Celeste Wray a spirit warrior who belonged to St. John’s United Methodist church in Memphis, Tennessee which has seen its share of evil and evil overcome. She fought every good fight with grace.
Mr. Trump used the National Prayer Breakfast to announce he was going to lend the power of his office to protect Christians. This venue has always been religion-for-show with the theological standards in the subbasement. But anytime he goes anywhere near the Bible, it ends up upside down all over again.
This is a good time to clarify the relationship between his policies and Jesus. For the most part there is none. I’m an ordained Baptist minister and I’d be hard pressed to find a proof text for or against tariffs. Lots of texts about mercy and care for the poor and immigrants (of which Jesus was one). Lots about God warning the rich and those that suck up to them. Lots more texts about obeying the law and telling the truth.
Jesus never voted or ran for office. When tempted he turned away from political power. He was killed by his government at the insistence of a subservient spiritual cabal. Actual Christians find spiritual cabals repellent.
Religion has little to do with Project 2025, except as cover. It’s about the money and power. Most gods don’t care about money and they don’t mind royalty. But one particular God does, the One we see in the peculiar life of Jesus. That One flipped over the temple tables speaking of mercy and justice. That One mocked the self-congratulatory cabal that took money from the poor, weak and vulnerable. You can do that in the name of Tesla, but not YHWH.
This brings us to Christian Nationalism, the explicit theology behind the Trump claim to royal privilege. Not that Mr. Trump thinks he needs help from theo—he thinks he is theo.
There are similar theological betrayals in Turkey, Russia, India, Hungary. But the American one is by Christians, of whom I am one, a Baptist whose heirs bled to put the separation clause in the Constitution now being shredded.
I believe these people are wrong about more than theology. That’s not my argument right now.
They are certainly wrong about who is theo and who is not.
Jesus must not be tethered to any nationalism, especially one so calloused toward the poor and the vulnerable. Use some other god, if you must have a god for your movement; I think the Aztecs had one closer to their policies.
It’s up to the Christians to sort that out. There is a different betrayal peculiar to people of faith who are also citizens of the United States of America. Because we were founded by numerous strands of faith, we have hard-won practical intelligence about how faith works well in democracy. We know that we are at our very best when none of us has the power of the state to enforce our own views. We know that it is better—spiritually—for the state and the structures of faith to partner in the love of the people, for instance by helping everyone get vaccinated, but not share in the exercise of power. You protect Christians by protecting everyone in the rule of law under the Constitution. That’ll do it.
No country is exactly the same, but we can learn from others such South Africa’s long walk from Apartheid. They gave us Mandela, Tutu and ….Musk. South African Christians challenged the theological and moral foundations of the Apartheid Government who had wrapped all their worst policies with the trappings of Christian Nationalism. The South African Council of Churches in 1968 called Apartheid “heresy” which was bold but not quite accurate. ‘Heresy’ is a ‘wrong belief,’ which is bad but not fatal. Christian nationalism was fatal; a betrayal of the Gospel. They came back and wrote the extraordinary Kairos Document which named it apostacy—betrayal. Apartheid cracked at the base.
The Christian Nationalist movement in the USA is the same betrayal.
It is one thing to punk the Democrats; quite another to punk YHWH.
I’m really missing John Lewis today. Fearless, tenacious and non-violent, he’d know what to do and how to do it, . He went to jail dozens of times–usually getting beaten in the process—so that people could vote. And clear-eyed, he would not be surprised that 49.2% would fall for an ugly offer to reduce the price of eggs a bit and beaat up on somebody weaker. But he would also know that many of them are truly traumatized and don’t know who to trust. But he would not whine like my Democrats are. But he would not pout. He knew it was a long, long walk. Since it is King Day, I’m quite sure he’d be in a church praying for good trouble.
Good Trouble
God of anger, fire, trouble and cry,
Kindle us, your willing embers of the world that needs a cleansing fire. We are yours to risk, eager for fresh air beyond the safe spaces. We love your street, and concrete grit. We love the stride and the heft of things worth doing, unafraid of conflict.
Let us not hold your energy lightly, unexamined and unwashed of pride. Let us not waste your hope by tethering it to our short-ranging vision. Let us not waste voice and language by limiting it to our cleverness.
Tune our ears to those hardest to hear, the ones we find annoying and inconvenient. Especially help us hear the ones that embarrass our proper friends, just as You bothered them with tax collectors, working women and the rich. You were rejected by family, nearly thrown off a cliff by neighbors. Complicate our sense of connection and draw us into the tangled humanity You have made so wonderfully and inconveniently complex.
And then, after we sense the breadth of your impossibly wide family, let us speak with simplicity of mercy and justice in kindhearted firmness.
