Black Lives are Sacred

I'd been asked to say a few words and do a public prayer at a rally for Black Lives in Mequon, near Milwaukee, over the weekend. I did so and enjoyed the company. 

These are my remarks. "As we were setting up today, someone drove by and shouted 'Get a life!' And what they fail to recognize is that we are here because so many lives have been taken. We come together because people have died. Died frightened, died pleading, died unheard. We mourn those deaths. But we come together too because of the living. Living in despair, in fear, in poverty of spirit. We come together to make this known, to point to it and swear that lives are no less sacred for that. We would be whole. When one of us cries, we all cry. When one bleeds, we all bleed. When one dies, we all die. Today, we all mourn. We ask to be brought together. Make us one. If we've forgotten, remind us it is good to be together. It is good to be beside one another in fortune and in pain. It is good to look into each other's eyes, to hear each other's voices. Remember the sacredness of our brothers and sister's lives as our own. We would be one. To make all lives safe and meaningful. To be as one and act as one, we would be one." 

The prayer is one I cribbed from John and Sarah Gibb Millspaugh, an adaptation from Pali canons. 

Opening: In the UU tradition, it's not just ministers and religious professionals who have the power to bless. Each of us has the power to bless one another, and therefore bless the world. The words are ordinary words, but we make our blessing real through our shared intent. 

Prayer: "As we have been blessed, so we bless one another to be a blessing. Breathe in, breathe out, this breath we share with all that breathes. Feel the love of the universe flowing through this joint community into you and out into the universe again. Let the love of all the universe--your love--flow outward, to its height, its depth, its broad extent. You are more than you know, more beloved than you know. Take up what power is yours to create safe haven, and make of earth a heaven. Give hope to those you encounter, that they may know safety from inner and outer harm, be happy and at peace, healthy and strong, caring and joyful. Be the blessing that you already are. That is enough. Amen." 

A surfeit of Babbitts

 Make no mistake, I do have a background in theology. But I've

had a longer history and more specific training in literature. When the name of the insurgent killed while trying to illegally enter the chamber of the Senate while people were hiding in it was released, I was struck by the coincidence--and that's all it is--of her last name Babbitt being the same as one of the seminal novels of the early American 20th century. Babbitt, written by Sinclair Lewis, is one of his series of satires of American life whose title, like Main Street, Elmer Gantry, and to a lesser extent Arrowsmith, have lived on in depicting a certain situation or kind of person long after Lewis's death.

It's been several decades since I read Babbitt or even had a copy of the novel, so for my purpose here I'm relying on a summary.

This wouldn't pass an undergraduate 200 level class, I hasten to say. I'm simply putting out something I think deserves a closer look with competent exegesis.

We know very little about Ashli Babbitt's life beyond her chosen career--the Air Force--and the circumstances of her death--trying to enter the Speaker's Lobby in the Capitol where members had taken shelter. We know she idolized trump, placing on him all her hopes for a better America.

Sinclair Lewis's George Babbitt also placed all his hopes in something larger than himself, the Booster Club of Zenith, his hometown. Ashli, having served in the service and voting twice for Barack Obama, had by the 2016 election transferred her allegiance to trump and his cult of personality. George, on the other hand, has traveled in the opposite direction, moving from a conservative mindset to a looser Bohemian way of seeing the world. We don't know what caused Ashli's psychological move from Obama's centrist Democratic principles to the hard-core delusions of QAnon, but they may have been similar to George's: His best friend Paul finally has enough dissatisfaction with his life and kills his wife. That's enough for George to reconsider his own issues with complacency. It's the recognition that, without his confidante Paul, life may not be worth living.

No one has suggested, as yet, that Ashli lost someone, but there's definitely something in her makeup that makes her not only vulnerable but it seems eager for someone to provide answers, even if lies, for her. This is, after all, the way so many people join the ranks of a would be savior. 

In Ashli's case it seems much of her inner resources were channeled into anger as her world constricted around her: She retired from the Air Force at a demoted rank. Her pool business, which was supposed to salvage her sense of self-worth, ran into financing problems and was hit with a 71K judgment for failing to repay a loan.

George finds solace in drinking, an affair, and radical politics, all of which put him at odds not only with the Booster Club and his friends, but with everything he's ever believed about life and the way it's lived. In his instance, because it is fiction and Babbitt is a satire of American boosterism, his wife becomes ill, and while George has an epiphany that leads him back to family and safety, he's learned enough to know that for his son, there's still an opportunity to be someone different. For Ashli, because it's real life and there aren't always second chances, what she might have learned in her last minutes is unknown.

I ask myself if George is the more acceptable Babbitt and my initial answer is yes. Largely it's because he's fiction and didactic. But while it's something inside George that dies, Ashli actually died. It was avoidable, not only because she had received riot training in the military and knew the response her act would receive, but because the politician for whom she would die did not have a right to demand of her that she fight a battle he could not win, legally or morally, and then hide in his tent listening to 80s one hit wonders, wearing boxing gloves and chanting "fight", wondering why no one outside his family, who like him had never sacrificed or put their lives in danger, was boosting the insurgents with him.

Peaceful transition is the difference

 There is so much to be said about this attempt today to delegitimize the otherwise dull, ritualistic ceremony that, like clockwork, simply move forward the result of the presidential election. Like a commentator I listened to today pointed out, normally no one reports on the record of electoral college votes. It's one of those things, like asking at a wedding if anyone objects to the marriage, that is a holdover from a time when there was really a reason to make the result public. 

But that wasn't the case today. Hundreds, perhaps a couple thousand (reports vary) of trump supporters marched from the White House, where they were given "instructions" by trump, to disrupt the otherwise rote recitation of electoral results. They stormed the chambers and succeeded in postponing the naming of Joe Biden as the winner of the election. 

There's been a lot of anger aimed at the disruption by trump-supporters and I'm not entirely certain where I stand on that. I'll admit there's some jealousy I feel that a group I can't agree with has been able to do what groups I can identify with have been unable to do. Rituals are nice but they can and should be questioned and maybe thrown out. If these were Black Lives Matter or some anti-trump group, I might have been tempted to join them. But I am furious at the disruption of the most important facet of the American experience, the peaceful transfer of power. 

Democracy demands the loser of a contest recognize it and allow the winner, an expression of the will of the people, to take the reins. Four years ago, while it sickened me that he was that expression, trump peacefully and legally took the office. I protested him and protested his administration. But I wasn't going to join others in rioting against the ceremony or the final decision of the process. It would not have been peaceful or right.