Category Politics/Culture

Reader David Moriah wrote a heartfelt comment in response to my previous post on “Is the Center No Longer Holding?” I offer it to you here as a prelude to a brief meditation of my own, because I believe, among the various important points he raised, none is more vital and literally noteworthy for our time than the implications of the “faith” that he sketches with the powerful imagery that he does.

His comment in full:

“I have reached a stage in my life and amidst the accelerating centrifugal forces at loose on the planet when I surrender to my inability to forecast where we are headed. There are times when I sense an impending darkness capturing more and more of the globe, and most disturbingly many of the supposedly enlightened corners that have been cleansed of tribal lunacy by liberal democracy and both secular and religious messages of tolerance and good will toward all...

We seem to be living in riven times. (Though one could ask with substantial justification: When hasn’t humanity lived in riven times?)

Schisms abound, and they appear to be more rancorous and sharp than at any time in recent memory. The European Union is fragmenting; the French may well follow the lead of their counterparts across the channel by doing a “Frexit,” with the added dimension of electing an overt racist to lead them.

Much of the world stays mired in intractable poverty under the autocracies and kleptocracies that serve as both its cause and effect.

And in the United States, we endure, in a kind of downcast awe, the awfulness that is Donald Trump.

So is the vaunted center, that core of shared values and aspirations and steady-minded tending of continued progress in the human project, whatever the differences in means and tactics to achieve it, slipping away from us?

Is the center no longer...

In 2009, if President Barack Obama had let it all go—allowed the banks to fail, GM to go out of business, the whole incipient Depression to descend as it would after the insistent anti-regulatory, tax-cutting machinations of the Bush administration reached their natural dark end—the American economy and the fortunes of its people would have gone into freefall. The suffering and dislocation would have been on a scale not seen since The Great Depression.

Many conservatives at the time were advocating just that—for the country to “take its medicine,” not rely on another government bailout that reeked of a dreaded “socialism.” They wanted Americans to snap up their big-boy britches and get on with the tasks awaiting an over-the-cliff, do-it-yourself, deregulated economy, in near total shambles by then but finally freed from the pseudo-protective shackles of government assistance and oversight...

The blog post below by my longtime friend and United Church of Christ Minister Jim Burklo so well encapsulates many of my concerns regarding the challenge to our Constitution and standing in the world posed by President Donald Trump that it felt redundant to fashion my own treatment of this same basic subject matter. Jim is the associate dean of religious life at the University of Southern California, the author of three books, a former church pastor, and prominent spokesperson for the movement known as “Progressive Christianity.” The only addition I will make to his essay below will be to add to the end of his quotes from President Trump a fourth one from the current (February 13 & 20) edition of The New Yorker magazine, which places in highly sobering context the seriousness of the concerns many millions of people across the country have after the troubling first three weeks of the new administration.

*...

So yes, we wuz robbed:

Fidelity to an antiquated, fatally flawed electoral college system that violates every tenet of one-person, one-vote.

Active voter suppression efforts in key Southern states.

Russian hacking.

Fake news.

James Comey.

But we were also wrong.

So, so wrong.

***

When Donald Trump announced his candidacy, a couple of friends and I engaged in a long-running email laughfest that treated him as the joke we thought he truly was. Surely, such an obviously uninformed, narcissistic buffoon and royalist billionaire had zero chance of becoming president, but we would at least enjoy the comic value of his candidacy while it lasted.

So, so wrong.

On the other side of the aisle, Bernie Sanders rode some of the same heat of anti-establishment rhetoric as did Trump, but with the key difference that he was actually informed and articulate...