Feeding the Beast

No, if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink;

for by doing this  you will heap burning coals on their heads.

-Romans 12: 20

If you were reading last week, that passage sounds familiar.  It's actually a quote from the Old Testament Proverbs 25: 21-22, not just a Jesus or Paul sort of thing.  Proverbs themselves are not particularly dependent on metaphysical belief systems either, they're wisdom that holds pretty much across the board.  This particular adage does conclude with a promise of the Lord rewarding you for being kind to your enemies, but in the most concrete and non-spiritual sense too, vengeance and tit for tat rarely make things better.  Most of us learn this lesson in childhood, but eventually, when we grow up, we forget important things that should not have been forgotten.

Thus, I do not find the treatment of various Trump functionaries in restaurants over the past week to be a particularly satisfying course in the culture war that we are being fed right now.  While I certainly understand the frustration of a restaurant owner who maybe saw Sarah Sanders refuse to answer the rather impassioned question of a reporter about the separation of children on the southern border, I think that asking her to leave your restaurant, whatever the circumstances, is pretty much the wrong approach.  It's wrong on several levels, first is the issue of consistency, which is a whip of cords that can pretty much always be wielded against liberals in the current climate, because we pretend to love free speech, except if Ann Coulter is coming to your college.  And we think that Christian bakers should have to make wedding cakes for a gay couple, but somehow we're okay with Sarah Sanders getting kicked out of a restaurant because the owner disagrees with her boss. None of those situations are perfectly clear moral decisions by the way, I'm not saying that they are, but the tendency of people on both left and right to jump the rails whenever the shoe gets on the other foot is a truly disturbing piece of our current sociological milieu.

This leads to the sort of next level problem with this behavior: it plays into the persecution complex that so many of us have.  I don't need to watch Sean Hannity deal with this, because I know how it's going to go: "This is yet another example of how the 'liberal elites' are trying to silence us," the poor persecuted wealthy white folks.  In case you haven't taken notice yet, a lot of people voted for Donald Trump because they had a deep resentment for Hilary Clinton yes, but also for Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, and not only them but Mitch McConnell and John Boehner before him and even John McCain as well. If you're an honest to goodness Republican, you need to take notice that Trump is a repudiation of your behavior over the past 40 years as much as it is of the Democrats.

The one thing that Trump and Bernie Sanders had in common was that they told people, in no uncertain terms, that the system as it stands is broken and needs fixed.  They were both challengers of the status quo.  The main difference between their paths to the White House was the different primary processes of the party they chose to try and take over.  Democrats have a massive weight of super-delegates to counter the raw urges of the masses (not always a good thing, but sometimes an important brake to pull). Republicans do not have such a thing and so they get what they want, like a five year old that wants a Twinkie before bed.  Stomachache is in process. Conservatives like Ross Douthat and Michael Gerson have been beating the Anti-Trump drum for a long time, but this week the stodgiest of the stodgy columnists George Will rounded the bend and said that to counter the Trump takeover, conservatives need to vote against the GOP.

I have been reading conservative folks and libertarian perspectives intentionally over the past several years, and this comes as no surprise.  People who actually understand politics and see our system for what it is: a balance of powers and institutions devoted to compromise rather than a winner take all contest, have not been sanguine about where this is leading our nation. The only people who really seem to be loving this are the likes of Sean Hannity and Alex Jones. In other words people who rely on anger and convincing people that "they" whoever "they" happen to be at the moment, are out to get them.

So, no matter where you fall on the political spectrum as it has been defined for most of my life, you are now a person without a country, thanks to the skillful manipulation of our tendency to feel persecuted.  Even now Trump is telling people that immigrants are a huge danger, that crime is raging, that foreigners (but not Russia) are playing us for chumps, that it is "carnage" out there.  None of that is objectively true, but somehow he makes it seem true to a lot of people.  The owner of a small restaurant asking Sarah Sanders to leave because of her association with Trump, somehow plays into that. Somehow or other a woman who daily represents a corrupt and mendacious administration has become a sympathetic figure. You know what wouldn't play into that?  Feeding her dinner and treating her like any of us would want to be treated in a restaurant.  We should not lose sight of our common humanity in all of this.  There are plenty of ways to protest what our government is doing, not least of which is voting for something different. But before all that, how about acting like we still are something different.