In the need of prayer...

I am grateful for all the day-after-the-election postings by Facebook friends offering hope and encouragement. I am striving to remember our Christian faith that, when all is complete, joy will transcend anger, love will overcome fear, community will replace division, and life will defeat death. I’ve preached those things, and I trust them.

But I also fear that we who do believe such positive things are entering a period of protracted struggle against the inhumane “principalities and powers of this present age.” I hope I am up to the challenges of our times.

Meantime, Thursday I will have surgery to remove what is, I hope, a benign mass on my left parotid (salivary) gland. It unsettles me to think about the surgeon making an incision just in front of my left ear lobe down to my neck, but that is what must happen to take care of this thing.

I will be asleep, of course. I trust I will wake up from my surgery, ready to do what I can do to heal.

We who are disappointed in how many of our fellow Americans voted yesterday may need to rest up to prepare for what’s ahead. To let others care for us the way our posts are caring for one another, so we can be strengthened to do whatever we can do to get us well.

I hope and pray our nation will wake up to the power of compassion and justice, and exercise them toward full health. And, I ask you to direct your good thoughts and/or prayers my way tomorrow as well. Thanks.

Competing yard signs; competing visions for our future

 

There’s a yard sign nearby that reads, “Trump…the Revenge Tour.” It suggests that a second Trump administration would be about visiting revenge on his enemies, real or imagined.

Lest we think that sign sounds more extreme that it really means, consider that last week Mr. Trump suggested that Liz Cheney belongs in front of a firing squad. His increasingly spiteful rhetoric tells us what would be on his mind if he moves back into the Oval Office.

Kamala Harris’s rhetoric makes it clear that governing our nation will be on her mind as our president. Many do not like her or her specific policies, but no one cannot deny the fact that she has never made so direct an attack on the very foundations of our republic as Mr. Trump and his allies are making over and over again.

Another nearby yard sign reads, “Harris for President…obviously.” The choice tomorrow is obvious to all who hold our country and its future dear.

Questions as November 7 approaches

 

Elon Musk warns that it’s going to hurt to get our nation’s financial house in order, doing it the way he wants to do it. I can sort of understand that, but I cannot accept it if more hurt is imposed on people who are hurting already, or on people just a paycheck or two away from hurting. And will his plan hurt the middle class, whose votes everyone wants? We deserve to know. Plus, I will not accept it if people in the top 1 or 2% are not also hurt—and I mean hurt, not just inconvenienced—by it. How will Mr. Musks plan hurt Mr. Musk? Tell me that, and I might be more interested in what he has to say.

The Haslam family has made billions off its chain of truck stops, enough to buy the Cleveland Browns several years ago. They have given over $6 million in the past couple of years to mostly conservative, Republican causes and candidates. At the same time, they are looking for a billion or two of tax money to build a new stadium for their Browns. Let me get this straight: they are looking for tax money from politicians who are for lower taxes and fiscal conservatism in order to subsidize their own enterprise?

One weather-caused disaster does not prove the entire climate is changing, but when such disasters start to add up, one on top of another, it may occur to those who are paying attention that something is not right. But adding up is what is happening…powerful storms, extended droughts, record high temperatures, nearly snowless Cleveland winters…and everyone knows it. It’s exactly what climate scientists have told us would happen. They have told us why it is happening, too. Why on earth would we even come close to electing a government that runs on climate change denial?

An essay on political name-calling

 

This morning's news is filled with self-righteous charges of name-calling flying back and forth between people who seem to enjoy name-calling. Whatever really was said, or was intended to be said, if it sounds even a little bit like name-calling, the other side (both sides) is on it with fury: "How dare you...!" 

 "The pot calls the kettle black," and the kettle responds in kind.

It's exhausting and demeaning, this style of politics. It won't do any good for me to call for a stop to it. I'd like to think we are better than this, but we aren't. Calling our adversary hurtful names just feels too good to abandon the practice.

My unplanned response to Donald Trump's rally yesterday

I just read about Mr. Trump's Madison Square Garden rally yesterday, and think the following, which I drafted last night, is as good a response to it as any. Maybe if some who spoke there had been in church with me yesterday, they'd have changed their tune...one can always hope!

We heard a great sermon yesterday morning about the ingathering God of the Christian scriptures. About the God who would rather gather us into one than scatter us into many. About the God who calls all people to be more gatherers than scatterers, who rejoices when the lost come home and the whole family celebrates with them. (I've moved beyond the sermon itself, but I was inspired.)

Leaders who want to bring people together around common issues and concerns seem to me to be a reflection of the God I heard proclaimed this morning. Leaders who want to scatter us into our various tribes seem not to be. People who want to be gathered and in community seem to me to be responding to this God more truly than are people who thrive on being scattered and isolated.

We must be careful, however, not to get derailed. When Martin Luther King, Jr., was preaching reconciliation of races in the beloved community, many accused him of being divisive. But, sounding divisive in the search of being truly reconciled is often a necessary step on the way to a healed community. It is not an end in itself, but a rough spot on the way to human wholeness. King's dream was not about divisions, but about a unity beyond all of our divisions. Dare our land still dream that dream?

Lord, show us all how to be a more faithful ingatherers of the human family, even when some accuse us of creating division. Teach us what to say and do to help create your beloved community. Amen.

Elon made me do it

I am voting this fall for the Harris-Walz ticket, for Sherrod Brown for Ohio’s United States Senator, and for Democrats down the entire ballot. I urge you to do the same wherever you live.

