Scum and Villainy

Look, I'm trying real hard not to label people who disagree with me as evil people.  I understand that a lot of people support political positions that are different than mine for reasons that are moral and may even be good. I lament the destruction of our common values and the polarization that has brought us to what feels like a dangerous precipice for our democratic experiment.  I want to give people who still have the R next to their name some level of grace, because I understand that there are two sides to every conversation and blocking out one side is a bad idea, but come on people...
In four days since the Mueller report is finally (sort of) behind us, the Trump administration has decided to attack the ACA, yet again, despite the fact that doing so would create unmitigated chaos in our already struggling health care system, and despite the fact that their team has demonstrated no suitable replacement, or even an inkling thereof.  Apparently, they have learned nothing from 2018, and have decided to poke the bear yet again. I would simply welcome them to their folly and watch the world burn, but I know how deep and wide the suffering they are going to cause will be for people all over the country, especially in "red" states. Mick Mulvaney appears to have dangled a shiny polished turd from his freedom caucus agenda in front of the orange toddler and Trump promptly forgot his promises that he would protect people with pre-existing conditions.  How is that going to happen exactly if they repeal the ACA?  Maybe we can count on the noblesse oblige of the insurance companies to do the right thing...
(pause while I laugh/vomit in my trash can)

Okay, deep breath.

Then there is the case of Cruella De-Ville, I mean Betsy Devos. Amway heiress and mental midget who has somehow become the Secretary of Education.  She wants to cut funding for the Special Olympics.  Really? The Flickin' Flackin' Special Olympics? Granted it's not the only draconian cut you are trying to make to the budget that is responsible for perhaps the single greatest duty of a civilized society, but the pittance that goes to give people with special needs a place to feel valued and experience a sense of belonging and accomplishment.  A thing that is absolutely nothing but a HUUGE bundle of feelgood stories and the triumph of humanity? How did you not realize that was going to make you look like a comic book villain? Why do you not care?

Okay, deep breath again.

Look, I understand the notion that big government is not the best way to do everything.  That maybe, on our march towards some sort of bureaucratic apocalypse we might want to pump the brakes.  But there are things that the government needs to do for us.  The market is a good thing when it comes to iPhones and Teslas, but it is not so great when it comes to healthcare and education.  Profit motive can produce some good results, but it can also produce absolute tyranny.  We need laws to protect us from the wicked, and the simply short-sighted.  We may have too many ineffective environmental rules, but we also have some that were put in place for the right reasons.  Our healthcare system may still have major flaws, but there is little doubt at this point that the ACA helped more people than it hurt.  Our education system may have flaws, but spending a few million on the Special Olympics is not one of them, in fact, as I stated above, it is probably the absolute best thing you could do with a minuscule fraction of a gargantuan budget.  It's actually such a small number compared to the whole budget that it almost seems like you decided to cut it just because you thought it would trigger the libs or something.  Which doesn't make you a smart conservative willing to make tough choices, it just makes you what the Brits appropriately call a prig.
Really, do we want people running this country who seem to be out just to be mean?
Look, I remember how deeply I disagreed with George W and his habit of invading countries full of people who already hated us, but I honestly don't remember the Republican Party just being this gratuitously parsimonious towards our own populace.  What happened? Did Obama really rub you all that wrong?  How can you support (I'm not even going to pin this one on Trump) Mulvaney and Devos with a straight face and anything like a heart in your chest?
Do you somehow think that this toxic collection of attitudes towards poor people, brown people and disabled kids is going to magically end well for this republic of ours?

And...

