Sinner Man

Oh, sinnerman, where you gonna run to?
Sinnerman where you gonna run to?
Where you gonna run to?
All on that day

The words of Nina Samone haunt me from my iPad as I write. Earlier today not long after I arose, I was in Third Space Coffee sitting in a full room, amid the lulling uneven hum of conversation sipping my coffee, eating a breakfast sandwich, and writing to my eldest grandson at the communal table. And I thought, communal is a good word, a word of belonging, a word that is as much comfort food as mac ‘n cheese. These days it seems I crave that communal feeling more than mac ‘n cheese.

I find myself day-after-day watching the news, listening to the news, my legs unconsciously moving in nervous gesticulations as I twist and turn to find a comfortable sitting position. But it is not the chair that makes it difficult to sit. It is not some neurological condition or bout with clinical anxiety that keeps my legs in a low acrobatic state. It is the news itself, it is the discontent throughout the nation.

I sit there and watch children in separation from their parents simply because their parents want a better life for them. There parents sit waiting for judgement and waiting for their children in the somewhere away because they are deemed illegals. That is only half the story. Crossing into the United States outside of a designated immigration point is illegal, however the law provides for them to ask for asylum once they are inside US territory. Therefore, they are both legal and illegal caught in a narrowing view that judges them far too harshly. Pawns of power and paranoia.

The same power and paranoia that disenfranchise long time allies and embraces long time enemies and dictators. The same power and paranoia which wants to disband the European Union and the G7 and NATO and Trade Groups/Coalitions in an effort to return to a world of chest beating, testosterone driven isolation. Though we know from the tested work of John Nash that working for what’s best for the whole is ultimately better than working for the best for oneself, our policies focus on the one-on-one that dries up of the lushness of cooperation into a desert of winners and losers.

I also watch as the balance of the Supreme Court teeters towards harshness and away from balance.  A view that goes against the founding fathers’ desire to provide for everyone’s freedoms to a small panel’s judgement of which freedoms count and which don’t. This is a grave analogy to the state of our union which no longer has balance. That is driven into divisions by hate and fear mongering and lies. And after being beaten so relentlessly, after watching wedge after wedge strategically placed and driven, how do we the respond? Chaotically, further degrading the discourse. Splattering ourselves with the same mud used to obscure our sight.

President Obama was not just offering some platitude by saying “When they go low, we go high.” He was giving us a framework, a blueprint for protest and rebellion. A call to protest peacefully, to discuss thoughtfully, and to rebuff half-truths and lies with full truth. This does not mean we lay passion aside. It means we take up passion as our standard, and defend it not by fighting fire with fire, but defending it from the high ground and using the energy and voices of the people who wield hate against them. Hate does not conquer hate, it only supplants it with a new hate.

Love and compassion are hate’s enemies, and perhaps that is the silver lining to this grey cloud that enshrouds us. Today’s strife has driven into the light, the divides that were just inside shadow, wounds that oozed but now bleed freely. Today’s strife provides us with a mirror to see ourselves more clearly. And these divides that are being sought to exploit us can be used to unite us. If we are all different, then we must all be the same. Race, religion, and gender identification are simply our chosen clothing. We are the same flesh beneath our fashion statements. Our hearts pump the same blood. If we let that be our guide, then we can extricate ourselves from this maze and define a path.

If we can set aside our hate, if we can unite against division, then we can look hate in the eye and sing unflinchingly along with Nina Simone,

Oh, sinnerman, where you gonna run to?
Sinnerman where you gonna run to?
Where you gonna run to?
All on that day

Wedges

Political times are difficult these days. I watch and follow them. I listen and learn. I fear. I fear. I fear.

But how to comment? The difficulty is that if I address the NFL questions, I miss out on the larger topic of race. If I delve into that larger topic, I ignore Puerto Rico. If I dive into Puerto Rico, I forget about health care. If I chase health care, I miss tax reform. If I discuss tax reform, I leave North Korea on an island, in the middle of the water, and that water is an ocean, and it is a big ocean.

I look at all these and so much more and I reel, stagger, stumble, fall. In a daze on the ground, I realize that these topics are a distraction. That one covers for another, that to focus on one is to chase a shadow while other shadows scamper about diverting attention and energy.

I look to the constitution and find beauty in its offerings, its flexibility, its existence as a living document to make itself available to change and inclusion. But it also sows the seeds of its potential downfall. The openness it permits allows for nooks and crannies, that can be exploited by wedges.

President Trump has shown himself to be a master of wedges. In a recent speech in Alabama he said, “I brand people, that’s what I do, I brand people.”  He does far more than that. His gift for naming extends to casting expersions and doubts. What is really happening here is that we have elected a president who finds gaps then drives wedges.

As a boy, I helped my father split firewood. My father being who he was had a lot of logs for us to split and save for winters. If memory serves me, he had logs for far more winters than we would see together as a family of seven before empty nesting would set in. I loved splitting logs with dad. He would bring out the sledge hammer and his wedge, and he taught be to drive the wedge into the log and cause a rift and eventually a split. That wedge and those rifts come back to me now all too vibrantly.

We have been foolish to overestimate the progress of race relations in this country, we have been complacent in how we perceive our journalism, and we would rather think that we have nestled into our classes than see that divisions abound.

President Trump is a genius in his egocentrism. He sees all of this and more, and he sees it in the only context that he really perceives anything – himself. In his ceaseless defense of self, he has carefully selected wedges, and driven them into the heart of America in a rhythm of his own choosing.

Through the NFL he has driven a wedge between people and the safe haven of sports where we live our fantasies and hold onto teams as if they were religious icons. While we have been seeking the simple joy that our favorites are national champions or world champions or just heroes that we can carry on broad shoulders into our dreams, President Trump has made them into constitutional threats.

Through race, President Trump has exploited the fragile delusion that things are better than they are. He has exploited the subtly growing rifts to be viewed as an attack on veterans instead of a protest of inequality, and that new arrivals to this land are stealing desired jobs and wages while milking the economy and funneling in gang members and drugs. He takes a wedge and seats it firmly in the earth to push apart our trust in media, and using similar wedges to drive gaps between the populace and the congress, as-well-as between the people and the judiciary.

If you remove our heroes, if you remove our trust in the legislature, if you take away a belief that the judiciary is a necessary balancing force, if you destroy our judgement regarding the fourth estate, if you reinstate African Americans and Latinos as the insidious enemy, what is there left to believe in? The answer is obvious, inescapable, and far more scary than I would dare imagine. Our only refuge is President Trump, and that sounds an awful lot like a dictatorship.

When a leader intentionally works at stripping the bonds of society from any political and moral groundings than his or herself, they are working toward a dictatorship. They are trying to establish a government driven by a single individual instead of the constitutionality mandated by separations of power.

It is October, Halloween is coming. I was hoping to be cowered by ghost and ghoulies, to have my pulse raised by wonderful superstition and myth. Instead, I sit afraid of something much greater, my own government.