Protect us last. Put our bodies in the way of those who would harm the poor and despised; let the bruises intended for the weak fall on us; let the venom aimed at the despised be ours. Spend us as You have spent yourself.
We know in resistance we find release; in giving, all gain. For life finds a way where we let it flow through us into lives parched for mercy, aching for justice, despairing of peace. May our young be brave. Our families raising up new prophets as our old ones take the risks reserved for those who have lived enough to give it all away.
Make our lives a protest against the lie that You have not created enough food, space and freedom to go around for all your children. We deny with generous lives the lie that You failed to design a world that might work for us all. May our kind lives protest the lie that we must narrow our hope to only those who pray like us, look like us and talk like us. May our lack of anxiety protest the bitter penury that shrinks your mercy into a fist.
Surely it is your voice that speaks of a time when your promises will be realized, the weapons laid down, the rich with the poor eating together, lamb and honeybee, Baptist and Buddhist, Anglican and Atheist quiet in wonder at how great Thou art, how blessed we are.
May it be.
////////
The prayer is from God and the People: Prayers for a Newer New Awakening, published by Stakeholder Press. Available on Amazon here.
We must not lose memory of his decency, honesty, toil, service and faith. White Dove, by Jimmy Carter in the Zaban Room of The Carter Center
Jimmy Carter’s life is now complete, a race run full out to the last day. The moravian bells of old Salem chime in his honor as I type. Many others will follow in the days, months and decades to come. We must not lose memory of his decency, honesty, toil, service and faith. And not dishonor him by elevating those virtues out of reach of all of us.
Counting him out was almost never a good idea whether he was running for an improbable office (every one he ever held) or an improbable health goal (guinea worm, polio, smoking or handgun violence). Or embracing improbable relationships—the Allman Brothers Band so key to the first steps of his race for President, Charles Taylor, the Liberian Pariah President or North Korean Pariah President, Kim Jong-un. Carter was able to live across improbable boundaries because he was comfortable with his own complexities and complicities; he knew he was human like all of the 8,018,082,868 of us. And he was clear-eyed about his own death, which most of us ignore until the last final shock.
Carter was always misread as being somewhat simplistic and moralistic. In fact, he worked through his own complexities to still choose to act, speak and do what he thought right. He was not surprised that his relationships sometimes made that harder; he was a loyal to people who made his life more complicated than a more ruthless man would have (thinking of a few bankers and entrepreneurs who clung to him like barnacles). A religious man with eclectic curiosity, he often confounded Baptist Christians who feared the grey areas (most of life). And he confounded secular friends who loved the grey so much they found it odd that a man could choose commitment and follow through. Not satisfied with a simplistic stab at polio, he did the hard work decade after decade after decade. Never satisfied with pontificating in a hotel ball room, he took African presidents to left-behind places in their own countries they had never seen. And then he went back again and again. He knew the complicated reasons for homelessness, but he never failed to pick up his own hammer and build one more home. He loved one woman his whole life, even though he was honest enough to almost lose an election by admitting “lust in his heart” for others. He gave the word “human” a good name.
Like many thousands, my life would be unrecognizably different had it not met his. Not long after he was involuntarily returned to civilian life from the White House, he started The Carter Center as a launching pad, more than a museum. He and Dr. Bill Foege, who had run the CDC under him, held the first global conference called Closing the Gap, even before he had a building. An engineer’s kind of conference, it asked how much of the burden of premature morality could be prevented based on what was already known. What could we actually do with what we already know? About two thirds was preventable back in the 80’s, as your grandmother would have guessed. And who needs to act? Among others, the ubiquitous faith networks who he knew tended to sit around and wait for something terrible to happen and then act surprised at the most predictable things (cancer, war, diabetes, river blindness). Could religious people grasp the vast moral chasm causes by not acting on the patterns we know cause needless suffering? He and Dr. Foege got the attention of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and started the Interfaith Health Program, which I ended up leading. Why me, and not some famous academic bishop? Frankly, I’m not sure, but both men had a preference for bold action over formal qualifications.
The first thing we did was blow up the perfectly respectable grant plan of work, which began with a big formal conference at the new Carter Center. We replaced it with two years of scrappy meetings in dumpy basements and raggedy centers all over the nation (not unlike his run for president, now that I think of it). We asked the leaders actually doing things what they would commend to him as worth replicating. And we asked where they were stumped for lack of a clear vision of what might work. The two lists were identical, of course, which meant that the big innovation was having enough humility enough to realize that somebody down the road had probably already figured out the answer we thought we had to invent. It is actually harder to adapt something as it demands even more intelligence than simply plopping down another idea from somewhere. He called this a “mundane revolution.”
