All looking for America

Driving on a cool mid-September afternoon through Ohio’s rural Geauga county, there was no way I could keep count of the campaign signs lining the two-lane roads.

Biden…Biden…Trump…Biden…Trump…Trump--I passed by them at around 50 mph, overwhelmed by their public display of love for and commitment to America, by the trust they evidenced in our democratic system.

Somewhere along my way, my ancient CD of Simon and Garfunkel’s Greatest Hits came to this track…

Cathy, I’m lost, I said though I knew she was sleeping

And I’m empty and aching and I don’t know why

Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike

They’ve all come to look for America

All come to look for America

All come to look for America…

And I thought, Yes, that’s what we are doing, all us Americans, this aching, anxious autumn…we are looking for America. We’re lost--or it is--we may or may not think we know why or how it came to this...

Some are trying to find an America that they believe once existed, but that never really did.

Some are trying to find an America that never existed for them, but that they still wish might.

Some are seeking an America that seems lost and to be lost…an America some have never found.

Some are seeking an America as described by scholars and scientists, some an America envisioned in imagination.

(Create your own dichotomies of such differences if you wish; I'll stop here.)

We’ve all come looking for America this fall. Placing our bets on leaders who might be able to help us find the America we fear we have lost, or are losing.

Do those campaign signs threaten to pit neighbor against neighbor, our different visions often being at great odds with each other, our our personal separation and isolation being encouraged by political rhetoric and simple slogans?

Or do they represent the strength of a still-vital democracy that is able to trust that voting, not violence, is the way we solve our political differences, is the way we Americans together forge workable understandings of who America is and hopes yet to be?

Some of those neighbors perhaps are able to engage in productive give-and-take about their often competing notions of the America they are seeking. Hurray for them!

Others of those neighbors perhaps just smile across the fence, maybe talk about the Browns, or an ailing child, or the best way to grill a steak. Just daily human stuff, knowing all along they will check different boxes on their ballots, and yet remain good neighbors, even friends. Hurray for them!

Hurray for the variety of neighbors and neighborhoods that are America!

Perhaps good and respectful neighbors are the life-blood of the America we are all looking for…those of us who hurtle down urban turnpikes and those of us who wind our way along country roads…in some impossible sense, all 328 million of us.

I dare to believe the vast majority of Americans on this trip want to look for America together. Can we resist allowing this moment's partisan political passions to take that away from us?

Our denier-in-chief needs to be replaced

The wildfires are burning. Out of control. Consuming millions of acres and who knows how many structures up and down our entire West Coast. Killing untold numbers of plants and animals, and threatening and killing people, too. There is no telling when or how it will all end.

Meantime, despite the in-your-face reality of this wildfire catastrophe and all the weather/climate-related disasters we’ve experienced, many continue to ignore the fact of human-caused climate change. What is happening is exactly what scientists have been predicting will happen as the earth’s climate warms.

Denier-in-Chief Donald Trump and his fact-denying administration and congressional cohorts apparently still think climate change is a hoax. They are silent on the matter, as they continue to pursue and implement policies that only hasten the total tragedy in history’s ever-nearer future. It’s a wonder to me that people still believe them, but millions of us have been bought off by the lies of the fossil fuel industry, the primary driver of the rapid rise in global temperatures.

We know this administration denied the COVID-19 crisis until it could deny it no more. People had to be getting sick and dying by the thousands before it showed the slightest serious interest in the pandemic. We now learn that the president feared the truth would “create a panic” among the American people.

Imagine…

An aid tells President Franklin Roosevelt, “Japan has just bombed Pearl Harbor.”

And the president responds, “Well, that’s terrible, but let’s not tell the American people lest they panic.”

Here in Ohio we have a Republican (yes, that’s correct) governor who told us the bad news about COVID-19 and calmly directed us through the worst of it, at least up until now. We didn’t all like what Gov. DeWine told us or ordered us to do, but we did it. I saw little evidence of panic except among Republicans to the right of him, solidly in the Trump camp, who panic at the slightest dose of truth.

