The Reset Button: A Prayer
I think it’s safe to say we’re all emotionally exhausted. We’re seeing death and destruction every single day on the news and in our Social Media. We all long to go back to the way it was. November 2019 would be early enough for most of us. Some of us would prefer to go back to November 2016. Others would like to return to November 1860. But, we’re all somewhere on the calendar. We all want to hit the reset button. Let’s start this level over. Let’s get it right this time.
Marty McFly and the crews of several iterations of the USS Enterprise notwithstanding, we can’t travel back in time. We can travel only forward. We have to reset the future. And, for me, there’s a certain sort of prayer in that desire. I’ve been an Atheist for more than 40 years now, but even Atheists have favorite prayers. You’ve probably heard my favorite:
Grant me the Serenity to accept the things I cannot change
The Courage to Change the things I can
And the Wisdom to know the difference.
There are things which must absolutely change. People are living in poverty. A startling number of us are likely to join the ranks of the homeless in coming days as eviction moratoriums come to an end. An American is dying frequently enough that at least one of us who was alive when I began talking to you has died of COVID by now. More than a dozen will have perished before we finish.
Many of us are enraged with others of of us. Family ties are unraveling over politics. Vitriol flows like water through a tap on Social Media. And it pays to be pissed. The more out of control you are, the more likely you’ll go “viral.” I suspect my efforts to remain rational have cost me a larger audience. I’ll live with the smaller numbers.
Serenity
“You can’t take the sky from me.”-Sonny Rhodes
I have to accept the things I cannot change. I cannot change Death. It will, finally, claim us all. I can’t bring back George Floyd. I can’t resurrect 5 year old Cannon Hinnant. I can’t reincarnate my father. I can’t breathe life back into the corpses of Covid. I must find the serenity to accept these realities. I cannot allow myself to collapse into a debilitating depression that will change nothing but my state of consciousness. I need to to be aware, and let the feelings become as calm as my awareness of all of the deaths that have occurred in the last 200,000 years. Nearly every single one of them is a tragedy. Can these events, though, show me what needs to change? And do I have what makes the muskrat guard his musk?
Courage
“I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.” — Atticus Finch
I’m still among the living, at least for this moment. And so are you. In the time we’ve been talking at least 2 or 3 Americans left our group. They’re not alive anymore, even though they were when this conversation began.
We can’t let the Serenity we gained transform itself to complacency. We’re the only ones left who can change anything. The Dead have no voices. It is for us to act because they can’t.
At the same time, we can’t change everything. We must first choose what to change, and then we must have the courage to act. How do we choose?
Wisdom
“Logic is the beginning of wisdom, Valeris, not the end of it.” — Spock
I have to accept that any changes I make will be small. There’s serenity in that understanding. I have to have the courage to try, knowing that it might well cost me some of the friendships I value most highly. There are Trump supporters I love deeply. The loss of their friendship will make me less than I am.
But…
That’s why I have this podcast. This is the most powerful tool I have to change the world. And now I must attempt to choose what to change. I want to create the greatest change possible that is within my power. As my Grandpa Schuelke taught me, I can’t change the world; only my corner of it.
We need many things to change. We need the pandemic to end. We need homelessness to halt its horrible march. We must not acquiesce to authoritarianism. We must eliminate the riots by addressing the causes of the protests rather than simply responding to their most frightening symptoms with violence. But, I’m going to argue now that there is something even more vital that must change. I’m going to argue that one significant change can help to bring about the others.
We must end the threat of the current administration. I have many associates, particularly in the Facebook Group called Resurgent Us, who will defend the President, regardless of his behaviors. It is my intention to crush those arguments beyond their ability to breathe.
First, he has lied to us more than 20,000 times. The counter argument, “All politicians lie” is pure bullshit. All people, as far as that goes, lie… from time to time. “No, Mommy, I didn’t take that cookie.” But then we learn that lying is not really a good thing to do. Why?