Carter is known for protecting the Arctic reaches of the Alaskan wilderness. I rafted the Canning River which borders that vastness and I was grateful; what other President even knew it was there, or would spend scarce political capital to protect it? It wasn’t just big nature he loved; he never missed participating in the Audubon bird count in Plains. He personally called the American Chestnut Society to get some hybrid seedlings to plant at The Carter Center, where they are improbably growing strong. He accepted some gift of Koi from the Japanese government but refused to purify the pond so people could see them. (A Georgia pond is brown.) Life, even the mundane, is spectacular when you have eyes like his.
My very best ideas are tiny footnotes in the extraordinary legacy left by this special man. These include the “Memphis Model,” emulated by dozens of major healthcare systems all over the nation, the “religious health assets” which paved the way for the WHO into activating faith networks all over the world and, of course, Leading Causes of Life, which I spoke about the first time at a Conference in Milwaukee to which the former President sent me to in his place (imagine their disappointment!). Carter created a physical and a mental space where it seems reasonable to imagine things that had never happened and then try to do them. And then keep trying, maybe even for 98 years.
After decades of one unbearably oafish Christian after another desecrating the very idea of faith, he quietly gave his life as a long gift to his church and all people of faith: an example of sacred dignity and integrity. Not that the oafs understood. When he was gracious enough to invite evangelical leaders to the White House, more than one publicly prayed that he would become a better Christian. However, when my secular friends think that anyone who tries to believe is foolish, I could always say, “No, I mean people like Jimmy Carter.” They had to nod.
He had little patience with superficial piety. Once he had all of us Directors reflect on whether Newt Gingrich had any good ideas in his “Contract with America.” I choked and noted this was not likely to go down well with the faith people who actually do the work on the streets. He snapped that the churches rarely break a sweat, while the government at least knows where all the poor live.
In the very first article for the Interfaith Health Program he wrote, “We must make the choices that lead toward life.” And who is accountable for those choices? Not just improbable Presidents, but hundreds of thousands of improbable grown-ups doing the right thing when people notice and when they don’t.
This is true, even unto the very end of their days, when the right thing means releasing into the love of one’s family, instead of the normal vain and fruitless medicalized struggle against death. James Carter was proud, but never vain, often overlooked, but few lives bore so much fruit. I hope his last thought was satisfaction of a life well lived.
A pitchfork is perfect for moving hay, compost, and the messy ensemble of cow poo that accumulates in barns. And the five sharp tines get attention by someone angry when the banker and landlord are insufferably arrogant. The wealthy are usually surprised. I know I was surprised last month as my party and candidates were so rudely put aside in favor of….well, you know.
“Reasons You Need a Pitchfork” from the Minnesota Horticultural Society (not the book Frankenstein)
Once anger flames, rationality has nothing to do with what happens next. Righteous anger can open the way for cynics with very ugly intentions to do things nobody voted for. Who voted for polio, measles, coat-hanger abortions and run-amok preachers? This is why Project 2025 was buried during the election and whipped out immediately after. This is why North Carolina losers used anger’s shadow to change the job descriptions of those that won. Ugly. And predictable.
Even when it is obvious that anger is being used by opportunistic frauds; it does not mean the anger will subside. Or that it will suddently become smart and be redirected toward the billionaire blowhards that actually do deserve a pitchfork.
What to do? Don’t argue with angry people, especially by telling them they are foolish to trust such obvious frauds. They don’t want instruction, especially from people like me they see as part of the “elite” that reminds them of their stolen dignity every time they go to the grocery store, bank, school or hospital.
Let’s talk about the hospital part of the conflagration. That’s the one I know best, having been inside the beast for nearly twenty years until recently. Why would anyone be angry at a hospital since everyone is going to need one? Normal people (the angry ones) understand that the shiny medical castles are only partly there for them. Hospitals are one visible knot in a complicated web of privileged guilds and professions including, executives, bankers, doctors, nurses, suppliers, technology companies, insurance companies, pharma, ambulance drivers, all seamlessly integrated into the government and universities. All that feels quite personal one is vulnerable and in pain with no possibility of negotiating anything.
All parts of the system—cruelly called “health”—seem to be more and more obviously about money—theirs—and less and less about those who need their “care” (the services people cannot not buy). This system costs roughly a trillion dollars a year and yet wants more. It drives every in the economy cost higher while whining all the time that it isn’t enough. Ironically, many of these hospitals (including my own) are not supposed to be “for profit,” so they do not pay taxes. All of this is painful at the family level only beginning with insurance and the huge indecipherable bills that result when you actually need the services. It makes the economy sick as every business thinks constantly about how to offload these costs onto vulnerable gig-workers or by shifting everything possible across the border or replacing humans with robots.