The Mueller Report is finally here! Now we find out what has been lurking in the shadows! Now we uncover the truth!
Or...
Maybe we don't.  Maybe we won't even get to see the thing. Maybe all we're going to get is the summary that Attorney General Barr gave us: it doesn't prove anything criminal, but it doesn't exonerate either. So vis-a-vis the whole Russian thing we're still back at ground zero.  They clearly wanted Trump in the White House, but possibly only because they hated Hillary (there were a lot of people in that boat), or maybe they figured he was a useful asset, a demagogue to bring a little Putin panache to the American people, an easily flattered fool that they could play like a harp from hell. Very few of the shenanigans that took place during the election required Trump's active participation or even knowledge, which is pretty much what I expected the Mueller report to say.
Where does Trump's daily rants and gas-lighting cross the line into obstruction of justice?  Mueller, being a serious man and serious about the law, was about as likely to jump into that as he would be to jump into a ball pit at Chuck E. Cheese.  It seems that Trump's ultimate defense against most things is simply that he is Trump and he has always been Trump, and people knew he was Trump when they voted for him.  But being a mendacious braggart and a boor is not illegal in general, and the specifics of when it might become illegal are not simple to prove or even understand, and so it would seem as though we are stuck, at least until January 2021, with a stooge at the helm.
So be it. We need to talk about how we get rid of him. I think what is left of the Republican Party and the genuine conservatives in the country need to primary him.  I know, you probably won't win, but if you want to be considered serious leaders in the wake of the catastrophe, just trying would make moral and practical sense.
Even if Trump didn't break the law, he is a wretched excuse for a leader.  He lacks empathy, he is primarily concerned with self-aggrandizing and self-dealing. It's hard to imagine that he even knows what the word commonwealth actually means. He wants to write TRUMP in big gold letters on everything, the country, your Bible, everything. World leaders have stopped taking him seriously, and many are openly derisive, and honestly he pretty much deserves what he gets. If you stick with him, you're going to end up in the same boat as Michael Cohen, Paul Manafort and Roger Stone.
But really, the people we need to talk to the most are the Democrats, because bless their hearts, they're the ones that have to stop him.  As much as I wanted Bernie in 2016, I'm not sanguine that he is what the country needs right now. The tag of Socialism still carries too much baggage, and honestly the sorts of big sweeping changes that the most progressive candidates are now proposing are probably a bridge too far.  Yes, Trump did win an electoral victory over a dyed in the wool centrist, but that doesn't mean centrism has failed, it means Hillary Clinton failed.  I just wished she had failed against Mitt Romney or John Kasich.  I think that progressives in this country are in a bad place right now, we're a little too obsessed with call outs and being offended, which is exactly what Trump loves.  He is entirely at home in the Sean Hannity sewer where he gets endless props for "owning the libs." His vulgarity seems like a refreshing bit of honesty to many people.
I would have thought that our collective sense of decency would have kicked in by now, but maybe we have lost more of our manners than I realized. The point is, it does no good lamenting the fact that a stubborn 40 percent of people still think Trump is doing okay.  It doesn't pay to try and launch Alexandria Occasio Cortez and Ilhan Omar against the Cracker Barrel crowd, it will backfire, it is backfiring.
The best thing I have seen candidate-wise from my Democrats thus far is Corey Booker from my one-time home state of New Jersey.  He's actually trying to be positive and talk about the things that hold us together, he's also about fourth or fifth in a crowded field. Republican or Democrat something better needs to come next, one thing I think we should all be pretty clear about, no matter what Mueller says or does not say, is that Trump is not what we actually need, and after over two years, I don't think he ever can be.  If we have a hope as a nation, not just Democrats, it is learning to grab a hold of those uniting factors and hold on for dear life.

Response

When I watch the Lord of the Rings movies I very much want to go to New Zealand to see firsthand those landscapes that Peter Jackson took so much time to show us in the films.  Over the last few days I feel like I want to go to New Zealand just to give the folks there a hug. What they are going through in the wake of the mosque shootings is unfortunately not unique in the world these days.  Too many places have faced similar violence, and I suppose there is nothing particularly new under the sun.  Still, I think it is important for us not to lose our sense of outrage and grief at these eruptions of senseless violence.  It is also crucial for us to express, and to keep expressing our firm conviction that, even if such evil has been with us forever, it is never to be accepted and brushed over.