As I’ve mentioned more than once, Trust is the foundation upon which all relationships are built. Without Trust, nothing can be accomplished. I can’t be a husband, a boyfriend, a best friend, a friend, a son, a brother, an employee, or even a fan if I lie too often. All of those relationships will end badly for me. If you can’t believe what I say, it is foolish of you to listen to me. There is no way of determining whether the information I gave you is of any value. I love you, I want a future with you, I love hanging out with you, I like to talk to you, I am taking good care of myself, Mom, really, I’ll pick you up at the airport, I’ll be at work tomorrow morning, I love all of your music… if I lie often enough, why would you believe any of those statements? In my case, you can just dismiss me from your life. I’m a threat to your well being. I’m being what people like to call “toxic” these days. Dump me.
It is more important, however, to be able to rely on what our elected officials tell us. I can’t just dismiss them from my life. They continue to affect my life daily in ways both large and small. Why do I care if Trump lies? It doesn’t hurt me, right? Yeah, actually, it does. It’s not just that it makes me angry. If that’s all it was, I would smoke a bowl, put on a Steely Dan album, and forget about it. It’s just a state of mind. But his lies directly affect me. How?
170,000 of my fellow Americans have died. I know. That wasn’t Trump’s fault. It has nothing to do with his lies. Except… yes. Yes it does. He’s told us more than 2 dozen times the virus will just disappear.
Because people believed him, because they believed masks are a political statement, because they believed the President when he said the scientists are wrong, I can’t go to work tomorrow… or the next day. I’m hoping, perhaps, for September. And I’m better off than many people. Again… I’m still alive.
So much for the who cares if he lies argument. There are more than 20,000 others. I don’t have time to deal with all of them.
We are seeing images nightly on the news of our police officers and federal agents behaving in ways that are remarkably similar to the films of Bull Connor displaying his own authoritarianism. The government was on The Wrong Side of History in the 1960s. Those hating the protests of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X then are now widely considered to have been wrong, the last vestiges of racism and hatred in our society.
Except… they weren’t quite the last…
We’re hearing the same arguments against today’s Protesters that we always hear. They aren’t doing it right. Don’t do it during your work hours; just entertain us. Don’t block roads. Where do you find the time to march around the capital building with your stupid signs and your Red for Ed shirts? Go get a job, you lazy hippies. You can’t Occupy that park. It’s illegal. We’ll send the police, whose job it is to ensure that the status quo is preserved, to deal with you. We hear that if we support the Black Lives Matter Movement, we must hate all police officers. (News flash: we don’t hate all police officers.) The Pretzel Logic practiced to defend tear gassing mothers, firing rubber bullets at journalists, and using both to clear the road so the President can walk a couple of blocks for a photo op in front of a church is too intense to unwind. I simply won’t bother. If you wish to be persuaded that you’re not witnessing the Death of Freedom, I will be unable to convince you otherwise. I regret that deeply.
While some of his supporters have expressed a newfound interest and rage concerning human trafficking (I share it… I did an episode about it several weeks before it reached their attention), few of those expressing rage at the kidnapping of white children seem to be concerned about the kidnapping of brown children by our government. The children are irrevocably lost. They are in cages. I don’t care if
Obama started it, it’s equally wrong to kidnap children whether one is a Democrat or a Republican.
The President is actively trying to interfere with the election by disabling the Post Office. At a time when mail in voting is essential to trying to slow the spread of the pandemic, he has appointed a Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy, who has a financial interest in at least one of the Post Office’s competitors. He is cutting off funding to the Post Office.
The President, himself, said, “If we don’t make a deal that means they don’t get the money. That means they can’t have universal mail-in voting. They just can’t have it. Sort of a crazy thing.”
I could go on. I could talk about believing Russia over his own Intelligence Agencies concerning interference in the 2016 election. I could talk about his requests for foreign interference this year. I could talk about “Grab em by the pussy,” or “I like people who weren’t captured,” or demeaning a Gold Star Family, or bullying a 16 year old girl, or the fact that he referred to Jeffrey Epstein’s enabler by saying he wishes her well. I could go on and on, but if I haven’t convinced you, yet, that Donald Trump is a threat to our liberty, that he is unqualified to be President, that his ignorance is appalling (the statement that the 1918 pandemic killed so many people it probably ended World War II, by itself, should be sufficient to send any sentient voter running for cover), and that he has all the character of a drug addicted pedophile who thinks God talks to him through a filling in his lower left side molar, I will be unable to accomplish any more, and I like to keep the show to 30 minutes if I can.
