The Angry States of America

There is a lot of anger going around right now.  I felt it this morning when I read the front page description in the Washington Post of the self congratulations that took place on the White House lawn yesterday. The way that a bunch of politicians were now kissing up to Trump and calling him an exceptional leader because they got their "dream" of tax reform through the legislature without doing anything that could be remotely called legislating, well it kind of made me throw up in my mouth a little.
I generally agree with this George Will Column from this morning (please note for the record that George Will is a fairly conservative chap), that the tax bill is not really of such terrible significance, and that it is rife with flawed assumptions and that its hasty passage is an egregious violation of the principles of our government.  But it is not the end of the world, it is simply Washington D.C. showing us, fairly clearly, where its priorities are: with the corporations.  By all accounts corporations are the only real and permanent winners in this deal.  That seems to be the only thing that experts from all over seem to agree on.  The reality that corporations run the world is not new, or surprising to anyone who has bothered to pay attention.
What makes me nauseous is the smug pretense of politicians who think we're buying their propaganda.  They're not on our side, none of them, they just proved that beyond a shadow of a doubt, and they think a couple thousand bucks a year is enough to buy us off.  Maybe it is, we've all got a price, and mostly it is lower than we would like to imagine.
Those stuffed suits up the road are missing something fairly critical in our world right now: we are a bunch of angry folks.  The Democrats ignored it to their peril for the past eight years and hung on to a vision of hope and change.  They talked about national unity and rising to the challenges that face us, and it got them booted from their majority in congress and left them hanging on to Barack Obama as their only hope.  But their hope came with a term limit.  The GOP, rather than ignoring the anger, decided (foolishly methinks) to try and harness it and ride it into power.  The Tea Party was the early incarnation, and Trump is also a symptom.  Many people voted for Trump as thumb in the eye of the establishment on both sides of the aisle, he is a repudiation of both the Clinton machine and the Old Guard of the GOP.  Naive people felt like D.C. would pull him in and make him be presidential and responsible.  His Twitter feed demonstrates that is a false doctrine.  This tax plan, if not for its content then certainly for its process, is a Golem of hasty and incompetent legislation.  It is what you get when you are just trying to appease the reptilian brains of your donor class, and the monstrous ego of Donald J Trump, who really needed to start winning something.
It will not do what they think it will do, and people know it, and it's making the anger worse.  We are just so very angry at things, and I wish I didn't have to include myself in this diagnosis, because I know it's unhealthy.  I preached a sermon last Sunday to a handful of people at our early service (it was Cantata week) where I talked about the three I's that are symptoms of our problems.  I was talking about the church, but as the week has gone on I think this applies to our society on a broader scale.  The I's are: Irritability, Irrationality and Irrelevance.  They are linked together and one feeds into the others.  In the church the I of Irrelevance is probably a little more clear than in the world in general, but it has to do with the fact that we just aren't what we used to be, we are being out-competed by other stuff.  The Church used to be the center of most communities, it wielded significant authority and formed the core of the social structure, not so much anymore. We now sort of get the leftovers after all the other stuff is taken care of, and that makes us irritable, because we used to occupy such a high station.  I think that the anger of people in this country is motivated by similar feelings related to the loss of high station, the particular thing they feel they have lost may differ from person to person, because there are a lot of privileges on the list that we are losing: whiteness, maleness, "christianity," heterosexuality, cis-gender identity, middle class, working class, traditional family structure, educational status, professional esteem, and the list really goes on and on.  I'm not criticizing people for feeling angst about losing these privileges, losing things makes you irritable, even if it's just misplacing your car keys, I just feel like maybe we are in danger of harming ourselves and others, in other words we have become irrational. That's what happens a lot when people have anger at things that are far beyond their control. But technically, and maybe it is only technically, this stuff should not be beyond our control, we have been given the gift of living in a democratic republic, where we have a voice, maybe it's time to stop shouting in futility and actually do something.
We really need to get serious about taking our Democracy back from these oligarchs that have gotten a hold of it, and I'm talking about on both sides of the aisle.  Maybe it's even time to break the two party stranglehold.  Most other advanced nations have more than two viable parties, maybe we need to shoot the donkey and the elephant and move on. Hysteria is not going to help, party loyalty definitely isn't going to help.  We need to start channeling our anger into something besides impotent rage at the man like a bunch of high school seniors giving the finger to their principle on the last day of school.  That's going to mean looking beyond the self-involvement and self-interest that adolescents are so very good at.  We're going to have to recover the nature of politics as the practice of serving the people, all the people, not just your constituencies or your donors.  I know it's a big job, but if we don't do it anger is going to eat us alive.