One of the most important functions of a leader in this world of ours is to be a part of that expression of our collective non-acceptance of the status quo.  For all his many shortcomings as President, I will never forget the image of George W. Bush in his windbreaker walking amid the rubble of the twin towers, talking to survivors and firefighters and hugging people. The pictures of New Zealand's Prime minister (who is not Muslim) donning a hijab and going to be with the families of the slain and the people who were near the shootings show a leader who obviously has a deep sense of empathy for the suffering that has occurred in Christchurch.  Then there is the response of our Tweeter in Chief... sigh, well I mean he did tweet out his condolences, and then proceeded to move right on to bashing John McCain (who BTW is deceased) over something that happened years ago.

Look, I get it, even Trump can do the "I care about you" routine for a minute, he was in Alabama last week hugging up on some people who lost their homes to a tornado.  He just doesn't seem to have any ability or inclination to stick to it.  There may be moments where he displays empathy, but they flash by so quickly, and he returns to his petulant bullying of his perceived enemies that it's hard for us to register that care has been expressed.  It's like if I were to conduct a funeral with all the appropriate emotional mien, but as I'm leaving the sanctuary I break into some sort of celebratory touchdown dance, and immediately begin laughing it up as the funeral director and I head out to a bar for a beer.  I doubt that the grieving family would take my prior performance seriously.

What I expect a good leader to do would be to spend at least some time contemplating the nature of a tragedy like the one in New Zealand or Pittsburgh, and perhaps even reflecting on the ways that he or she might exercise the power of their position to heal and perhaps even prevent future eruptions like this. I'm not saying that Trump, or any other leader, has the ability to prevent the explosion of a deranged person into violence, but it seems incumbent upon them to help us try to wrestle with such events with more than just a "thoughts and prayers" tweet.

I suppose this is just another data point in an already extensive collection of things that tell us that Trump is a horrible President on the one hand and pretty shabby human being on the other, but there is something about his dodging of any accountability in situations like this that seem like failures that amount to more than just disagreeable policy decisions.  His insistence, for instance, on downplaying the threat of white supremacy, nationalism and various right wing movements that have erupted in violence a bit too frequently of late, does not make me think he has our best interest at heart.  With a few exceptions (the guy who shot the Republicans playing softball), too many of the recent eruptions of mass violence have been perpetrated by folks who have stewed a bit too much in the racism and xenophobia that Trump gleefully stokes. This time it was against Muslims, in Pittsburgh it was Jews, in Charlotte it was (black) Christians, in Orlando it was gays, the exact pathology of the shooters was different, but it boils down to hatred of those who are different, which ultimately goes back to fear.

So much of what Trump says and does circles around telling his base what to be afraid of; outsiders and enemies are always seeking to do him/America harm.  The toxicity of that message effects all of us, because, like it or not, he is our leader for the time being. The character of a leader does matter, it was true when Bill Clinton was abusing women, and it is true now. It is an indictment of our national integrity that we often accept such malodorous character in the name of economic success.

I'm not blaming Trump for this, but I am suggesting his actively divisive rhetoric is a contributing factor in many of the recent "tribal" identity-based violent incidents. Even in the wake of something like what happened last week, he doesn't acknowledge that or repent of his complicity in the atmosphere of hatred.  He cannot help us mourn or heal, maybe it's just not in his character. We need to learn this lesson as a nation, it's not just policy, and it's not just legislation and judicial appointments that we need from our elected officials, we need them to actually be decent human beings too.  I know, it's a big ask, but people are dying, and we need some better ideas.

Who Can We Trust?

