Poem Toward an Aroma Map of New York City

[After a recent trip to New York City, I tried to recall the odors I experienced as I walked from Grand Central Station east to Junior’s Restaurant in Brooklyn. In looking up previous attempts to do such things, I’m struck by the omnipresent dismay at the odors New Yorkers, especially Manhattanites, seem to experience. Notably, the effort has not been made in poetry. For myself, having been away from the City for decades, the scents were almost uniformly comforting. I walked the four mile route at least partly because I felt at home and wanted to reconnect with my home base of many years ago.]

 

Grand Central Terminal:

Diesel, oil, steam, human piss, perfumery scent

Park Avenue:

Carrot cake, hot pretzels, ditchweed, spiced halal meat

Union Square:

Ditchweed, roast lamb, hot coffee

Bowery:

Better cannabis, piss, coffee, damp wool, hot pork

Chinatown:

Vinegar, sweet coffee, steaming rice, strong herbs

Manhattan Bridge:

Wildfire Smoke, salty water, cannabis, coffee

Dumbo:

Coffee, cannabis, spiced meat, mixed Chinese herbs

Jay Street:

Exhaust, dust, piss

Walt Whitman Park:

Take out coffee, cannabis, yew pines

Tillary Street:

Hidden beer, coffee, dogs, scent

Flatbush Avenue:

Hot pretzels, cannabis, exhaust

Juniors Restaurant:

Percolating coffee, good beer, warmth, fresh Cole slaw, hot beef

Should We Cheer On the Lone Ranger?

 

[Quick note: This was published this morning prior to reports a suspect had been found and detained in Altoona, PA. Some answers may be forthcoming.]

I've been thinking a lot about the unsettling murder of Brian Thompson. It is a murder and it unsettles me because I only have guesses, and they aren't very reliable ones, for its cause. Putting aside the possibility that it was done with no connection to what he did for a living (!), should we be comfortable with a murder done on a person whose fortune came from essentially deciding who lives and who dies? (The words inscribed on the bullet casings imply Thompson was killed because of his work, but we've all watched mysteries where such clues are red herrings.)

That is, when you come right down to it, the job of every insurance executive. Their decisions are based on what will generate the most money for their stockholders, and that isn't damning in itself, because that is the reason companies like United Health exist. The rules they operate under, admittedly mostly self-defined, are often Byzantine and designed for profit rather than an individual's health, and that is how capitalism works. Whether that's justifiable is a different topic.

This is the world we are in and we need to maneuver in it, preferably keeping our sense of right and wrong intact. So I guess the question is, How should we react to a murder possibly done for vengeance? 

The overwhelming consensus expressed online is that the act is understandable, if not justified. That assumes a lot of background that we might find is wrong. But let's say all these guesses are true: That the murderer lost a loved one due, at least in part, to the unthinking juggernaut of the capitalist healthcare system, and he is acting, in the best Levitical tradition, on the basis of an eye for an eye. In this way he's acting as a stand in for justice, and I've seen him compared to the Lone Ranger or the Equalizer. 

The Equalizer deaths are gorier and nastier than a quick bullet to the back, so let's say he's acting like the more romantic Lone Ranger, albeit with the caveat he shot Thompson in the back. The Lone Ranger, of course, never shot anyone in the back. In fact, according to canon, the Ranger never killed anybody, always aiming to disarm, sometimes by wounding. 

But again, we're in the world in which guns are used more often to kill than to wound. We might not even be having this conversation if Thompson had only been wounded. There might have been a news blip, a short unsuccessful search for the shooter, and we'd hear no more about it. Presumably, executives would rest easier and there would be a lingering question whether their own insurance claims cover being shot, but in the end nothing more. 

Instead we have what Aja Romano and Sigal Samuel in Vox call "people [who are] posting vitriolic comments about Thompson feel justified in being smug about the death of this human in particular." There are some funny ones, I won't deny it--the "thoughts and prayers" and "my empathy is out of network" memes being two of the most clever if also the easiest--but the overall response by many people I'd consider comrades is exactly that, a smug assertion that Thompson got what he deserved. 

Here's why that gives me pause. Romano and Samuel recognize "The humanity we show each other is a complicated thing." Their solution suggests we expand our compassion so that we align with both Thompson's family and those families affected by his decisions, and that's one way to accept it. But in that rationale there's no reason to change anything, it's a "tut tut, isn't that terrible" response, and it's like saying everyone is responsible and no one is responsible. 