This interwoven system is the leading cause of bankruptcy in most states (for medical debt under $5,000). So who needs democracy when I can’t take my kid to the doctor without risking eviction or having my car towed away?
Pitchfork.
It is ironic that this web of privilege thinks it (we) are protected by our non-profit status and science. Who could quarrel with charitable scientists? Well, we don’t look charitable and we don’t look scientific. Offensive executive and physician pay levels pulls one fig leaf away. The other fig leaf—science—disappears as it is always used to justify another shinier and more expensive building. What about the low-cost and low-tech science of prevention that makes at least some of those buildings unnecessary? Silence. What about the science supporting investment in education, faith and good stable jobs? Maybe later. What about the science linking democracy and neighborhood stability to health? Sounds woke. Everybody in healthcare knows that science, but we build bigger buildings instead of following it. So the angry people give us a Secretary of Health who doesn’t believe in science either.
The whirlwind is partly our fault. Those of us who do believe in that science and do believe in the non-profit mission should have been far more aggressive in pushing the medical industrial complex to act appropriately. Instead, we prodded gently and waited for a better time.
It’s not too late. Dr. King said it is always the right time to do right. It is crucial that we not be pulled into defending the indefensible. Not everything is worth defending from president Musk who will be losing support pretty quickly on his own. And as you pull apart the data we should notice that some of those most angry are people friends. This might be a good time to lend some intelligence by helping aim the energy where it can do some good, instead of bad.
For instance. I offer two minor tweaks to non-profit health policy everyone should agree with:
First, hospitals’ non-profit tax status now rests on superficial “community benefit” rules. It should never have been allowed to be superficial. Those rules have little to do with the science of prevention and social determinants because implementation plans have no accountability to local public health (except in Ohio which is a story for another blog).
Give the local public health department authority to approve the hospital’s community benefit implementation plan so that it aligns with actual public health science and local government. This has been discussed quietly at the National Academies of Science for years. But religious hospital lobbyists fought it (!?!?!?!) It would have been better to make the hospitals uncomfortable, Than having the voters angry. Do it now.
Second, hospitals are huge financial enterprises which often make as much money from their investments as from selling expensive medical procedures. It is likely they have about a trillion in their basement, which nobody ever thought possible. But there it is; they are banks that also offer medical services. Legally, their investments are invisible to their non-profit status; they aren’t required to report how much investments they have. They are usually required by their bankers to have between 100-300 “days of cash on hand”. Take your local hospital’s annual revenue and do the arithmetic. Unlike hospitals, your local banks are required by the Federal Reserve to invest some of their corpus in places impacted by their historical racism. Why not hospitals, which have done the same in the past (usually to the identical neighborhoods)?
Add transparency to the legal “community benefit” form. And give the Federal Reserve responsibility to oversee non-profit investments instead of the IRS.
Dumb is going to happen. But the chaos breaks open some room to do some good things, too. This is a great time to speak very specifically about how our public goods can be available to everyone no matter how they voted, prayed, worked, worried or shouted. If we use the pitchfork to shovel out the barn, nobody needs it as a weapon.
Good ideas help us adapt to reality. The Statue of Liberty is one.
We bottled 8 gallons of mead last night, which seems more relevant to our times than honey for tea. The bees must wonder if it was all worth their trouble. One bee gathers enough nectar for 1/12th of a teaspoon of honey over their whole life, flying 500 miles, visiting tens of thousands of flowers. This is about the output (and the itinerary!) of the average writer, professor or pastor. They contribute to the strength of the human hive in tiny increments that are even less predictable than the bee which probably didn’t intend the mead. The human system lives on ideas that prove to be good and bad over time as they help or hurt our need to adapt to reality It is hard to tell with ideas.
“When a complex system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to shift the entire system to a higher order.” The internet attributes this to Ilya Prigogine, but it is hard to tell where even the best ideas originate. Of course, every writer thinks their 1/12th teaspoon of typing is that crucial small island of coherence as soon as it is typed. It actually takes a couple decades for a thought to stick and then another dozen for the speck of coherence to join many others to make even a small island.
Not sure the bees envisioned the need for 8 gallons of mead. I think they would be okay, if we share.
One of my own idea-specks was the about strengths of congregations in Deeply Woven Roots written at The Carter Center in 1997. It was useful enough to be used in many seminaries. Twenty one years later they found their way into the National Academies of Sciences workshop on how those strengths contribute to community health. We’ll see if that small island of coherence survives the cultural storm tides now raging.
