Ripening

This is what the Lord God showed me - a basket of summer fruit.

-Amos 8:1

I don't much care for the stifling heat and humidity of summer, but I do love the produce: tomatoes that are actually red, zucchini the size of a baseball bat, sweet cherries, homegrown peppers, stuff that is locally grown and sold out of barn stalls and roadside stands.  But you know that stuff has a shelf life; it can go from good and ripe to rotten and moldy in a matter of hours.  I consider it to be a private little miracle when I manage to eat an avocado at exactly the right time, when it has just gotten a little soft, but not too soft, but it is a pretty tricky deal.

What I like about Amos' visions is that they are vivid without getting weird.  The plumb line and the basket of fruit, are pretty straightforward in their meaning, yet they pack enough of a visceral punch that you can't just breeze on by them. I think a lot about the plumb line, but lately I have been feeling like the basket of summer fruit, just on the verge of rotten, applies to a lot of what is going on in our nation. There are some people who seem to think it has gone past a point of rottenness, and others who think it may be fine.

In my family we have differing opinions about bananas.  My wife likes them on the green side, my daughter just a bit riper, and I like them when they start to show a little bit of brown.  None of us are wrong in our preference, and that, in normal times, is sort of what our political life amounts to, reasonable people on a spectrum between left and right, liberal and conservative, dovish to hawkish.  Much ink has been spilled over the fact that things "suddenly" seem to have gone rotten.  Now it seems someone one disagrees with has to be not only wrong but evil.

In my better moments, I want to believe that people who disagree with me are acting and thinking in good faith, even if what they say seems wrong, I want to give them the benefit of the doubt. I have been trying really hard to do that for Donald Trump, but he is just not giving me much to work with.  His latest twaddle fest, where he tells certain un-named U.S. congresswomen to "go back where they came from," even though three of the suspected four were born here, just does not strike me as something that reasonable people can disagree upon.  It is racist, in fact it is one of the earliest brands of racist speech that I can remember, before I ever heard the N-word, I remember certain kids on the Elementary school playground telling a black kid to go back to Africa (the black kid was not surprisingly as much of an American as we were). I also remember teenagers on the street shouting at Hispanic men to go back to Mexico (very dangerous stuff if they happened to be Puerto Rican).

The racist tone of these taunts was never in question, even before I really knew what racism was, I knew these things were despicable.  So, even though I do indeed question Trumps judgment sometimes, I have to assume that he has at least the intellect that I possessed in the third grade.  He knows they are despicable and he has chosen, not just to say them, but to stand behind them, to belligerently re-iterate them.

Pundits have theorized that perhaps this is just some grand political scheme to make "The Squad," Alexandria Ocasio-Cortex, Ihan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley, the "face" of the Democratic party.  The theory goes that if Trump has to run against a moderate that doesn't inspire the hatred and fear of "middle America," whatever that means, he is doomed to be a one term President.  He is so desperate to avoid this, either for egotistical reasons or possibly to avoid criminal prosecution, that he is willing to wade into the cesspool of white nationalism and racial antagonism.  This is, frankly, the only explanation that gives Trump an excuse that does not make him a stone cold racist, but it makes him pretty much a moral failure all the same.

Look, in my youth I know that I, trying to fit in, engaged in some reprehensible talk with people who held racist, sexist, homophobic and any number of other abhorrent attitudes.  I know what it's like to feel like you need to "pander to the base."  I do not look back upon those times as proud moments.  I was a teenager, or younger, by the time I was 18, I had developed a firmer grip on what was good and righteous, now at almost 45 I can speak carefully and tactfully and without deliberately offending people if I choose.  Donald Trump is in his 70's, what is his excuse? Senility? Perhaps, but I think it's deeper than that, he may not, as he says, "have a racist bone in his body," but his tongue is not a bone, his brain is not a bone (well maybe it is ossified), and the muscles that guide his metacarpals over the twitter keyboard have been acting pretty damn racist.

More troubling than the single case of Donald Trump, is the rottenness that this reveals in our nation.  No, it didn't happen all at once, racism is in some very real ways an ingredient of who we are, but we don't have to let it be our primary flavor. We can grow up instead of rotting.  Or we could continue on the path we're on, but in that case I suggest you read Amos chapter 8 past verse one, see if you like the results.