Independence Day, 2025

On national holidays I plant two 12 by 18-inch Americans flags in amongst the flowers in front of our house. I will plant them tomorrow morning, on the Fourth of July, our Independence Day, 2025. But it won’t be easy.

I know: some Americans are celebrating where the Republican administration and congress and, I feel, Supreme Court are leading us. But I am among the dissenters who disapprove of where we are being taken, who feel it is a betrayal of the best of our values, ideals, and practice of self-government. So I am tempted not to fly our flag tomorrow.

But I am not going to do that. In part because, I would not have liked it had someone done the same, for example, when the Democrats were in positions to govern. But more importantly, because I am an American and I want everyone to know it.

I have a claim on and stake in this nation, and honestly believe we can do better—much better—for the good of all of us than does the law the President will sign tomorrow. I will continue to make my aspirations for our nation known as long as I am able. 

Tomorrow we celebrate the 249th birthday of our nation. But we were not really free to be that nation until several years later after a bloody war. It took a fight not only to liberate us from Great Britain’s rule, but also to be free to constitute a nation whose government, as Abraham Lincoln famously put it, would be of the PEOPLE, by the PEOPLE, and for the PEOPLE! 

In the end, I will plant my flags tomorrow for you and for me and for all of us people, and in the fervent hope that one day, the people willing, we will once again aspire to be a nation where life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are real possibilities for us all.

The good old days of working together

This afternoon, while our U.S. Senators squabbled in Washington, I rode my bicycle along 13.5 miles of the towpath trail in our wonderful Cuyahoga Valley National Park. It was a beautiful day, and I was deeply thankful I was here rather than there.

CVNP was created out of mostly privately-owned land through the joint efforts of Republicans and Democrats some 50 years ago. (It was the Cuyahoga Valley National Recreation Area at first.) If this land had not been protected by our Federal Government, today it would no doubt be packed with as many homes, businesses, and perhaps even factories as its rugged terrain could bear, all tied together by endless strands of concrete and asphalt. Instead, it is 33,000 acres of natural beauty stretching between Cleveland and Akron, offering easy escape to some sense of wildness to millions of people.

I could not help but wonder if such cooperation as created our park would be at all possible today. Frankly, I doubt it. Seemingly gone forever are politicians who want to work together for the honest public good, not for who can gain or exploit what from whom.

Cuyahoga Valley National Park could not happen today. Who knows when someone will find an excuse to undermine it, given the trajectory we are on? It's one more reason I shudder for our nation's future.

Tell the truth? Someone may be listening!

 

This sign is now posted at our nearby Cuyahoga Valley National Park. Makes me wonder how the Native American guide we had several years ago at Little Bighorn National Monument is faring. If she's not unemployed already, she soon will be. Makes me angry.

Deportation by the Numbers

Fox News reports this morning that President Trump has ordered ICE to “‘expand efforts to detain and deport’ illegal immigrants in ‘America’s largest [c]ities,’ including Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York.”

Trump is quoted, “ICE Officers are herewith ordered, by notice of this TRUTH, to do all in their power to achieve the very important goal of delivering the single largest Mass Deportation Program in History.” He further justified the effort as “fulfilling our Mandate to the American People.” (Did he mean from the American people?)

When the LA demonstrations were at their peak, I began a piece offering my opinion that, when it comes to immigration enforcement, quotas are the problem, referring to the demand that ICE arrest for deportation at least 3,000 people a day. An enforcement quota strongly pushes officers to round up as many people as possible, with little regard to their individual circumstances, in order to meet the quota. Trump’s Truth posting today confirms the fact that this whole thing is about politics, and nothing else.

Adding to it is the fact that he has now ordered ICE to ease up on the agricultural and hospitality industries, and to focus on urban areas largely populated by Democrats. It is patently obvious that the President is serving his own interests (votes from rural areas and money for his hotels and resorts) rather than the nation’s, something he instinctively does with almost everything he touches.

I am reasonably certain that the majority of Americans support the fair application of our laws when it comes to immigration enforcement, as flawed as many believe those laws to be. There was a chance to make these laws more just and tailored to current realities before the last election, but candidate Trump advocated not passing that bill. Doing so would not have served his need to keep the immigration pot boiling.

Deportation by the numbers and over-the-top responses to protests both make Donald Trump look strong. But behind that look there hides an extremely insecure man, and many are suffering and compromising their integrity in order to bolster his poor sense of self-worth.

We are all the people...

 

This is a story I wish I could fill with details, but I am afraid for the safety of its central characters.

A woman who helps us with an important job in our house immigrated to the United States from Central America several years ago. She is friendly, energetic, and a good worker.

Recently she, with the help of her husband whom we’ve not met, did a very great kindness for us. What she did was far beyond her job description. It was justplain neighborly, and she neither asked for nor seemed to expect anything in return.

She is a U.S. citizen, and has a U.S. passport. She recently returned from a visit to her homeland.