A slight plurality of citizens turned the ideas in their gut to elect someone certain to knock our systems even further from equilibrium than they ever. Some of them like Bannon think they are the new island but I think not. We’ll see. The week after the voting I happened to be on an actual island built on granite and ideas now called New York. TC and I were tending to the grandsons as their mom gave birth to yet another play this one about the ultimate New Yorker, Billie Jean King. Lauren rarely passes an unscripted morning, so we trundled through the streets of the Lower East Side to the Tenement Museum—a living archive of the many waves of immigrants that became us.
I picked up a copy of The Island at the Center of the World, by Russell Shorto, which flipped my history-major mind upside down. He dives deeply into the revolutionary scholarship of Charles Gehring who translated thousands of pages of 17th century Dutch records of the New Netherlands to find us—the Americans. His main point buried under two centuries of self-serving English mythology is that New York is New Amsterdam and our core culture and politics Dutch, not English. The English colonial built their “city on a hill” filled with the spit and venom of Christian nationalism. The Dutch had a different idea: us.
The Dutch didn’t mean to plant us; but they put a trading depot on the tip of Manathans (Manhattan) in 1608. The company director launched a stupid war against the Native Americans in spite of the counsel of the settlers which set off a battle of ideas still underway. One of the settlers, Adriaen Van der Donk, was the the sole lawyer who wrote their petition to the West Indian Company and eventually carried the battle right to Amsterdam. He was deeply influenced by the new Dutch idea of “natural law”—which overruled royalty and the rich. They also adopted the odd Dutch idea of religious and ethnic tolerance—which was the absolute opposite of the English and pretty much everyone else in the world, at the time. “Something was happening that was quite unlike the unfolding of society at the two English colonies to their north, where rigid Puritans…and even more rigid Pilgrims maintained, in their wide-brimmed piety, monocultures in the wild.” (p61). Bannon and his tribe know the narrow-minded city they mean to build on our hill—Plymouth, not Amsterdam. It was bad history and worse two centuries later.
Brooklyn has always thrived because of its welcome sign (over the right in red).
This Dutch embrace of human complexity is the foundation of what became the United States. That idea has always seemed vulnerable to fear baiting. It is the taproot that feeds our radically adaptive capacity to find the next new way which we need urgently. The test of our adaptive ideas is not on TV but in the real reality of our ecosystem, the slowing of the Gulf Stream and a 3 foot rise of New York Harbor. We need the best of intelligence, spirit, gut and grit, not just the fragile brittle ideas of Christian nationalism. It’s really Puritan nationalism which failed, as all brittle ideas do. The Dutch one thrived and we will, too.
A good idea doesn’t stay on an island. The revolutionary Dutch ended up infecting the English, Welsh, Scots and South Africans just as they did New Amsterdam. There are a few pretend kings around today tolerated for amusement like poodles. The rich who admire their pomp have missed the tale of time confusing work and show.
When TC and I are in Glasgow or Cape Town people wonder what happened to the Americans. They ask “when did you become mean and narrow?” I didn’t know what to say, as I barely recognized my people.
Adriaen Van der Donk knew that there is no such thing as an American, Dutch, Scot, or African. We live on the same tiny blue island of coherence built on ideas that proved worthy of their times and may yet again.
No, I’m not over it yet. So I went to the honeybees, who are Italian immigrants technically. They reminded me that they had seen way worse—their social structure has survived dinosaurs. I’m bottling mead this week from last year’s honey, which should help in these days.
I thought this week about my hospital episode few years ago. A squadron of doctors tried to discern why I was bright yellow with disabling chills and night sweats. All the labs had run off the rails so they said I was experiencing a “cytokine storm”.* The numbers made no more sense than white women voting for a convicted rapist, or a Hispanic for mass deportations. The doctors didn’t know the why of my body’s storm any more than I do Tuesday’s convulsion. They released me home thinking the blood work would sort out over the next few months. The body—and I pray our body politic—sorted things out.
Most of the world sees us Americans more clearly than we do ourselves. They see not just our quaint trappings of hometown democracy, but our military troops stationed in 170 other people’s countries. We are an empire every day that sometimes votes. The voters hardly notice, as all of those young men and women we send are “volunteers,” mostly poor. But at the Wake Forest football game we watched a handful of students get sworn into the army right on the Jumbotron; everyone clapped. Earlier when the helmeted gladiators had jogged onto the arena they headed right to the end zone, kneeled and prayed. I don’t know why or what for. The prayed up, hyper-patriotic Wake Forest team succumbed g to the California tofu eaters, 46-36. I don’t know what it all means except that politics, education, sport, military and public religion are in more of a blender than I thought.
Bill Foege said that “you don’t have to know where you are to be there. But if you want to go somewhere else, it is the very first thing you need.” Where are we?
