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.