All I can do is beseech you to adopt the perspective of alien from another planet who has been watching us for the last couple of centuries, and ask what they would recommend. They would recognize The Holocaust didn’t begin with Concentration Camps. It began with attacking the Press and sowing hatred toward those who weren’t Aryans. It began by turning Us against Them. Today, we know better. We know there is no Them; we are all Us. Any alien species advanced enough to visit us would know this, too.
But, is there no solution?
Yes, as a matter of fact there is.
First, we have to have a little Serenity about something we can’t change. In November, either Donald Trump or Joe Biden is going to be elected President. I would love, with all of my heart and soul, for a third party candidate to have a shot at becoming President. I have many friends who want to vote for Jo Jorgensen. They believe she more closely matches their beliefs than Biden does. Some of my friends are convinced Biden is no better than Trump, and they buy in to the Russian spun myth that Biden is a pedophile, himself. I, myself, would love to vote for Andrew Yang. Yang, however, shares my concern about saving democracy while we still can. He endorsed Biden. I’m following Yang’s endorsement, and I’m adding my own.
Why? What does Biden offer?
Kamala Harris, Biden’s running mate, in her acceptance speech, talked about the Protesters as a Coalition of Conscience demanding change. The President, sitting alongside Bull Connor squarely on The Wrong Side of History, refers to them as thugs and terrorists.
Biden asks, “What can I do to make life better for you?” Biden has shown empathy and compassion frequently. These are vital characteristics for someone who is going to lead a free country. He and Harris represent a chance of hope. They want to create a Pandemic Testing Board instead of pretending COVID will magically disappear.
We need the Courage to act to save our Democracy before it falls into an authoritarian regime from which few countries ever recover.
Normally, I try to steer clear of telling anyone for whom they need to vote, but I don’t feel it’s morally right for me to do that. If we are unable to remove Trump from office now, when our very liberty is at stake, we are, I believe simply doomed.
Two men whom I love and trust far more than one would expect would be possible since I’ve never actually met them and I almost certainly never will, told their audience this morning they believe it may already be over. The election may already have been so entirely corrupted that it’s beyond salvation. I trust them implicitly, and I trust their judgment at least as much as my own. They may well be right.
But…
I’m counting on you. I’m doing what I can to save The Land of the Free. I’m asking you to help me make it The Home of The Brave. If I’ve convinced you at least to consider voting for Biden this November, I have done a service to the world. If you convince someone… and they convince someone else…
We will be able to stage a revolution at least as powerful as the kids did with their brilliant Tik Tok moves. We old folks can’t leave it up to the children to pick up the pieces that we’ve dropped.
We’re alive. We have voices. We can share our ideas. We can engage others with love and compassion. We can show them the beautiful world in which we believe. We can help them see the Beauty of Freedom, and we can demonstrate what Freedom really is. We can show them how valuable it is, and let them understand why so many have fought and died for it.
We can show them the cancer eating at the Body Politic. We can ask them to help us excise it while there’s still time.
We accept what we cannot change here on The Front Porch. And we have the Courage to change what we must. We have the Wisdom to see what we can change, and we are smart enough to change it. We are the hope of humanity. Just us… this tiny little group of people changing one idea in one mind at a time.
We few… we happy few…
We would not die in that man’s company
That fears his fellowship to die with us.
This day is call’d the feast of Crispian.
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when this day is nam’d,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say “To-morrow is Saint Crispian.”
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars,
And say “These wounds I had on Crispin’s day.”
Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,
But he’ll remember, with advantages,
What feats he did that day. Then shall our names,
Familiar in his mouth as household words —
Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester —
Be in their flowing cups freshly rememb’red.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be rememberèd —
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.
Let’s save the world… together.
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more…