The Pale Rider

When he opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth living creature call out, "Come!" 

I looked and there was a pale green horse! 

It's rider's name was Death; and Hades followed with him; 

they were given authority over a fourth of the earth, to kill with sword, 

famine and pestilence, and by the wild animals of the earth.

-The Apocalypse of John 6:7-8

A while back it was Ebola, before that it was SARS, and of course we have had the specter of AIDS with us for most of my life.  Now it is the Corona virus. Plagues and pestilence are nothing new to humanity, the Black or Boubonic Plague is perhaps the most famous (because it happened in Europe), but there is good evidence that there have been multiple ravages of human populations over the course of history.  Diseases were probably responsible for destroying the massive pre-colombian civilizations before we white folk ever started showing up on this side of the Atlantic.  What happened to the Aztecs? The Maya? The Incas? The Lenape?  European settlers played a part, but it probably had more to do with microorganisms than it did with Conquistadors. That doesn't make it less tragic, but our violent colonial impulses to wipe out the natives were mostly just a rear guard action.  Diseases did most of the work before most of our scurvy ridden ancestors stumbled off the boats.
History gives us some grim warnings about the way diseases can crack our heads but good.  In our globally connected world, we really do need to give some thought to how a virus that started in Wuhan China now has people in New York City wearing those little white masks.  The potential for a pandemic is not a laughing matter.  You can argue all day about the virtues and dangers of globalism, widespread contagion being a big hit on the minus column, but the fact of the matter is, we're probably not putting that genie back in the bottle and regressing to isolated tribal society.
While I'm not generally given to interpreting Revelation too literally, I think John of Patmos was actually a fairly astute observer of human society.  Those horsemen really are pretty accurate symbols of our greatest perils, and they have been for a very long time.  I know, that's not comforting, but what I'm going for here is that the humility it brings us can and should be a good thing on the whole.
Our collective response to crises like this is actually improving, even if it still leaves something to be desired.  The world rallied to face the threat of Ebola even though a pretty short time ago most of the world would have just clucked their tongues and said, "too bad it happened, but at least it was far away from here."  AIDS kicked us hard and left us with a bunch of bigotry and hang ups to sort through, but sort through it we did, and Magic Johnson is still hanging around.
I'm not saying that the Corona virus and other pestilence is here to teach us a lesson, viruses and bacteria don't have any purpose other than self-propagation.  But pay attention to what things like this are teaching us about what it means to be humans in this world.  We are learning that our connections might bring vulnerability, but connection is also what helps us solve the problems we encounter.  It's pretty obvious that we can't get those riders back behind the seals, they're out there and doing their work.  New and stronger diseases keep coming at us, new ways to kill and destroy are always coming down the pike, because they're getting better at what they do; we need to be doing the work of being better humans.

Team Meeting

If you remove the yoke from among you,

the pointing of the finger,

The speaking of evil,

if you offer your food to the hungry

And satisfy the needs of the afflicted,

Then your light shall rise in the darkness

and your gloom be like the noonday.

-Isaiah 58: 9b-10

Alright liberal types, it's time for a team meeting.  I would like to call particularly on those who identify as Christian, and those who hold the Hebrew Scriptures sacred, but honestly we need our atheist and agnostic folks on board as well.  We can all agree that Donald Trump is a big, obnoxious, ignorant, orange bag of lies, but that, unfortunately, is not going to get us much of anywhere over the next nine months.  I think we can also agree that every single Democrat has some strengths and weaknesses, but that pretty much all of them would be a significant upgrade in the humanity department from our current chief executive.

We have two choices going forward, we can either keep hammering at how despicable Donny and his gang of corrupt, spineless sycophants are, (which feels good, I admit) or we can do something that will actually get rid of them.  Unfortunately, stringing together all the insults in the world, even erudite and clever ones, is just playing right into his hands.  Trump has demonstrated that calling someone a big stupid head on Twitter is as effective in winning over his base as calling them a "Vesuvius of Mendacity" as George Will called him in an editorial in the Washington Post (that's my personal favorite). In fact, Trump actually gets credit among his tribe for being vulgar and un-complicated in his taunts and in pretty much everything else.  MAGA world does not know what 'mendacity' means, nor do they much care; to them it's just more elitist snob talk aimed at making them feel inferior.  Never mind that George Will is a pretty conservative type guy, he still uses too many big words to be trusted.

That's the mindset we are confronting here, and we need to do so with some level of empathy, or else we will be exactly what Trump accuses us of being: clueless, elitist, and determined to destroy all that red state folks hold dear.  These people have a deep feeling of estrangement from people like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Shumer, from places like San Francisco and New York respectively.  They read and hear about political correctness run amok and the rise of cancel culture, and to them those are the "existential threats," not Donald Trump and his ham-handed bullying of Ukraine or his boundless self-dealing.  He tells them he understands them, even as he is tweeting from a gold toilet, and by God, he might actually just understand them.  He seems to be able to keep their loyalty and maybe even their love.

I'm not naive enough to believe we will be able to win back the MAGA crowd by November, but we absolutely need to win back the folks on the edges, and we will do so most effectively if we don't go full on Lefty-Liberal.  As much love as I had for Bernie four years ago, this time around he's starting to look like four more years of Trump.  Primarily because he is what Trump would be if Trump had decided to go left instead of right.  My belief is that if we play Trump's game, fight fire with fire so to speak, we will lose.  We will lose if we lose and we will lose if we win.  We will lose if Trump gets four more years in frightening ways, but we will lose even if Bernie gets elected because he will never get any of his stuff done.

Even if we flip congress, the Democratic party is never going to fall into the kind of lockstep it would take to ram through something like Medicare for all.  There will be no bipartisan support for it at all, and we will probably even lose a bunch of Dems who already put their necks on the line for the ACA and aren't about to bail on it now that it's stable.  That's the pragmatic reality, but the spiritual danger goes even deeper.

The spiritual danger is that we will continue to dig our ideological trenches deeper and pull further back into our echo chambers and tribal identity cliques.  Each side will continue to regard the other as a dire threat to all that is holy (in their own mind), and instead of "forming a more perfect union," we will be feeding the chasm of hatred that now separates us.  Trump did not create that chasm, he has simply decided to party naked on his chosen side of it.  After four years of watching that with disdain, I cannot ignore the consequences, and I don't want us to make the same mistake on this side.  We need to start building bridges across, not spitting at the folks on the other side. It's hard work, because the stakes are high and power has a way of making a convincing argument that winning is the only thing that matters.

I guess my hope for this season of political primaries is that the person who runs against the Donald turns out to be someone who can heal and unite us.  I hope we can really be better than we have been over the past four years, being this nasty is really wearing me out.