God still matters here. Amanda Tyler, author of How to End Christian Nationalism, spoke in our library a couple miles from our Jumbotron. She runs the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs, dating to the days when Baptists believed in separation of church and state (the same Baptists that started our Div School, which still does). She expects the MAGA people, unleashed by the clean electoral majority, to accelerate, not moderate. One facet of the attack is explicitly theological: Jesus as captive, not lord. The Christian nationalists are wrong theologically. But so have we been in allowing our Jesus to be so emeshed with empire, which is not new. The National Council of Churches (bastion of mainline liberalism) was opened by President and General Dwight Eisenhower in the 1952. Empire fits Hulk Hogan, but not Jesus.
Humans live here. Normal people think of politics roughly 25 minutes a year, maybe every four years. Don’t assume your neighbor’s vote tells you much about them. They might really like eggs, are too old to worry about an abortion and don’t quite make the connection with democracy. And they may already be embarrassed. So don’t treat them as if they have married some hussy. Just one bad vote in a bar, which happens. It is crucial that 23 months from now that they are quietly able to change their minds. We must not let these lines harden.
Intellectual humility matters here. The fruit of a decent education is the capacity for self-criticism with intellectually grounded humility. The better the education, the more fruit of a humble spirit. How so? It is only100 generations since the Greeks built Epidaurus for social, political and bio-medical healing when they were sick with war spirit. They applied all they knew and then left room for mystery beyond what they knew. They wove highest arts of theater and theology with such reverence that you can hear a denarius drop in its 14,000 seat amphitheater now. Did they know something we need now? Yup.
“Here” is the whole world. Empires sees the world as their (our) supply line. The Romans needed African grain and gold; we prefer oil, copper, lithium (and still gold). This is why every empire goes away, as will ours. We don’t need empires anymore. We have better tools for connection, communications and exchange. Their imperial claptrap and its Jumbobotron Jesus is simply unnecessary. We can do better than Elon and Donald picking up the phone like Caesar and Brutus. The UN is as flawed as twitter, but both are clues to another way that 7 or 8 billion people can share a planet. The train wreck about to happen may open a chance to figure it out.
I didn’t like this week.
But I like being here.
///// *A cytokine storm, also called hypercytokinemia, is a pathological reaction in humans and other animals in which the innate immune system causes an uncontrolled and excessive release of pro-inflammatory signaling molecules called cytokines.
Final car leaves the lot as the polls close in precinct 405, ironically Happy Hills.
I stayed inside the polling place till the last of the 249 votes was counted in precinct 405. Then I went home to watch what I had not thought thinkable as the other many millions of votes were counted. This is probably one of the cleanest elections in our history, which only magnifies the irony.
I’ve been confused about my country since Reagan. And tonight more than ever. So feel free to ignore and discount anything I say about politics in my country ever again.
My read: gender, race, fear and price of eggs. Kamala was a great candidate, but if she were a guy or a white woman…..and we had talked more about eggs.
I can’t give any big strategic guidance about the next four years. We (the planet) really don’t have four years to waste on important things, which now we probably will. And the mud isn’t even dry from Helene. Clearly, those of us speaking of “vital conditions,” public health, or climate have failed to communicate well enough to overcome….gender, race and the price of eggs.
New world, so I’m going to listen carefully to those with whom I disagree so profoundly. Obviously, I’m missing something I need to hear of anger and frustration. I am pretty sure Trump and his Senate will fail to give any real balm to what drives that anger, so it is crucial we listen carefully. And I’ll listen to those who have been deeply disappointed by their nations–Germans, South Africans. This is a crucial time to listen to the pain that would make such a man votable.
In the meantime, I feel like we (at least me) have let down my daughters and grandsons.
But we’re not dead, yet. And we can’t give up on their world.
There is great value in simply doing the right thing even if 2% more than half see it differently, Live by facts, follow basic science, show decency for the poor. These may be minority positions but not by much. We need more Bonhoeffer than Rauschenbusch; Francis more than one of the random Popes with the fancy hats. But some humiility might help, too.
Dawn breaks as the polling opens on Halloween. It was not scary.
I only saw four early voting sites out of the 8,616 open around the nation, now paused until the other 108,374 open Tuesday. But it was real and more Norman Rockwell than Guernica (but don’t forget that is happening in Gaza and the Ukraine, Sudan and and and and). I was a greeter at one historic black church that was one of our vaccination sites, home to events honoring Dr. John Hatch and the anchor of a 300 unit model redevelopment across the street. No wonder people would vote there. And then I served as an inside official democrat observer in three other sites, two rec centers and a library.