Part of the reason I'd consider many of these smug posters comrades is because we reacted together in horror at the fact that Donald Trump won the popular vote (yes, I accept it), that a majority of people accept and relish his view that people they don't like need to be brought to justice in some way, that laws need to change to make them pay, either by exile or prison, fines at the very least. 

Trump, on the other hand, was found guilty in a court of law of at least 34 felonies, and there might have been more had he not won the election and will definitely negate his convictions and trials to the extent he can, whether through Constitutional means or not. Trump is the opposite of what Lincoln called "the angels of our better nature." He has voiced his primary desire (and many of his supporters echo this) as vengeance on his perceived enemies, the people who would hold him to the laws. 

To cheer on Thompson's killer is to join sides with Trump, only changing the list of the deserving punished from right-wing enemies to left-wing enemies. Do not join his side. The urge to punish, poetically justifiable or no, sits in the cavern of our hearts where anger and frustration and hatred reside. They are angels of our baser nature and we must have the courage to refuse to give in to them.

May We be Overreacting

In conversation—okay, an argument—with someone I know who, while not necessarily a voter for trump, is nonetheless willing to give him the benefit of whatever doubt she still harbors, she said I was overreacting because of the "hyperbole and rhetoric" of the opposing campaign. "This has," she wrote, "caused policy disagreement to elevate to terror."

She is, of course, a lawyer who has long spent time making big things out of little ones, so she knows of what she speaks when it comes to hyperbole.

But I hope she's right. While I don't recognize these "disagreements" she mentions, which seem to me more like fiats, I do recognize the terror people feel about them. I know folks who fear for their livelihood, their housing, their health needs, even for their lives, because of things trump and his toadies have said they will do. 

But I would like to be wrong. I would like to wake up one day and realize, "God, what was that all about? Why was I so worried?" In this world, trump is no worse, if no better, than any other president, having made no real inroads into the American psyche or legal structure. As a result, he goes down in history, not as the King Joffrey of our political structure, but as the Claudius of it, being no more memorable or despicable than Millard Fillmore. And maybe played by Derek Jacobi.

Of course, his first term eradicated that possibility. This one has all the earmarks of being worse given what we're already seeing of his choices (RFK Jr at HHS? Matt Gaetz as AG?). But I would still like this to be an overreaction on our parts, projecting all our fears and worries onto a politician (and he is one now) as pliable and loveable as your grandfather with the initial stages of dementia. 

From my lips to God's ear.

I also really, really doubt that. 

Rule Number One: Don't Isolate

This is an issue I'm particularly prone to. I feel embarrassment after a political loss, as if I somehow failed the people I worry for. As a result, I would self-isolate if I could. It's a hard thing, dragging myself to meetings and church services and even work when all I want to do is hide in the bed for the next four years. 

But we know that's not productive, either on a communal or personal level, and I know from past experience it doesn't leave you or the people you love any less a target. As the author writes, "you just need to show up consistently. How else do we get to know the people around us if we don’t make the effort to get together?...[Every] interaction and every group meeting is an opportunity to get to know one another and create trust." 

And trust is our weapon the opposition can't replicate. 

I Will Not Give Those People One Tear

I'm in the process as I'm sure many of you are looking for as many allies and good people as I can. To that end, I'm going to share them with you. 

Nana Tuckit is a drag queen on Instagram (for now? perhaps) who brings her A game to the results of the election. As she says, You can stand behind me.

An Essay You Should Read

 

This is a good, hard look at what our immediate future can look like if we can look beyond our own fears and trepidations and stay in touch with the people we trust, not just to bitch but to bitch and work toward solutions. Don't allow yourself to be isolated, that's the way these motherfuckers get their way. Love each other and stay safe. 

Take courage friends.
The way is often hard, the path is never clear,
and the stakes are very high.
Take courage.
For deep down, there is another truth:
you are not alone.

Wayne B. Arnason

Hope Among the Meanness

 

I've often lived in an America meaner than the sum of its parts. I was born into the hopeful Kennedy years, and I was five when the Civil Rights Act made things a little better. The American with Disabilities Act and the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency were a couple bright spots, too.

Meanwhile, a majority of citizens supported wars in Vietnam, Laos, Nicaragua, Iraq, Afghanistan, and lots of little places and little wars in between. Jimmy Carter, with his sensible sweater and solar panels, made me think things weren't so bad. But I remember the Reagan/Bush years, when nastiness was the point and people were encouraged to say what they already felt, the Clinton years, when citizens were left banging on empty factory doors, and the Bush II years, when lies authorized a lot of death.

