more, like turn the other cheek, and go the extra mile, and pray for those who persecute you.

This Jesus thing is awfully tough sometimes.

Dizzying Intellect

I watched the debate between Bernie Sanders and Ted Cruz yesterday, or at least as much of it as I could take.  I admit to having a distinct bias because I freaking love Bernie about as much as I have ever loved a politician, and just looking at Ted Cruz makes me want to punch something, preferably him.  On top of that, they were debating the fate of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which has direct bearing on my life, not because I rely on the healthcare marketplace for my insurance, but because Michele works as a Navigator and if the repeal fanatics get their way she will be magically unemployed and we will be magically and hopefully temporarily poor.
Also, because of the connection with this particular process through Michele, I have heard stories about how many people have been helped, and also a good number of stories about how the system remains broken, which is something that both Sanders and Cruz seemed to agree upon and a fact which the boots on the ground are also painfully aware. The ACA, despite the fact that the first word is Affordable, has not managed to make health insurance that way.
From that common ground, Sanders and Cruz went on for well over an hour espousing the relative merits of their particular solutions: Bernie is for a single payer system, a plan he calls Medicare for all, which would guarantee coverage of some sort for every single American citizen. He is unabashedly socialist in his critique of the capitalist profit-mongering of the insurance and pharmaceutical industries. Mostly I'm with him, but I also just filed my taxes so I'm aware that such a massive program run by the government would probably be expensive, ponderous and probably vexing in the extreme.  Cruz also came out with guns blazing at the insurance and pharma industries, which was a little surprising as I sort of had him pegged as the type of politician who had sold his soul to industries like that, but Cruz's solution (thin on details as far as I could tell) was some version of the usual free market utopianism that is popular among Republicans. This assumption that market forces and competition are the answer to any bloated and dysfunctional system may not be entirely unfounded, but it has not worked out well because greed remains a persistent human sin.
So the choices swung back and forth: the government needs to fix it, the corporations need to fix it, the only thing that was common ground remained that it is profoundly broken.  I would recommend watching it, but to tell you the truth, it will probably ruin your day, so here's this instead:

Both glasses are poisoned, and that is a fact.  There is no simple solution to something as complicated as healthcare in this country.  My feeling is that there needs to be some sort of compromise, we need to get used to the fact that if we want to avoid the tragedy of people in this country dying or ending up buried in debt because of inadequate and/or prohibitively expensive care we're going to have to work together.

I think that the market is not entirely a bad influence on the healthcare industry.  The promise of economic benefits does encourage innovation.  Competition does encourage efficiency and competency.  However, never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line, and never trust a corporation to do the right thing just because it's the right thing. I think Bernie's single payer system might actually serve best as one available choice among others, allowing the government to have real regulatory clout in the marketplace and actual skin in the game.  It works okay with Medicare, though it could use a little polishing up and perhaps a few more teeth.

Notice how Vezzini's downfall is in not realizing that he can't actually win this particular battle of wits.  The only way Wesley wins the contest is by changing the rules, basically cheating.  His "resistance to iocaine powder" is the only reason that he is not dead as well.  I have this feeling that a lot of our greatest challenges require us to change the rules that we are currently playing by. Idealogues are getting in the way of real progress in some very challenging areas from healthcare to environmental protection to gun safety. The problem is they have money, and they have bully pulpits and they will continue to rant and rave about how smart they are while people are dying. 

There were a few moments where I thought both Bernie and Ted realized that, they didn't ever seem to let it get traction and go anywhere, if that seed ever takes root though, hope can grow again.

Louder than Bombs

I'm trying to take a break from outrage, call it a fast if you will.  But it's not easy. There's a lot that I could rage about from my progressive cocoon, but in my experience those who do not share my particular socio-political slant will instantly write it off as sour grapes or liberal whining.  So I'm going to address something that we as a society need to understand better no matter what side of the political spectrum you happen to inhabit.  The only position that need not care about this is the one occupied by blatant authoritarians, fascists, dictators or totalitarians and their supporters.
I have talked about this before, and on the surface it sounds sort of geeky-wonkish, but it is absolutely not.  In fact, the study and practice of this particular field will help you succeed in almost any venture that requires you to regularly speak or otherwise communicate with other human beings with whom you do not share a hive mind.  I am speaking, of course, about rhetoric. Once taught as a core subject to school children and continually refined throughout the educational process, rhetoric is now becoming a lost art.  In fact, instead of being understood as "the art of speaking or writing effectively," rhetoric is sometimes seen as the use of deliberately obtuse language to try and bully through a point.
The art of rhetoric though has certain conventions that are supposed to peel us away from that specific tendency.  Rules of rhetoric and argument are crucial in basic human interaction, and since we no longer study them as a matter of course, these important things, which should not be forgotten, are often bull-rushed right into the mud. What happened to Elizabeth Warren yesterday, and continuing into today is a miscarriage of the very rules meant to protect our public discourse from the brute rule of the majority, which next to the rise of a despot or a monarch of some sort, was the second biggest fear of those who framed our nation's republic.
Here's what happened:

1. Elizabeth Warren intended to read a letter from Coretta Scott King (the widow of MLK) that had been entered into the record during hearings about Jeff Sessions (current Trump nominee for Attorney General of the United states) back in 1986 when Sessions was a candidate for a federal judicial appointment in Alabama.  King wrote that, "Sessions has used the awesome power of his office in a shabby attempt to intimidate and frighten elderly black voters." The letter was written to then Senator Strom Thurmond (hmmm), who never entered it into the official record (wonder why?). Sessions was not confirmed despite the apparent attempt to silence the influential voice of King.
2. Mitch McConnell invoked a rule in the Senate against impugning the character of other Senators.  Which is a good rule to have, it abides by the rhetorical principal of avoiding ad-hominem attacks.  For instance, if I were to refer to McConnell as turtle-man, that would be an ad-hominem attack.  If I were to say that Senator McConnell misused the rules of discourse to silence Senator Warren and the late Mrs. King, it would not be.  The latter statement is an assessment of his behavior and lack of situational understanding.
3. The Senate then voted to officially revoke Senator Warren's voice in the remainder of the Sessions confirmation proceeding, because she broke a rule, which she absolutely did not break.  Here's why: If she and Sessions had been arguing about a piece of legislation on the floor of the Senate, and she brought out King's letter to discredit him and his argument, then she absolutely would have been guilty and would deserve the motion to silence her.  However, the issue being examined here is precisely the character of Senator Sessions and his relative fitness or unfitness for the office of Attorney General.  In such an instance, previous character assessments are absolutely relevant.
4. Liz Warren, being no one to be trifled with, proceeded to read the letter outside the Senate chambers and post the video to social media. Getting her message out there and blasting egg on to the faces of the Republicans who shut her up. Parenthetically, it made me ache for the possibility of the Sanders/Warren ticket that could have been if the DNC did not have their heads so far up... sorry I'm trying not to outrage.
5. Hours later, the frenzy was such that when Senator Jeff Merkley decided to read other parts of the ten page letter, there was no opposition voiced.  In other words they knew how bad this was shaping up to look.  But by allowing a male Senator to read from a document that they had basically censured a female Senator for trying to use they added a bit of sexist slime to the already copious amounts of improper procedural bullying they had smeared in their eye.

This is bad stuff, bad for Republicans and Democrats alike. This is the breakdown of civil discourse precipitated by a relatively small controversy.  It is the type of controversy that has been pushed upon us pretty much daily by the Trump administration.  He has picked, what seem like deliberately inflammatory people for his cabinet: Devos, Sessions and Pruitt being at the top of the list, but even some of the more conventional picks like Tillerson are not without eyebrow raising features.  Right now the dysfunction in the Senate is the latest manifestation of the chaos that is reigning in our government.  The railing and raging of people like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren is not enough to stop it, and may even be contributing to it. However, it is not the responsibility of the dissenting position to silence themselves in order to make things go smoother for the majority.  Right now the Democrats have no card to play but the hope that the checks and balances of our system of government can somehow function. If those checks and balances fail, i.e. if the Republican controlled legislature fails to hold their President to account for his chaos dealing and/or incompetence, and if the courts are overridden or politically cowed, our Republic will fall, and that is not hyperbole.