As an observer I was trained on very basic election processes so I could be the eyes for a sophisticated quality assurance team of lawyers, just in case anyone has trouble voting who is qualified to do so. There’s an app for that, of course, on which I can report anything I have questions about. I never needed it. There’s WhatsApp channel from the party headquarters that coordinates all the volunteer greeters while also keeping track of the few aggressive wingnuts in big SUV’s people (very few; we all came to know Dave on sight).
I sat next to a jovial republican observer who brought a bowl of candy to set by the ballot machine and reminded me of my dad. We both watched one of the rare technical problems involving an elderly white man from a rural county just north of ours. The elections judge was likely a sorority sister of Ms. Harris. She calmly spent more than a half hour on calls to Raleigh to find his registration before he ended up with a provisional ballot. He almost certainly cancelled out her vote, just as did my republican observer did mine. But these wrinkles were rare, only 299 provisional ballots cast across the county—about a third of a percent. But this is what you-know-who will be shouting about.
Every now and then a first-time voter appeared, registered and voted (6,002 of them so far). Everyone applauded.
There was slightly more action in the library where TC usually goes to get her books. I shared some Trader Joe’s energy bars with the woman who was observing for the other side as we chatted about mutual church friends. On the outside Dave (or one of his buddies) had placed a sign in Spanish warning Hispanics they could be deported for voting. There are two versions of this sign, one more intimidating that the Board of Elections ruled illegal. This was barely legal, so we flanked it with Harris signs. Our Spanish-speaking greeters used it as a motivational prop.
My other site was a rec center than shares a parking lot with one of the tiny churches my hospital FaithHealth program worked with for years. My republican observer was a heating/air contractor as was our outside observer so they had a great conversation in the early Halloween morning sun. The 10-person team running the polls had done it all many times and took pride in making friendly eye contact with every voter of every type. They all had on Halloween garb. Every child was escorted to the room next door to pick out candy while their mom voted.
I saw America vote. Mostly women and lots of minorities. Work boots, bedroom slippers, tassel loafers and flip flops. Just over 155,000 other people—68% of those eligible with election day still waiting. Whatever happens after that will not be the fault of the people running the election process.
And it won’t be the fault of the Democrat party which has a run the first well-organized campaign I’ve ever witnessed. Winston Salem is in North Carolina, so we’ve already had Tim Walz and Bill Clinton, with Jill Biden coming to canvas tomorrow. William Barber speaks tonight. A billion excellent billboards and inescapable social media that is somehow not annoying (unlike the ten billion text messages). I see more volunteers doing actually useful things than I’ve ever seen. And so many yard signs that our homeowners association had to remind us in their grumpy schoolmarm voice to keep them off shared spaces. Kamala has spent her billion+ wisely while Donald and Elon have paid lawyers and grifters. It matters.
What will happen next? I don’t know. I see through blue tinted lenses. I expect Kamala to carry North Carolina—thank you Mark Robinson, Black women and the blue ground game. She’ll be President facing the worst job in the history of the species. Do you have any clue about how to handle the climate, Russia, China, North Korea, Israel, Iran, Ukraine, immigration and and and and?
That’s the sign attempting to scare Spanish-speaking voters. Kinda weak, really.
We’ll see negligible violence as the bullies go back to wherever they hangout. Few of them will want to take a last hurrah bullet for an aged loser. He’ll be old news by the time the maples bloom in Asheville. It is easy to enjoy the suffering of the “republicans” who have run my dad’s party off into the swamp. But, if I’m right about President Harris, we will owe a great deal to the loyal opposition of Liz C., Arnold S. and all the republican women who will never tell their husbands. And the tens of millions of Black women who protect us again.
One basic poll observer job is to take a photo of the opening count.
And you and me? We should be ashamed of what almost will have happened. Time for Micah 6:8. We should walk humbly and love “hesed” –a Hebrew word with no direct English equivalent; the ensemble of strong mercy, kindness, compassion.
Three quarters of Americans are experiencing stomach grinding because of our political dumpster fire. The cure is voting.
Nearly three quarters of Americans are experiencing stomach grinding because of our political dumpster fire. No idea what the other quarter is thinking about.
You’ll experience healing surprises. My favorite: I’ve never seen Democrats this organized. Websites, apps and in-person offices are all cheerfully functioning with logic, energy and friendly hopeful people. I was even able to donate for a yard sign by app. Cool.
TC and I did our first shift as poll greeters at Metropolitan Missionary Baptist Church in East Winston yesterday on the first day of early voting. Perhaps a hundred voters and a few choir members came through, nearly all in cheerful spirit. A pod of sorority sisters from Winston-Salem State University did selfies with the Harris signs (guessing they might have voted for their sorority sister?) Two sheriffs showed up. I thought they were there to protect us, but they went inside to vote (we thanked them for both looking out for us and voting). More than a few veterans, some disabled from their service in one of our wars, came in.