She told us that not long ago she was stopped by the police in a neighboring suburb, apparently for no other reason than that she looked foreign. At least that’s the only reason she can think of. She had to show them proof of her citizenship.

This is terrifying. I know it’s not new for police to stop people whose skin color seems to them to be reason enough to stop them. But it is always wrong, and it seems likely only to get more common as the Republican administration ramps up its war on immigration and immigrants.

It it is also one step closer to even more wrong as the Republican party takes aim at more and more Americans whom it considers outside its norms.

If we can’t save a man our government admits it wrongly deported to a two-bit dictator’s prison, who else will we not be able to save? In the end, none of us.

Christian belief and Christian nationalism, according to Karl Barth

 

Does what we believe matter? You bet it does! And it matters very much when it comes to so-called “Christian” nationalism in our own time.

Twentieth-century Swiss theologian Karl Barth had no doubt that belief mattered. And that is the point of Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac post for today, Barth’s birthday anniversary (1886). Find the whole post if you can.

Keillor writes that Barth “became disillusioned with the liberal theology he had learned at the university, and this came to a crisis point in 1914. Liberal theology was optimistic about modernity and felt that humanity's progress was part of God's plan and therefore had divine blessing. Barth believed that there was a fundamental divide between humanity and God, and that the line was too often blurry. He believed that the truth about Christianity came only from the revelation of Jesus Christ — he called Christ "the one word of God." He was particularly upset when governments used Christianity as a way to justify actions that he considered very un-Christian. In 1914, 93 German intellectuals signed a manifesto declaring their support of the German cause in World War I, and among the signers were several of Barth's former teachers. Barth was disgusted, and he began to doubt ‘everything which flowed at that time from the pens of the German theologians.’”

Keillor’s Barth birthday essay ends with this: “When the Third Reich came to power in Germany, Barth was strongly opposed to Hitler and the ‘German Christians’ who merged the Gospel with Nazi nationalism. He wrote most of the famous ‘Barmen Declaration,’ which rejected the idea that the state could have power over the Church, or that the Church could have power over the true essence of Christianity. When he refused to begin his classes with ‘Heil Hitler!’ or to swear allegiance to him, Barth was kicked out of his teaching post and Germany. He moved back to Switzerland, where he spent the rest of his life writing his monumental work Church Dogmatics, which at the time of his death was 13 volumes and more than 9,300 pages.” (italics are mine)

Terms like “liberal” and “conservative” can be slippery and their meanings certainly change with the passage of time. And thank God we don’t have to read all 9,300 pages of Church Dogmatics to get to the gospel truth that the melding of state and church is heresy. But maybe we should dust off at least some of Karl Barth's writings to help us clarify what we believe and how that belief informs our political convictions.

Earth Day 2025 and 1963 and 19963

 1963

We hereby demand more Jobs!

We hereby demand more Power!

Let us go on record right here and now that we hereby pledge

to Tame This Treacherous Torrent!

[applause.]

We hereby demand more Recreation!

We hereby demand more Reclamation!

We hereby demand more ECONOMIC GROWTH!

We hereby demand more…PROGRESS!

[thunderous applause.]

Spin the wheels. Faster. Hum whirl flash rumble hammer revolve

explode.

Grease the gears with outboard oil.

Grease the gears with the fat of beaver who aren’t any use.

Grease the gears with the blood of deer who aren’t any use.

Grease the gears with dissolving cottonwoods and the sickly

sweet perfume they wear when they drown.

Grease the gears with the stale slime on the shore as the banks

fall over and as the grass and the moss and the brush and

willows and reeds and seeds and pods sink underwater.

Grease the gears with my and your blood and the blood of

everyone who floated down and lost himself in the side

canyons and on the riffles and sand bars

And left part of himself on the walls.

We’re all under water now, and drowned.

We burst the ranks of the walking dead, and the killer goes

Unscathed.

19963

“No, it wasn’t always this nice.

Most always, yeah, but for a little while the water didn’t flow.”

He shook his antlers and went back to browsing.

Jerry and Renny Russell: On the Loose; Sierra Club-Ballentine Books, 1967.

-  -   -

From 1968 to 1970, I served as Assistant Pastor of Westminster Presbyterian Church in Medford, Oregon. As a newly-minted young minister, one of my primary responsibilities was youth ministry. As my too-brief time in Medford neared its end, several of the senior highs and our adult advisors and I took a short back-packing trip into California’s Marble Mountain Wilderness.

As our trek ended, they presented me with a copy of On the Loose, in which those who made that hike wrote expressions of appreciation for my being with them. I’ve treasured the took and the memories it holds since then, but was recently reminded of it, and have reread it.

The two entries above struck me as even more appropriate for Earth Day, 2025, than perhaps ever before as our government abandons all pretense of caring for our home planet. I am quite sure they were written in response to the building of the Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado River, completed in 1966 despite long and passionate opposition.