There are certain discussions that today’s parents expect to have with their children that I did not have when I was their age. What to do if there is a shooter in your vicinity. That any drug can be laced with fentanyl. What you post online can always be found, even years later, and not just if you’re running for public office, but also if you’re applying for your dream job and someone runs a background check. And then there are discussions that were the same as when I was their age. Keep your drink covered, don’t drink from punch bowls, and only from cans you open yourself. And, more than anything, be true to yourself. Don’t be taken in by the con men, the snake oil salesmen, the impostors. Trust your gut even if your head and heart are leading you astray. Your head doubts and rationalizes, your heart leaps, but your gut will know, if you pay attention. (So will your parents, more than likely, but you may not be ready for that yet. And that’s okay.)
I grew up in what some people have referred to as a Norman Rockwell childhood. I’m sure it had its issues but I largely remember it that way, too. A lot of acres to roll around in, a dinner bell (an oversized musical triangle, actually) to call us home. Two happily married parents, and a grandmother who made homemade bread and pies and let you flop on her bed to talk about the day, on her flowered quilt bedspread, next to the Some See Him Rorschach Jesus print that hung on her wall for as long as I can remember. We had a clubhouse with a rope and a ladder and a tire swing underneath, and a trampoline that hosted some highly choregraphed routines that were nothing short of impressive. Newborn kittens in the hay loft, and extended family baseball and kickball games with first base as the foremost oak tree in the line of them, and third the closest corner of the garden.
To be clear, a Norman Rockwell childhood doesn’t save you. I went on to make plenty of blunders. But it grounds you. It gives you your basic touchpoint about who you are when you are true to yourself. I had a religious, church-centric childhood, but not one that was in any way evangelical. My parents, then and now, believe in a religion you can see by how you treat people, by how you care, not by where you are on Sunday morning, though the two can certainly intertwine. They taught me that how we treat the neediest among us is how we create our personal yardstick of service, grace, and love. I grew up accountable to a lot of people within our Methodist church community, and I think I was –am– better for it. It kept me on a pretty straight-arrow path as a teen, not because of a fear-based religion, or a community of judgement, but because there were a lot of good people who wanted to see me do good. We volunteered in Appalachia, and with Habitat for Humanity, we put together comfort bags for homeless shelters, raked leaves for the elderly, and visited nursing homes with cookies on Valentine’s Day.
I also grew up with Kids Praise and Psalty, the Singing Song Book. Psalty and Free to Be You and Me were really transformational early childhood soundtracks for me. I can still sing 1 John 4: 7-8, and Seek Ye First in a round (only Seek Ye First, in a round. 1 John 4: 7-8 sung in a round would be chaos). It is a memory that makes me smile, but also feel a little sad. I know some people would point to the fact that about 68% of Americans identify as Christian as “the problem with America today.” When I was born, it was more like 90%. By the time I graduated from high school, it was more like 80%. My kids didn’t grow up with Psalty, and some would say that is why the solution, perhaps, is to bully religion back into classrooms. Put the 10 Commandments on the walls of first grade and Trump Bibles on the shelves. But I contend that the issue is more that, as Gandi said, “I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. They are so unlike your Christ.” Instead of insisting on pushing a condemnatory rhetoric and demanding adherence, we need to live as Christ intended, so that “they will know we are Christians by our love.”
Some people will stop reading here because either, 1) they are insulted that their Christ-like nature is being questioned; or 2) religion is boring and sanctimonious, and reading someone’s sermon is a really lame way to spend a Saturday afternoon.
I’d ask you to keep reading, partly because I think I have some things to say that are worth thinking about, and partly because I am honestly so surpassingly angry these days that I need to get it out somehow. I understand that there are a lot of people, people who I grew up with, and looked up to, who I know are salt-of-the-earth good people who believe in community and giving back, who show up at women’s shelters with clothes for job interviews, and serve at soup kitchens on Thanksgiving – and who will, or have, voted for the Trump Vance ticket. And I can’t wrap my head around it. It brings me back to the print on my grandmother’s wall, and makes me wonder as I balance the world’s rhetoric, Do you see him?
I had to explain to my loving husband this morning, upon listening to Good Morning America and hearing Trump talking to Tuck about training guns on Liz Cheney, that I was yelling near him, not at him. “You’re passionate about it, not angry at him,” my daughter soothed (because she knows girl code). But in fact, I am angry. I am very, very angry, because I don’t recognize my neighbors anymore, and I don’t recognize the people I grew up with. I don’t use this blog much these days, mostly because there are so many things that shouldn’t need to be said, and also too many people already saying it. And how do you even begin to articulate things like, “Publicly fantasizing about jailing Americans with opposing viewpoints, supporting “one real rough, nasty day” of policing, and dismantling the FCC… is bad.” If it needs to be said, it feels kind of too late to save us. When I think back to the #thisisnotnormal hashtag of 2016, it seems so stinking cute. Quaint. We had no idea. If only we could go back to the not normal of 2016, I’d be forever thankful.
A few things have been on my mind lately, and they go back to those conversations that you don’t expect to have with your children.
