Maybe This Is What We Deserve

As a life long resident (almost) of Pennsylvania and Maryland, I have never before voted in a primary election that had much meaning.  Both States hold their primaries in late April, when most of the world has gone back to ignoring Iowa and only thinking about New Hampshire as a place to maybe go on vacation.  Yesterday, I got the chance to have a meaningful say in who will be on the ticket in November (define meaningful as you will). Honestly though, as this Primary season lurches on, I'm starting to get a bit of a knot in my guts.  It looks as though we are on a collision course for a Trump v. Clinton race for the White House, with a strong possibility of some of the ugliest internecine hissing and scratching in the GOP since Barry Goldwater, not that I remember that personally.
At this point, I have come to prefer Trump to Cruz.  Not that I would vote for either one of them.  The only reason I would even say which one I prefer is to point out that our candidates reflect something about our nature, and in this cycle, we should probably take a minute to reflect on what exactly our choices are saying about us.
In the Bible, people groups are characterized by their allegiances to both kings and gods.  The way the enemies of Israel are described by the prophets for instance is wrapped in layers of metaphor and artful descriptions. Sometimes these prophetic observations had great truth, other times they were maybe couched in fear and hatred, it's hard to tell, because we don't live in that world.  We do live in this world though, so here is what I think each of the four apparent candidates says about us:

1. Donald Trump: Trump is the bully and the front runner in all of us.  Trump is the voice that calls for change back to the way things were, or at least how some imagine that they were.  Trump is the voice of money and success, and his credibility extends as far as you believe money and power are really the important forces in the world.  He can wield both with fearless (some might say fearsome) confidence.  Trump's actual policies are vague and thus difficult to challenge in open debate.  But he's not selling us his ideas, he is selling us himself, as a cult of personality that says: "Are you angry?  Me too, let's do something about it."  He hasn't, up to this point, had to define what that something might be.  Yet he keeps winning states and delegates, despite harshly alienating large segments of the population.  He is a testament to how screwed up our Government is at the current juncture of history (not our nation BTW, I don't believe we need to "make America great again," America is pretty great, our Government could use an overhaul). Remember when Howard Dean, the Democratic front runner at the time, let loose those awkward (oh so awkward) yells at a rally speech, and basically everyone sort of jumped off the bandwagon?  That's how fragile a candidacy can be, but not Trump, he can weather making positively absurd statements, and have people admire his honesty.  How?  Why? These are soul searching questions America.
2. Hillary Clinton: If Trump is the bully, captain of the football team, Hillary is the student body president.  She is a political beast to her very core, and has been for pretty much her entire adult life.  She is our ruthless pragmatism.  She is the spirit of our nation that accepts atomic bombs and drone strikes as necessary means to an end.  Hillary's greatest quality, and the reason so many don't trust her is precisely her undaunted drive to occupy positions of power.  As Obama has revealed some of the deeply seated, latent (and emergent) racism of our nation, Hillary exposes our sexism.  Even if we consider ourselves thoroughly modern, enlightened types, there are ways in which we negate Hillary because she is female.  Her character does not fit what we think of, deep down in our instinctual thought patterns, as appropriately feminine.  She refuses to sit down and demurely occupy the side stage, even when her husband was POTUS, and that rubs a lot of people the wrong way.  People are torn by Hillary, because many would love to see a woman finally occupy the Oval Office, it's just that many of those same people just don't want THAT woman to occupy the Oval Office.  The why and how of that is also a prompt for some searching.
3. Ted Cruz: Cruz is the zealot.  He is a political zealot of conservatism, he is a religious zealot of Seven Mountains Dominionism, which gives me the shivers, both as a voter and as a Christian.  Now I will admit, despite what I do for a living, I have always been more comfortable with skeptics and agnostics than with true believers. People with doubts tend to be more trustworthy than those who are absolutely sure of everything.  I tend to see the Zealots and the fundamentalists as people who were most opposed to Jesus in his day, and also being a force counter to the Gospel in the world today.  I am suspicious of any religious movement that focuses too much on an end times scenario and some idea that God is all of the sudden going to decide to change the rules and do things by divine magical intervention instead of the slow and painful work of sanctifying human lives.  But Cruz's brand of gnostic-ish Christianity plays pretty well in America, it gives the people what they want: assurance that they are "in" the club, and that no matter how bad things get, Jesus is going to be on their side.  Cruz is with the crowd that sees persecution of the Church coming around every turn, and is constantly on the lookout for the attacks of the enemy, which leads to militancy and a bunker mentality which is really at odds with the multicultural global world we find ourselves having to deal with these days. He seems to be fading, but you never know, the establishment really hates Trump.
4. Bernie Sanders: Confession, if you didn't know it already, I really like Bernie.  I understand all the reasons people have for writing him off: socialism, idealism, impracticality of his ideas.  I get why people feel that way.  But to me, even though he doesn't seem to stand a chance against the Clinton Machine, he is a breath of fresh air in politics: an honest man. More so than any of his policies, Bernie was and is doing the same thing as Trump: selling us himself, his frank, Brooklyn Jewish Grandfather persona, his long years as a political gadfly, his lone opposition to the Iraq war, he's selling us his vision and his integrity.  You may disagree with what he thinks we should be doing, or question whether his policies would ever be feasible, but in an arena filled with so many people who will bend and maybe even break in order to win an election, Bernie doesn't, he hasn't and it would seem he won't.  He could have attacked Hillary on so many fronts, but he insisted that he wasn't going to start flinging poo, and he hasn't.  His only attacks have come on policy positions, voting records, and, well, political stuff.  Bernie is our idealism and our hope.  He is an American story that shows us the best of what we can be, honest, sincere, modest, intent on serving rather than ruling.  He is probably not going to be an option, but his presence and the stir he has caused gives me hope that we might actually be turning for the good.

This is not me trying to tell you how to vote.  That's why I waited until after the Primary to write this.  This is me encouraging all of us to think about our choice of elected officials not just in utilitarian terms of what they can do for us, but think about what they say about us.  Especially when it comes to POTUS, that office is more deeply emblematic of our national identity than it is important to our national policy.  The fact that we may only have bad choices should give us pause to consider what we did to deserve those choices.