Obama, well, what can I say. We really saw a difference, both in personal conduct on the president's part and government. That "hopey-changey thing" Sarah Palin disparaged made things easier for a lot of people. Sure, there were still food wastelands in all our inner cities and prices fluctuated, the way they always do. But for the first time, in my lifetime, we had a president who understood that most of us live paycheck to paycheck, a lot of us don't have steady transportation, and those that do can't always afford to use it. Obama understood that bosses could be assholes and owners looked out for themselves long before they paid a living wage or overtime. We felt the meanness many Americans experienced at the hands of officials begin to slip.

Then came trump I. The hood came out. Children were separated from parents. Many children died. The guy who was supposed to be looking out for us suggested we pour bleach in our guts to relieve the symptoms he got the most cutting-edge treatment for. In the name of enriching himself further, he bullied, stole, and cheated. 

We hired Biden, Obama's number 2, and thought we'd bid adieu to America's Bunga-bunga leader. And for a while, especially when Joe made the decision to put country before himself and stepped aside for Kamala, it looked like we had it made. It would be a rout.

It was a rout. But in the wrong direction. 

Kamala was not a flawed candidate, or not any more so than any candidate, and if you want to call a candidate flawed, look to the one with 34 felony convictions, the one whose followers were violent because he told them to be, the one who had to have a new vice presidential candidate because they tried to hang the last one. In any contest, there shouldn't have been one. But there was.

We lost. 

America is mean again in the agglomerate. Get any two together and they'll find a way to diminish a third.

That's who we are, and I want to thank the electorate for defenestrating the notion I wasn't aware I still held that we were a unique nation, one where right wins out, where history is slow in coming but is coming still, where decade by decade the lives of its people get better. This second trump term, even if it ends with him, leaves the clock America lives by spun back, particularly if he names another SCOTUS member. 

This time it's not just Muslims and Hispanics (whose individual votes for him actually increased) on the receiving end of their meanness. It's women (oddly, a group which voted in greater numbers for him than in 2020, despite all they have lost, except for black women, who have never had illusions about America's meanness) and the LGBTQ+ community and people who are already at a disadvantage and whose lives were already endangered. I'm white and straight and already on a lower rung of the middle class, and I can feel the meanness boiling around me. I can't imagine the fear my friends face. 

Amid all this despair, can I offer any hope? Yes. 

While America in the aggregate is mean, individual Americans are not. When I lived in my car, I was often taken in by people I never would have expected. From sharing beers in the truck bed with a bunch of guys who had more guns than teeth, to fundamentalist Christians who gave me a safe place to sleep and eat without attaching their religion to it except as the reason they did it, to any number of people in suits and skirts giving me money because I asked for it, when you get people one on one they surprise and delight you. 

While a majority of us allowed our inner trump to direct our actions and together can terrorize what Jesus called "the least of these," I celebrate the rolled-down car window and a hand holding out a $20 to the guy standing by the exit; the cop who might disdain their behavior helping up the trans~ victim of assault and listening to their story; the angry worker bee who has had it up to here with these illegals handing a bottle of water to the thirsty Guatemalan at 6 AM in front of Home Depot; the self-described trad wife whose greatest fear is she won't have dinner ready on time offering the single mom who's paying with EBT and is short $2 to add it to her bill, and then takes out another $10 in cash for her. 

Are these examples of self-aggrandizing individuals making themselves feel a little better about how they have it by deigning to give a little out in dribs and drabs? Maybe. Maybe it's all we've got. Maybe we're all we've got. Like the beloved Ram Dass said, "We're all just walking each other home." Even Jesus laid it out on the individual: "Sell all you possess and give it to the poor and then follow me." Maybe the best we can hope for in a mean America is the individuals who give away what they have one element at a time, making one person's day a little bit better. 

It's like the kid who throws a starfish back into the ocean. Help that one.

Uncomfortable Places I've Slept In

Not the actual van. Duh.

A Nonworking Van in Someone's Driveway, Rural Minnesota

I used to get around everywhere by bike. I loved my late 80s white Specialized Stumpjumper, bought for about $200 brand new and lovingly obsessed over for a decade by me. I especially enjoyed the feel of speeding down hills on roads, sitting straight up evoking the sensation of time whipping past me.