For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

-Luke 12: 34

I've been reading all about this college admissions scandal involving celebrities and rich people buying their kids way into Yale and other prestigious schools, and I have to say, I'm not really shocked.  Actually I'm not even mildly surprised.  The only surprise in the whole thing is that our legal system is actually doing something about it.  I have known for a long time that you can't trust rich people, because "love of money is the root of all kinds of evil," (1 Timothy 6:10).  For the same reasons, unfettered corporations, also pretty dangerous.  If you scan through the Acts of the Apostles and pastoral letters of the New Testament, you will get the distinct impression that money caused even those blessed early believers no end of trouble.

I have been feeling a bit like a man without a country lately, because as much as I detest the Trump phenomenon, which I believe to be cynical greed masked with a reactionary form of populism, I am also rather unimpressed with the left handed counter-punch.  My firm belief is that for a society to flourish the center must hold.  This is true of empires and democracies alike, but it is especially true of this American experiment of ours. I have come to something of a realization that our government is now functioning entirely too much like a business to be trusted (see above money, root of evil).  Thus the hybrid socialist-capitalism that Bernie Sanders and the left wing of the Democratic party envision is a disaster waiting to happen, because it doesn't actually solve the problem that pure socialism (in theory, it never actually worked in practice) was meant to solve: the unequal and/or inefficient distribution of resources.  Income inequality is the reason why some people can pay $40K for a "college consultant" for their teenagers and other people send their kids to schools with metal detectors and armed guards.  That's not a problem that can be fixed via the tax code, it would take basically the installation of an authoritarian state, and I don't think any of the Bernie Bros really want to go there.  That's kind of why I'm not at all as tuned up about Sanders 2020 as I was about 2016.  We need the center to hold and start to function again.

I had a conversation with my Doctor yesterday, in which we discussed that pretty much all the solutions to the rather broken state of healthcare in our country rest upon a rather flawed assumption: that healthcare should be a business, whether it is run by the state or by insurance companies (because let's face it, they're the ones in charge right now).  Either way the near fatal flaw is that health should be governed by the economic assumption of scarcity, which means, in short, there is not enough of it to go around, just like there are not enough enrollments at Yale.  Even in countries with socialized medicine, it is still rather common for people with the cash to be able to purchase better, faster, more advanced care, and from a certain perspective people, most people, figure that this is just the way it should be.

The college admission thing has actually helped me clarify some of my emotions about this.  Ink has been spilled in outrage, and ink has been spilled in the direction of "duh, of course it's not fair, open your eyes you stooge."  Indeed, education in another one of those things that sits on the line between a good that should be available for purchase and a right that should be available to all.  In an ideal world (even according to ancient Greeks) education would be available to all as they have need and aptitude.  Our public school system (Socialism!) uses our taxes to fund the education of children, but even something with very egalitarian roots still favors wealthy neighborhoods with better resources than poorer ones.  So obviously even a highly socialist premise doesn't exactly condemn the well off to Stalin's Gulags. Let's face it Lori Laughlin's daughter always stood a better chance of getting into USC than the average kid from Watts, even if she scored poorly on the SATs. She had a better (probably private school) primary and secondary education, she has money to pay tuition regardless of scholarship offers, and she has the resources and connections of Aunt Becky from Full House.  The fact that these folks still had to resort to extra-legal activity to earn admission just seems strange, how dumb are these kids?

Now take out the idea that you should have to earn healthcare, because you shouldn't.  If you're sick, you should be able to get better.  For all of our sake, everyone should have access to decent preventive care like I had with my Doctor (along with a philosophical discussion) yesterday.  Does making education available to all mean everyone gets to go to Yale? No.  Does making healthcare a right mean everyone get's to see Dr. James Andrews (NFL knee guy) for their arthritis? No. That's a stupid straw man argument, in other words a thing that is not ever going to happen in the real world.

If the center is going to hold, we're going to have to start dealing with reality.  The Green New Deal is a ridiculous thing, but it doesn't mean that we don't need to take drastic measures to reduce climate change.  The Wall is an abomination to everything America stands for, but that does not magically fix our very broken immigration system.  I would maintain that the extremists have nothing to offer us but stupid ideas that are only going to allow more crooked folks to get rich enough to buy their kids a spot at Yale.