Brace Yourself

Caitlyn has an overbite, pretty normal stuff for an eleven year old.  The dentist recommended that we take her to an orthodontist.  Both Michele and I wore braces and various pieces of plastic apparatus when we were kids to straighten out our teeth, so it seemed like a pretty normal idea.  We have dental coverage through the Presbyterian Church (USA) Board of Pensions, run through Aetna.  The coverage pays for cleanings and fillings and the like, and it is supposed to pay for orthodontics for kids under the age of 22.  So we find an orthodontist that works with our DMO coverage (not easy for some reason), and finally we get her checked out and find out that she has to wear one of those headgear things at night for about a year.  This involves a fitting, some bands on her back teeth and the wire and elastic thingy that she wears in the evenings.  The total bill for this high tech piece of head-reshaping is over $1400, spread out over about a year.  Insurance, so we think, is supposed to pay half, except they don't.  The orthodontist thinks they will, but our plan doesn't cover this specific thing, and nobody seems to know that.
So, a sort of terse phone call later, I come away with the unpleasant reality that, in this day and age, whenever you interface with the healthcare system, you need a freaking lawyer.  We, or the orthodontist, or someone, was supposed to check to see if this specific thing is part of what is covered by our dental benefit.  How we were supposed to imagine that something as straightforward as a big rubber band that corrects something as common as a mild overbite would not be in the realm of covered procedures, I do not know.
Insurance companies are minions of Satan.
I don't mean the people that work for them on the ground, the lady that I called and spoke with this morning was quite nice and sympathetic, but she really can't do anything about the fact that the system is set up to regularly and arbitrarily screw average people over.  Do you want to know why I think the Affordable Care Act is a good thing overall?  Well, I'm going to tell you anyway: because it set some limits on the kinds of shenanigans that companies like Aetna and US Healthcare and Blue Cross, Blue Shield can play on people.  Here in Maryland Aetna and US Healthcare decided they really didn't want to play by those rules.
Do you want to know what the biggest problem with ACA actually is?  Well, I'm going to tell you anyway: it's that they didn't come down anywhere near hard enough on these insurance providers.  The CEO of Care First (a Blue Cross Blue Shield provider) made $66 million dollars last year.  He did so because he ran a company that maximized profits.  Do you know how they do that? By tightening the screws on what sorts of care you are allowed to receive from your doctor. And once they became the most competitive provider in the market, consequently driving away most of the competition, they are then free to jack up their premiums, making things decidedly not affordable any more.
Why is it this way? Was it a terrible plan? A catastrophe from the get go?  Nope, it was made this way by the tortuous political process it had to go through to become a law, and the unavoidable consequences of human greed and sin. The health insurance lobby is powerful and they have senators and legislators in their pocket, they really didn't want too many rules governing how much money they were allowed to make off of people getting sick and needing healthcare. And there is an unfathomable amount of money being made, but generally not by the people who really should be making it.
Doctors and nurses get shafted in this deal too, because they want to treat their patients as thoroughly and as well as they possibly can.  Uninsured people, who were much more prevalent before the ACA, often could not, or would not pay their medical expenses, leaving hospitals and doctors in the lurch and causing a massive inflation of the "going rates" for various sorts of medical care.  I have very little doubt that, in a world where insurance was not a factor, Caitlyn's head gear would probably cost a few hundred dollars and involve a few paid visits to the doctor for adjustments, but not almost $1500.  They charge what the insurance will pay, and if your insurance decides they're not going to pay anything, tough cookies.
This system is broken in ways that the ACA didn't even touch, and it didn't touch them because some people with the power to stop it decided that their cash cow was sacred.
The thing that drives me nuts is not the cost of this little snafu.  As annoying as it is, we will be able to afford to pay for our little girl to have her jaws all lined up right.  An extra $700 or so is not going to kill us, but for many people who find themselves in the teeth of this system, it is absolutely life and death.
The only thing I know for sure about this is that you cannot trust corporations.  If it is your health against a massive, billion dollar industry's profit margin, you are going to die.  I do not like the removal of regulations being contemplated by the current administration.  Do I want them to fix the problems that the ACA has?  Absolutely.  Do I want them to take away the slim protections it actually affords? No way.

Winter in America

And now it's winter, winter in America

And all of the healers have been killed, or sent away.

And the people know, people know it's winter

Winter in America

And ain't nobody fighting, cause nobody knows what to save.

-Gil Scott Heron

I lived for nearly ten years not far from the world capital of marmot based meteorology, Punxsutawney Pennsylvania. Early this morning, tens of thousands of revelers descended on that sleepy little hill outside town called Gobbler's Knob and watched as a man in a top had pulled a fat groundhog out of his "burrow," and waited for the creature to either come out and go about his woodchuck business (not chucking wood), or "see his shadow" and go back in the burrow.  This year he saw his shadow and went back in, so we get six more weeks of winter, rather than spring being just around the corner.  It's all highly scientific.

Groundhog Day is all good fun, nobody really cares that much about what the rodent actually does, it's all an excuse to get drunk and have a party.  The groundhog doesn't actually live in the burrow on the hill anyway, he lives in a rather posh habitat down in town, where generations of Punxsy Phils have lived and been fed and cared. By contrast most of Phil's numerous relatives in Indiana County are often exterminated with extreme prejudice by farmers because they are destructive nuisance.

For a very long time, the United States has been that protective shelter for its citizens.  We have safety, security and prosperity on a scale that makes us the envy of the world.  Add to that a remarkably stable and balanced form of government, and it would be easy to believe that we are living in a divinely sanctioned holy empire.  But we are Punxsutawney Phil. We are the one actual rodent in all of creation that people want to care about and lift up and look at and ooh and aah about. And we have the luxury of remaining blissfully ignorant of how our fellow marmots are regularly shot from afar with high powered rifles and left to rot in the ditch.