I took several bike trips after I'd moved to Minnesota. This one was the cycling tour I took to visit my soon-wife while she was doing a radio internship in the small Wisconsin town she'd grown up in. I rode several days from Mankato where we were students on the Sakatah Trail and then began riding back roads east across Minnesota to the Mississippi. 

It may have been the third or fourth evening of the trip. I was on a road bordered by long lines of trees with occasional houses. Back then I used a slim backpack US atlas where I traced my travels with markers, including stars at places I'd spent the night. But I've long since lost that, so my best guess is it was along one of the rural roads between Northfield and Prescott. A storm was brewing that I expected, having heard about it on a radio playing at the McDonald's where I'd had breakfast that morning. But by midafternoon I didn't need a weatherman to tell that. The sky had been a milky grey before covering what was left of the sun by 4 or 5.The wind, which had been pleasant through most of my trip, picked up so I was pressing the pedals as hard as if I'd been riding through a river flowing in the opposite direction. 

I didn't have a watch--I haven't worn one since the mid-80s--so my estimate of the time of day is really a guesstimate. But I was certain it was darker earlier than it should be. I'd started looking for someplace to set in for the night, hoping my tent would weather it but worrying it wouldn't. So I was searching for a place under trees where, even if I was at risk of a limb falling on me, would afford better protection than being in the open. 

I'd decided to start looking for an abandoned barn but while they were plentiful in that part of the state the only ones I could see were all in use by cows and horses. I was beginning to wonder if I could ask some family if I could cower on their porch when I passed a house with several vehicles in the driveway. My eye was caught by a van up on blocks. It looked like it was unlikely to suddenly be dragooned back in use. I stopped just past the house, listening to the sounds of people inside it, determined they were unlikely to hear or see me--it was the kind of place built into a hill where the ground floor on one side was actually the basement with no windows and the living was done on the next floor--and without giving it another thought opened the back of the van, popped my bike and gear inside, and closed it behind me.

The sharp smell of disuse and gasoline intoxicated me. The floor was a collection of tools, laid out where they could be grabbed easily from the door, and beyond them it was comparatively clear. I laid out my mat and mummy bag and read by what thin light was still available; when I decided it was safe,  I used my tiny reading light for a while until I gave in to exhaustion.

The wind had been pretty steady while I'd read and for the initial part of my sleep until the sound of a train barreling down the tracks at me shook me awake in a panic. The wind had  become a behemoth during my nap, a massive dragon snuggling up to my shelter and buffeting it enough that the sides shook. 

But I felt safe. The van had stood on those blocks for a long while and through many storms. Nothing was going to pierce those walls, not the harridan wind or the rain that hit the roof and windows sounding like stilettos. It probably went on for hours but I had little trouble, once I determined there was nothing coming into the few holes I noted in the van's floor, sleeping the sleep of the just plain tired. 

Despite my referring to it now as uncomfortable, it actually was pretty warm and secure and, most of all, dry. I slept close enough to one of the holes the smell of gas didn't bother me. When I woke the sun was just cresting the horizon. I usually spent the first minutes of my day brushing my teeth and splashing water on my face, but I didn't want to be caught by my unknowing saviors, so after a quick gulp from my water bottle, I opened the door as quietly as I could, and stepped out into a brilliant aqua-tinted world. Everything looked washed clean by the storm. Even the air seemed like it had been spiffed up. I took my bike out, closed the door just as quietly, walked it to the road and hopped on it without looking back. Tree limb after tree limb had been flung to the road and huge puddles were easy to navigate away from. Reaching the next town I heard it'd been a severe thunderstorm with sub-Category One winds, only(!) reaching speeds in the 60s. I was dry and safe and celebrated with a full breakfast at the diner. 

Weave a Mesh Together From the Bright Spots

 

I've read a book I came across at my local library a couple weeks ago with the bold title, How to Stand Up to a Dictator: The Fight for Our Future. It's by 2021 Nobel Peace laureate Maria Ressa and recounts her chronicling the return to authoritarianism in the Philippines under Rodrigo Duterte, ending with the election of Ferdinand Marcos' son and Duterte' s daughter as his replacement president and vice president. Along the way she presents a lot of distressing facts and events suggesting we are headed ever closer to a willing abdication of our political rights in favor of the  relinquishment of our political responsibilities.