I am making this announcement (which will probably come as no surprise to anyone) at this time because Elon Musk is all in for Trump, MAGA, and the rest. I have neither Musk’s gazzilions nor his power nor his ego, but I am no less a citizen of these United States than he is. He has his reasons, and I have mine. He uses his voice, and I will use mine.

My reasons for supporting Harris and all are many. But I will keep this simple.

First, I like the kind of leadership she will exercise and many of the things she stands for and has promised to try to do when she occupies the Oval Office. Most important, I believe she will exercise power within the boundaries of our Constitution.

But second, I am absolutely certain that Mr. Trump and his allies will irreparably compromise our democracy if they are returned to power. Mr. Trump and his supporters at Project 2025 and elsewhere have plainly told us what they will do given another chance at it. Every day they tell us more, and it gets more extreme by the moment.

Let me ask you this: no matter how much you agree with the MAGA movement’s positions on the economy, or abortion, or Israel, or whatever else is important to you, is it worth abandoning over two centuries’ worth of American democratic government and replacing it with one man/one party rule? If it is, then have at it.

But if what matters to you is the United States of America and the republic for which (our flag) stands, then I cannot see how you can support Mr. Trump and the rest. If this election grants them total, unchecked power to do what they what to achieve the things you want, then the next thing they will do is to use that same power to do things you do not want, and perhaps against you yourself. History shows that that is how power works when it knows no limits. Always.

So, I am voting this fall for the Harris-Walz ticket, for Sherrod Brown for Ohio’s United States Senator, and for Democrats down the entire ballot. I urge you to do the same wherever you live.

Signs of our time, hope for our future

Political signs are sprouting up in the neighborhoods around our retirement community, but not here, in our senior citizen neighborhood.

We are not permitted to place political or “social” signs anywhere on campus where they may be seen from the outside, including in the windows of the ranch home in which we live. The official justification for the prohibition is that allowing such signs would jeopardize our community’s non-profit status.

As I have been riding my bike through those surrounding neighborhoods, I’ve kept an informal tab of the signs in their lawns. Trump signs made a showing months ago (some had never come down!), and gradually have continued to increase along with other Republican party signs. Willoughby is an overwhelmingly Republican community, so that is no surprise.

More recently, Democratic party signs have begun to appear. There were not many Biden-Harris signs up before the party changed its ticket. Now Harris-Walz signs are beginning to show, still in the minority, but enough to lift my heart as I pedal by.

“Down-ballot” candidate signs are joining the fray. Bernie Moreno signs supporting his run for U.S. Senate are now being countered by Sherrod Brown signs as he seeks to hold on to his seat. Local and statehouse signs are in abundance, as well as Ohio Supreme Court signs. So far I’ve seen no signs related to the November ballot issue that would amend the Ohio State Constitution to reign in partisan gerrymandering, but I expect them to begin appearing soon.

It is a wondrous thing to ride slowly down an American street and ponder those signs and to try to imagine the people who might live in the houses that display them. I suspect none of the usual partisan stereotypes fits most of those residents.

I also wonder how neighbors with competing signs are getting along with each other. Political yard signs allow you to announce your preferences without directly confronting your neighbor with it. I suspect many of us like to display signs not only to influence others (which they may or may not do), but to take our stand in a relatively safe way.

I write “safe” because there’s little evidence people actually attack or try to harm neighbors or the property of neighbors with whom they differ. Neighbors may acknowledge their different perspectives without discussing them, or they may decide not to talk to one another, at least for a while. It’s an old tradition: I will let you know where I stand, but I want to keep my telling you one step removed from an actual interaction with you. I think that’s okay.

I also think it’s okay not to have a sign at all in your yard, which is true of the vast majority of yards in these neighborhoods. The private relationship between a voter and their ballot is not up for debate.

Riding my bike past all those signs makes me a little sad and a little angry, because posting them is a right that my retirement community is intent upon denying me. I may or may not choose to hang a sign in my window, but knowing I cannot do so deprives me of a liberty I’ve assumed for my entire lifetime.

As I said, the official reason for the sign prohibition is our community’s tax exempt status. Several of us believe this is as bogus argument: a sign in the window of the house I inhabit is obviously a statement of my position, not the position of the owner of the community itself.

Another justification that has been suggested is that our administration wants us to be one big happy family enjoying our retirement years in tranquility and harmony, safe from the decisions and divisions that troubled our lives up until this time. It’s as if being old means we can  no longer make our own decisions about how much difference and challenge we can stand, as if we need kept safe from feeling anything unpleasant or controversial.

Then, there’s marketing. It has been reported that there was at least one incident a few years ago (when signs were still permitted on our windows) wherein a prospective resident was turned off on us by them. I don’t know if it was political signs in general or signs for particular candidates that soured them on us.

I can understand that happening given reports that some Americans are choosing what state they will live in at least in part according to the political leanings of that state. On the other hand, political signs in our windows demonstrate this is a community that is alive and passionate about things that matter, things we are not somehow too old to concern ourselves with.

In an time when each party is out to convince the electorate that a victory by the other party would end our democracy (if not our country itself), political signs in yards are reassuring. Americans can still state their preferences freely and openly and, I continue to hope, safely. We are still one nation, often quietly seeking to influence one another but always committed to living together, no matter who wins our elections, and no matter how old we are.

And yes, even senior citizens are still citizens!