Recent events have shaken our confidence in our own blessedness, at least they have shaken my complacency.  If I'm being honest, I am more frightened for the future of our republic right now than I was after 9-11, because this time:

Here's the thing, it's not just the tangerine in chief that worries me. To me Trump is and always has been a petulant egomaniac. He would not be dangerous by himself, but he has seized on the fear of our nation, the worst angels of our nature rather than the better ones that Lincoln called forth. And he has risen at the precise moment when our political life has been degraded by years of ineffective infighting and our public discourse has been polluted by a "post-truth" mentality. In less than two weeks the spirit of the age has summoned the worst of us on both sides of the aisle; the left is angry and there have been eruptions of violence, the right is demonstrating how to be about as ungracious in victory as you can possibly be short of actually following through on the campaign threat to lock up their opposition.

I don't care what your political inclinations are, if you're pleased with the direction our country is moving right now, you might want to see a mental health professional ASAP. This is not making a mountain out of a molehill, the kind of toxicity that is out there right now is the stuff that leads to utter meltdowns and conflagrations.

I was born around the time that Gil Scot Heron wrote Winter in America, in the wake of Nixon and Watergate and the 1970's hangover.  I grew up in Reagan's America and I when I heard that song for the first time when I was probably twelve or so, I liked it, but I don't think I really felt it until now.  I'm looking for healers, and even the people who normally fill those shoes are girding for battle.  I don't really know what to fight or how to fight because I really don't know what to save.  Case in point: Gorsuch, should the Democrats filibuster and try to block him because the GOP wouldn't even give Garland a chance? Tit for tat, eye for an eye? What would his confirmation mean if it does go through, how much damage is he going to do? After all he is replacing the most "conservative" justice on SCOTUS, would he really shift things all that much? By most accounts he is qualified and capable, even if I don't like his location on the political spectrum, is that the hill we want to die on? I don't have answers to these questions, only anxiety about what is going to happen.

For most of my life our government has seemed so utterly predictable and plodding even.  It could be frustrating, but I was taught that it was that way for a good reason, as a bulwark against tyranny. My hope was that even if someone like Trump conned the American voters into electing him that the system would prove stronger than the individual, that's how it's supposed to work. Unfortunately, I may have underestimated the level of dysfunction in the system (but frankly it's still too early to tell). The reality is that Trump has managed to utterly scuttle diplomatic decorum and punch holes in what little was left of a bipartisan or even non-partisan cooperation.  He is deliberately antagonistic to other world leaders, he is dismissive of people who disagree with him, and he persists with demonstrably false statements about things both relevant and pointless. It would seem like no accident that his preferred method of dialogue is Twitter.  His is a social media approach to politics, big splashy, clickbait headlines, no publicity is bad publicity as long as that hit count rises, bring on the trolls and the fake news, kick out the actual journalists, go for the knee jerk reaction, don't ever slow down long enough to think or even go check Snopes (they're just another liberal media mouthpiece anyway). 

After the intellectual, almost laconic style of the Obama administration this is more of a shock than I was prepared to handle.  It's like thinking that you switched the channel from C-SPAN to the Cartoon Network, except that you realize you're still watching C-SPAN. It's been jarring to say the least.

I think we might be in for more than six weeks of winter in America.

I'm Just Going to Leave this Here:

Shout out, do not hold back!
Lift up your voice like a trumpet!

Announce to my people their rebellion,
to the house of Jacob their sins.

Yet day after day they seek me
and delight to know my ways,

as if they were a nation that practiced righteousness
and did not forsake the ordinance of their God;

they ask of me righteous judgments,
they delight to draw near to God.

“Why do we fast, but you do not see?
Why humble ourselves, but you do not notice?”

Look, you serve your own interest on your fast day,
and oppress all your workers.

Look, you fast only to quarrel and to fight
and to strike with a wicked fist.

Such fasting as you do today
will not make your voice heard on high.

Is such the fast that I choose,
a day to humble oneself?

Is it to bow down the head like a bulrush,
and to lie in sackcloth and ashes?

Will you call this a fast,
a day acceptable to the Lord?

Is not this the fast that I choose:
to loose the bonds of injustice,
to undo the thongs of the yoke,

to let the oppressed go free,
and to break every yoke?

Is it not to share your bread with the hungry,
and bring the homeless poor into your house;

when you see the naked, to cover them,
and not to hide yourself from your own kin?

Then your light shall break forth like the dawn,
and your healing shall spring up quickly;

your vindicator shall go before you,
the glory of the Lord shall be your rear guard.

Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer;
you shall cry for help, and he will say, Here I am.

If you remove the yoke from among you,
the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil,

if you offer your food to the hungry
and satisfy the needs of the afflicted,

then your light shall rise in the darkness
and your gloom be like the noonday.

The Lord will guide you continually,
and satisfy your needs in parched places,
and make your bones strong;

and you shall be like a watered garden,
like a spring of water,
whose waters never fail.

Your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt;
you shall raise up the foundations of many generations;

you shall be called the repairer of the breach,
the restorer of streets to live in.

Love,

Isaiah