Pleasure to vote for such reasonable people.
A high spirited young couple came by after attending the overflow crowd at the nearby rally where Tim Walz and Bill Clinton cranked it up. They left a bit early to a) vote and b) grab a beer.
Oh, and TC and I voted, too. As I fed my ballot into the machine, I accepted my “I voted” sticker from the poll worker who looked a lot like me. I thanked him for his service and he said he had done it for years and looked forward to helping the process every election as it lifts his spirits.
There was a time when you’d be hanged for each and every one of those steps. After all, it has only been 295,607days since King John signed the Magna Carta on June 15, 1215. I think we’re starting to get the hang of this democracy thing.
When the stomach grinds, remember elections are decided by the people who actually vote.
Elections are decided by the people who actually vote.
Even in places where every effort had been made to make that harder than it should be.
Even in places where people in red hats huff and puff and threaten to blow democracy down. Even in places where it takes a few days to actually count the votes once they are cast.
Despite our venomous public mud-wrestle, to a remarkable degree there is every evidence that when a vote is cast in the United States of America, it is counted accurately.
TC and I were in a normal country for three months, Scotland. Like most of the places that have clawed its way to a modern democracy after centuries of craven royal idiots, the Scots are shocked at how casual we Americans are about letting ours circle the toilet. Their national animal is the unicorn and one of their modern national heroes is the old man who won’t sell his tiny plot of land which is encircled by the golf course owned by a certain American gold-course fraud threats. He won’t even let him on his doorstep. So the Scotts are confused about how we might allow him into office….again.
Yikes.
I grew up a Dick Cheney republican. My dad was friends with Ted Agnew. I licked stamps for republican candidates for this or that after school. I even have a card I carry in my wallet that I was among the first to support Richard Nixon for President. Once I got old enough, I even voted for a republican once on a whim (a friend running for clerk of court who did get elected and then screwed it up). I’ll leave the name of their party uncapitalized because I don’t think any of these actual Republicans think it is the same one. It’s not.
I don’t have a plan for what to do if JD Vance is sworn in as Vice President of these United States. It makes my stomach grind to even type the sentence. My counsel to myself and you is to put down your clicker, walk away from the internet and spend the next 28 days making sure that everyone inclined to vote for Kamala Harris, Tim Walz and a remarkable array of decent people wishing to serve their country as Democrats—actually votes.
Don’t spend 5 minutes trying to convince anyone undecided or, God save them, committed to the lunacy. Leave them alone. I suppose there are some worth a conversation, but you’re your expectations low. Don’t stir them up.
Instead, find your local Democrat precinct chair (google it…) and ask to help with your body, time and probably some cash. I served in that role, replaced by the giant upgrade named Kevin. Old school: post cards, poll-greeters, organizing rides to the polls. (Because elections are decided by the people who actually vote.)
If your precinct is not organized, find your county level Democratic party. They’ll have a good website with plenty of opportunities to do real things that take time (postcards, phoning, more phoning, and then some more). You’ll feel like you are in the bar scene from Star Wars with all the odd and wonderful characters. You won’t feel your stomach grind because elections are decided by the people who actually vote.
Plan to take a week or even a few days off before the election and do whatever the local party says do. You really don’t have anything more important going on that can’t be scheduled for November 6th. Because elections are decided by the people who actually vote.
Maybe you’re a writer like me. Even writers can be useful for the survival of the planet, depending on what and when they write. This is the time for you to write personalized emails and hand-addressed notes. Make a list of the 10-20 friends most likely to vote Blue and make sure they do so. Email them (not a group mail). Make sure they are registered. Ask if they are voting early. Ask them where. Offer to go with them. If they are waiting for election day, ask to reschedule conflicting appointments on the day. Make them know you care.
Don’t forget your own family (you’ll know which). We had a daughter who would probably move to Canada if Project 2025 was realized. She got busy and didn’t quite vote for Hillary.
In some odd parts of our fragmented states there will be huffing and puffing intended to make people nervous about voting. The bullies almost always evaporate when a grown-up appears. But offer to take anyone you hear is wobbling. And make sure your precinct and county Democrats know you’re willing to do that as they’ll have a list of folks who need rides.
It’s a human process, not at all what it sounds like on Fox or MNBC. Last election cycle I was the poll greeter at our precinct and a man who was big in his imagination showed up loudly. He ran a training center for 70-pound girl gymnasts but talked all about his exotic military service. And we ended up talking to each other, sort of. We handed out each others’ literature when one of us needed to go to pee.