One thing is that in my suburban Denver house, in one of Colorado’s safest cities, in one of the state’s wealthiest counties, per the statistics, my daughter has fears about school next week after the election. She is afraid of potential violence. She is afraid of voicing an opinion because she fears reprisals. She is afraid for her sister, at college out of state. She is afraid for the fact that we picked up a couple extra jars of spaghetti sauce and pasta, cans of tuna, and put a few extra pounds of hamburger in the freezer – because you just never know. Before every snowstorm, bread and milk fly off the shelves. It feels kind of like tracking a storm right now. It could blow over. Or be just some flurries. Or it could be snowpocolypse. Because That. Is. Where. We. Are. We just don’t know. We are in the middle of deciding who we are as a nation; it scares me, so of course it would scare a 16-year-old. “I never thought I would cry about politics,” she said.
I’ve cried about politics before. I cried when Trump won the first time. I ugly cried when RBG died. Both of those proved warranted, from my perspective. But this is the first time I’ve been afraid, not of the outcome of the election itself, but whether the country makes it through with a peaceful transfer of power. I realize that some people will disagree, but I don’t feel like it is the person saying she wants to be the President of all Americans, listen to the experts, and seat people who disagree at her table who driving this fear. It does seem like it might be the guy talking about the “enemy within,” an era of retribution, mass deportation, and guns “trained at” his political foes. The guy whose own generals and national security leaders (780 – seven hundred and eighty! – of them) have called him “dangerous” and “unfit,” and a “wannabe dictator.” If January 6, 2021 is debatable, about whether it was an insurrection or a “day of love,” it is at least a foreshadowing of possibilities we didn’t even consider when we voted in November 2020. I would even take the not normal of 2020, it turns out.
When I think about about the things that worried me as a child – and I do remember a couple of heated middle school arguments about Clinton and Bush Sr and definitely some more heated college ones about W vs Gore – politics did not feel like they were about personal safety. Rural Ohio in the 90s was different than suburban Denver today. It’s fair to say it was – for me – more homogenous, which perhaps lends itself to a skewed sense of fraternity. Today, my world is more diverse, and I’m grateful for it. I’ve traveled more, I’ve met more people, my circles have both grown and contracted. For example, I know quite a few friends of my children who are witty, smart, talented, empathetic people who either aren’t as concerned about fitting into a snug box of sexual or gender identity, or who are outside the box. Their parents, the same as mine were, we all are, are looking for a world where their children are safe. I want more than anything for the community that I grew up in to embrace the children who are growing up afraid, today. To let them know they have their backs.
It’s different than we grew up with, than what our parents grew up with. The difference is because society is ever-evolving to be more complex because we are evolving, our brains, our reach, our humanity. An ice age ago, finding a cave and lighting a fire was pretty much the apex of things. Today my electric car connects to my phone that connects to radio waves that can connect me to a podcast of a Finnish Nobel laureate (or The Tortured Poets Department anthology, whichever).
There is a reason why they say, “Don’t look back. You’re not going that way.” The United States had slavery until 1865. Women couldn’t vote until 1920. The Equal Credit Opportunity Act (the reason I can open a bank account, a credit card, and hold a mortgage), didn’t come about until 1974. Gay marriage wasn’t legalized in all states until 2015. 2015! Less than one single decade ago. Blows my mind. All of this to say, society changes, but the biggest constant is our unique ability to care for each other. Even in the fire caves, excavations have found skeletons with bones that were set and healed. Our very first ancestors cared for each other, even when it was hard, even when doing the right thing probably felt scary, with perhaps a saber cat pacing outside. Christians don’t live by the Old Testament, because the New Testament superseded it. Modern Christians pray in public, accumulate wealth, and have women in pulpits, even though all of those things are verboten in the New Testament. The greatest part of humanity is our ability to evolve. In our evolution, let’s think about how many times Jesus mentions love. Love as the greatest of these. We aren’t a community only when it’s convenient, only when people look like us, or speak like us, or love like us. We are a community because we have each other’s backs and want to see ourselves do good, and pass it on.
If you think you can love someone while voting against their equal rights, I’m pretty sure one of us is misreading Jesus. Jesus served the poor, the sick, the distressed. He sought out those whom society kept at its edges. When Ghandi noted the discrepancy between Christ and Christians, this is what he was looking for: For I was hungry, and you gave me food. For I was thirsty, and you gave me drink. I was a stranger and you took me in.
Would you find Jesus, a brown emigrant of Nazareth to Egypt, at a Trump rally with Stephen Miller talking about America for Americans and Americans only? Would you find him making up stories about (legal) immigrants eating pets, stories that put people in danger because of the vitriolic and irrational reaction of people who lived no where near them? Or would you find him sitting with a frightened teenager, or holding the hand of a woman with an ectopic pregnancy, or maybe even giving food and water to someone crossing under the razor wire of the Rio Grande, maybe a mother with a newborn son, looking for somewhere safe to watch her child grow up without a metaphorical saber cat, or Herod, in sight.
As Psalty the Singing Songbook said, “Beloved, let us love one another. For love is of God, and everyone who loveth is born of God, and knoweth God. He who loveth not, knows not God, because God is love.” Come to think of it, I think someone said it before Psalty.
On November 5, let them know us by our love.
