A friend of mine posted a thoughtful column from the Chicago Tribune
on her Facebook page Friday. Entitled “Donald Trump’s Behavior is Not Normal,”
it is one of many such commentaries lamenting the tsunami of adolescent
behaviors that swept out of the capital and across the land this past week.
Like the columnist, even I was shocked at some of the antics we endured.
But it was this line in the columnist’s analysis that
stopped me in my tracks:
“[I]t's
weird to hear a president using that kind of language. It's not normal.”
Actually it’s not weird at all. This is part and parcel of
the Trumpland that enough American voters chose to allow the popular loser to
become an electoral president. These are the values the head of Trumpland
evidenced consistently throughout the campaign.
They are the values about which
white voters - and white evangelicals in particular - lied to themselves as
they held their noses and voted for a moral monster reassuring themselves “He really doesn’t mean that.”
But he did. And he does. And now he is showing us exactly
what he meant. Ironically, while the CEO of Trumpland is a pathological liar,
patently untrustworthy and willing to instantly turn on his closest allies when
he perceives it benefits him, he has never made any pretenses about who he was
and what he was about.
On that score, he was perhaps the only honest one who
showed up on election day.
Normal in Trumpland
Contrary to the protestations of this columnist and many
like him, the behaviors we have witnessed this past week are quite normal for
this new reality called Trumpland. While it bears passing resemblance to the
America which died on Nov. 7, 2016, its values - and thus its acceptable behaviors
- are very different.
Many of us living in Trumpland are desperately trying to
convince ourselves that this is still our country. We tell ourselves that we’re
going to take it back in the mid-term election and, if not, certainly in the
2020 presidential election.
Cue the confetti and “Don’t Stop Thinkin’ About
Tomorrow.”
But the reality is this is a stacked system. It’s a system
of Koch Brothers gerrymandered congressional and state legislative districts.
Its elections have devolved into a Citizens United auction to the highest
bidder for campaign funding. And between the strong possibility of Russian
election tampering procured by the reigning political party of Trumpland and
the persistent efforts to suppress voting at the state and federal levels, the
results of its elections lack legitimacy.
We may be appalled by this love child we spawned through
our willingness to let corporate and vested moneyed interests have their way
with us over the last 40 years of neoliberalism, and we should be. But the
truth is we acquiesced to this stacking of our system every step of the way.
Now like the frog who relaxed in the gradually heating pan of water on the
stove, the water is beginning to boil and we are far too relaxed to jump out.
A Context to Call Forth Our Better Angels
Though I have always been highly critical of socially
constructed realities and ideological patterns of thinking all my life, I am
hardly a pessimist by nature. For me, critique is always a tool in service to
the calling to live into our better angels. I am a hopeful human being and,
truth be told, I work very hard at seeing the image of G-d on every human face
including those I find most disagreeable.
Especially
those I find most disagreeable.
But over the years any optimism I might have clung to has
become highly attenuated by the avoidable suffering I have observed in places
all over the world from the bloody fields of Central America to the shuttered
houses of Flint, MI to the sprawling outdoor prison that is the West Bank. Even
in light of those atrocities, I have never found the dark determinist
caricatures of human nature articulated by men of privilege from Augustine to
Calvin to Machiavelli to be particularly compelling.
But like della Mirandola, Locke and Mencius, whose positive
humanist visions I tend to share, I recognize that without providing the proper
social context for virtue to be cultivated, the vices of greed, privilege and
power lust will sprout like weeds and overcome any garden plot. Our best and
highest angels simply cannot come to the fore in an adolescent consumerist
culture whose Prime Directive is “What’s in it for me?”
Building a New Beloved Country
“Cry, the beloved
country, for the unborn child that's the
inheritor of our fear…” –
Alan Patton, Cry the Beloved Country
In the end, I believe it is inevitable that Trumpland will
ultimately implode upon itself. Regimes built of fear and loathing always do but often with great harm to life and destructiveness in the process.
Let me emphasize, I absolutely do NOT wish to be proven
right here. Like the Hebrew prophets, I take no pleasure in articulating the
visions I see even as I feel compelled to proclaim them. And I continue to hope
disaster can be averted, that it will be cultural evolution which prevails in
my once beloved country and not the angry devolution – if not armed revolution
- that increasingly appears more and more likely.
But it’s columns like this one – plaintive calls to simply
return to a normal which no longer exists - that alarm me more than the content
of the daily offerings from Trumpland’s Twitter-in-Chief. There is a sense in
this column that if we simply insist that this moral monster and all his
immoral minions will just behave themselves, everything will be OK.
But it won’t. And it is this avoidant approach, rooted in
denial of the reality we face, that suggests to me that the trainwreck that is
Trumpland will continue to barrel toward that cliff with no signs of slowing
down.
In the wake of failed states, it is always incumbent upon
those who survive to build a new land. That will be the task of the New America
that will be forced to raise itself from the ashes of Trumpland. This is where
hope comes into the picture without which the current reality would drive
anyone to despair.
But there will be no quick fixes. There will be no room for
instant gratification. If this process shall prove successful, it will require
at least the patient, deliberate consideration that the original America
required. And it will require the angry, fearful denizens of Trumpland to learn how to once
again listen to, care for and ultimately trust one another.
I pray every day for the coming of that New America. And I
hope that if I survive, I can play my own role in the building of a new beloved
country.
“The great valley of Umzimkulu
is still in darkness, but the light will come there. Ndotsheni is still in
darkness, bu the light will come there also. For it is the dawn that has come,
as it has come for a thousand centuries, never failing.”
– Alan Patton, Cry the Beloved
Country
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Harry Scott Coverston
Orlando, Florida
If the
unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it
religious or political, is not worth holding.
Most
things worth considering do not come in sound bites.
For
what does G-d require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to
walk humbly with your G-d? (Micah 6:8, Hebrew Scriptures)
© Harry Coverston
2017
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1 comment:
Sad, scary, but likely where our once great country is going under tTrump. WE MUST ALL get up and do anything we can think of to rid our great America for which our forefathers and foremothers fought and died of this sorry pestilence):
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