We need to turn this around before it’s too late, which it may be already. We need to get back into the driver’s seat of combating climate change by resuming our place at the table of nations, by restoring at least the clean energy and environmental-protecting policies of the Obama years, if not going beyond them. We need to elect a new president to take office next January who understands that any economic game plan that does not include policies to slow down, if not halt, climate change is not worth the paper it’s printed on.

Joe Biden will be such a president. Donald Trump will never be.

I know many supporters of the current president stay with him because of what he promises yet to do to save “unborn children” and to turn back the clock on civil rights for all Americans, even to the point of nominating Ted Cruz to sit on the Supreme Court. I recognize, sometimes appreciate, your passion and single-mindedness.

But I do not fathom your willingness to let planet earth become hell in your quest to make it into what you apparently think will approximate heaven. Is that a deal you really want to make? To me, it’s a deal with the devil.

It's so easy being certain

I once knew a lawyer who said of his law partner, “He’s not a very good lawyer…he understands both sides of every case.”

I think that’s only partially true. Understanding your opponent, your adversary, can make you a more effective opponent and adversary. On the other hand, sympathizing with your challenger will likely weaken you, make you think twice before charging, feel sorry for them when you are about to pin them down.

But then again, understanding and sympathizing with another with whom you are at odds will most surely make you a better human being. And maybe you will learn that you do not have to make a court case out of every little messy human encounter you have.

It’s not easy, this being human.

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I wish I were a better political pundit. Well, sometimes I wish that. I try my hand at it from time to time (as you know), but I always hedge my bets the way the successful of them do not. I guess I know just enough about a lot of things to have an opinion on them, but not enough to take an unwavering stand on them.

Take Portland, for instance. It’s amazing to me how many people all across this nation know exactly what’s happening in Portland and why. How do they know so much for sure, when there are so many conflicting reports about it? Is Portland itself burning, or are there just a few small fires here and there? How do some know for sure so that they can pontificate on the situation? Perhaps some secret revelatory source to which I am not privy?

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I do know that a 17-year-old kid who shoots and kills two people with a weapon he was not old enough to have should not be treated as a hero or given a pass, even by the President of the Untied States. Especially by a president who decries violence in our cities. Or who claims to stand for law and order.

It’s an odd way to support the police, don’t you think?

No? You must know something I don’t know, then.

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Sunday evening we watched the first episode of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross on PBS. (I believe it was made in 2013, but we had not seen it before.) Gates mentioned that, somehow, the various political entities in Europe early on came to understand that they would not enslave one another, perhaps because it would not ever be easy to tell which white folks were free and which white folks were slaves. That understanding lead to another understanding: people of color were perfect for enslaving because you could always tell who was what, and they could never escape it. Very soon “black” and “slave” became two ways of saying the same thing.

Isn’t that what makes white racism so enduring and so appealing to whites? It’s easy, no two ways about it. But wrong.

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Here’s another easy one: Every time a white cop kills a black man, the cop is in the wrong.

Or, every time a white cop kills a black man, the black man had it coming.

It’s that easy…unless and until it isn’t.

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Yesterday Maxine and I delivered bags of food to seven homes all across our area. It’s a ministry of our church and another church, begun when the pandemic started to address the needs of people suddenly unemployed and without incomes.

I am not sure any of the seven homes we visited asked for food because of pandemic-related unemployment. They seemed more likely to be homes where poverty and need are ongoing realities. Several of the people I met were clearly either elderly or differently-abled in a way that made me doubt their employability. Once again, my eyes were opened to the reality of massive poverty in this, our “greatest country in all of human history.”

It would be so much easier to sit in Washington or Columbus and imagine they were all just lazy freeloaders. So much easier.

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It’s easy to leap to large judgments based upon small information. I do it all the time, until I cannot.