They say money cannot buy love or happiness, but right now it can buy healthcare, education and political influence, all three of which are things that we need to struggle against as we seek to become a more perfect union. The increasing polarization and the formation of informational ghettos is not helpful in this difficult evolution.  We need to be more skeptical of money, rich people, corporations and the place it occupies in politics.  We also need to remember that we cannot serve two masters and that... nevermind just go read the New Testament, you'll get the idea.

Enemy

Two weeks ago I preached about Jesus saying, "But I say to you that listen, 'love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.'" Usually I manage to get things out of my system when I preach a sermon on them, but this one is really bugging me.  The gist of my sermon was that we don't take Jesus seriously on this point, and I was challenging the congregation to do just that.  In the name of not being a hypocrite, I have been noticing all the people I hold in those categories.
Honestly, very few of them are people I actually know.  I guess it's a good thing that I just don't have many people in my life that I consider enemies.  I can not think of too many people I actually know hate me or curse me or abuse me.  I found myself having to stretch a bit, to people I disagree with, or people I think are generally bad folks, but who haven't really hurt me personally. I mean, I can imagine all sorts of enemies and I can create them around every corner if I want, but I have a very real chance that on most days I will not encounter anyone who is seriously my enemy.
I think also, that some people may hate me, or at least the idea of me.  They may hate me because I'm American (sometimes I figure we deserve it), they may hate me because I'm a white male, because I'm educated, because I'm Christian (meaning that I bear that religious label not because of my mystical identity as one who is "in Christ," but I will get to that), because I'm a pastor, because I'm liberal, because... well you get the idea, but none of those things is really me.  I hope the number of people that I have actually hurt or offended, at least since I left my adolescence, is rather small, and so I don't think I have many enemies in any real sense.
That's a luxury that very few in the history of the world could really claim.  Which is why I think we are getting so carried away with trying to make or just imagine enemies.  Because I think we don't really understand what it's like to live in peril.  The closest we come is when some lunatic decides to commit a so called "random" act of violence, or we become the victim of a crime of some sort, then maybe we have a chance to see our enemy clearly.  Jesus had serious enemies all around him.  He had the religious authorities who really didn't smell what he was cooking, he had the Romans who would just as soon put him to a brutal death as look at him, he even had a friend who was ready to betray him.
Am I living too safe? Should I be making more people angry at me? I mean so that I can love them?
Look, we've all had people hurt us, and forgiving is hard to say the least, but what I've been thinking about for the past two weeks is why I seem to want enemies in the first place.  Yes, people irritate me, sometimes very prominent people.  I really dislike Mitch McConnell, Donald Trump and Mike Pence, I can't help it, the sight of them makes me irritated, but I don't hate them.  If they were in a ditch bleeding I would help them.  I disagree profoundly with most of the things that come out of their mouths, but I don't want to see them come to harm, I just want them to lose their jobs (I don't think Trump even wants his job anyway).
Maybe if I believed that there really was a border crisis and our actual enemies were at this moment streaming across the border to come rape and pillage our world, I would feel differently about the hawks and white nationalists (I hope not, but maybe I would) who are vainly offering to keep us safe.
But the thing is that I am growing in this awareness that I am "In Christ," not just a Christian in the sense that I go to church (that I preach in a church), but that I am a part of this creation which is made according to the pattern of Christ, the Word, who was in the beginning.  As I get more and more towards that understanding (and it's not always a slam dunk) I am becoming aware that not only must I love my enemies, I really just need to stop inventing them in the first place.  I am so very fortunate that I live in a time and a place where the Vikings, the Huns or the Visigoths are not about to appear on the horizon and kill me and enslave my children.  That lowers the stakes on loving my enemy, makes it rather easy comparably speaking.
It may seem less dramatic to say, "love people who disagree with you," or "pray for those who make you cringe," but the challenge is the same,