The "our" of the subtitle is not rhetorical. If you're tempted, as many of us are, to shrug her warning off as "that's Asia's problem," presuming that as bad as Trumpism has proven for the US, it can't be that bad, she points out that in the early 20s the US was the only country whose use of Facebook superseded the Philippines. And while both nations have since then lost their number one and two status--India now dwarfs us, and the Philippines has slipped behind Indonesia, Brazil, and Mexico--we remain thoroughly within the grasp of what Shoshanna Zuboff has named "surveillance capitalism" which is the -ism whose operational form is "primary extraction". This is a practice by which " social media companies took our private actions and lives by using machine learning and artificial intelligence to collect and organize our personal data..., then publicly declared that they now own those corporate assets, which are then used to create algorithms that... manipulate us for profit. They offer no compensation, and they don't have to ask us for permission." 

As an example, you will never find a way to lower the number of ads you see on FB, despite those regularly appearing pitches that claim all you have to do is this and this. Delivering ads to your feed is what Facebook does, what it's meant to do. It's not good or bad in itself, but as Ressa describes, it can easily be put to bad uses. For instance, it will favor news and information one entity paying another wants you to see. She includes charts and details that, frankly, are too much for my very small brain, but people with greater experience with how the internet works will likely understand it.

There are moments when we might see the light at the end of the tunnel is not an approaching train. Ressa focuses on Facebook, for instance, because that was the primary social media platform at the time. While it remains the lead it is swiftly being overtaken by YouTube, Instagram, and WhatsApp, and as the bulk of boomers like me die off and stop using it, will be subsumed by younger, more malleable apps. They're likely to start by aping the successes of FB, but we've already seen how that kind of thinking has already become both corrosive and obsolete for Elon Musk/X. 

In her penultimate chapter with the depressing title "Why Fascism is Winning," Ressa explains that you stand up to dictators by "embracing values, defined early...: honesty, vulnerability, empathy, moving away from emotions, embracing your fear, believing in the good. You can't do it alone. You have to create a team, strengthen your area of influence. Then connect the bright spots and weave a mesh together.

"Avoid thinking in terms of 'us against them.' Stand in someone else's shoes. And do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Technology has proven that human beings have far more in common than we have differences; the tech platforms insidiously manipulate our biology regardless of our nation or culture. Fascist ideology, whether you call it 'the great replacement' or not, pits homogeneity against domestic enemies, who invariably champion democracy and its ideals. It's happening not just in the West, but in India, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, the Philippines. We all have our own Pol Pots who encourage mass violence based on us against them."

Indeed, trump is simply the airbrushed version of Putin, Kim, Orban, and Bashir, made more palatable for a nation that claims it operates on individuality while it thrives on fetishistic consumerism. As we should already know, the hard work of governing ourselves requires paying attention and making difficult choices. Evil lurks in the easy answer, the simple solution. The core thing we have in common is the dignity all of us deserve. Dignity demands real thinking, hard thinking, and we must not let that go. 

"This only gets you this"

 

I remember when RFK and MLK, Jr were shot. I was 3 at the time so I don't recall JFK's assassination but I do recall the surprise I felt at the realization it had happened in my lifetime. I remember George Wallace being shot, and Jerry Ford, and John Lennon, and later Ronald Reagan. Any time violence mars the political or cultural dialogue, it's a blow against the safety we all take for granted.

Now Donald Trump has been shot at. I say "shot at" because, even after 2 days of reporting, I have yet to discern whether he was hit by a bullet or a shard from the screen behind him. It doesn't ultimately matter because the fact remains he was shot at, and this is something we can't dismiss.

Let me first reiterate, as someone else has, that the notion this was a false flag operation by his own personnel is absolutely ridiculous because there is no way anyone would sign off on putting himself in immediate danger like this. Whether it was a bullet or plastic that struck and bloodied his ear, any nearer and we would be talking about an assassination rather than an attempt. 

Trump's raised-fist response in some photos is legitimate and I'm willing to allow he is braver or at least appears so in the clutch than I would have thought (and maybe even more so than I would be). That wouldn't make him any better a president than he was before and it doesn't change any of the wrongs he's done. It makes for a great picture, is all. Let him have it.

Here is the thing. When we move from rhetoric to violence, as has happened, it diminishes us all. It says we have given up that, in MLK's words, "the arc of the moral universe...bends toward justice." If we would be content, we can't allow anger with one another, distrust in one another, or violence against one another to dictate how we behave toward one another. 

Neither should we forget Corey Comperatore, who was struck by a bullet while shielding his family, and killed, or David Dutch or James Copenhaver, both of whom were struck and hospitalized. And we shouldn't forget Thomas Matthew Crooks, who for reasons we can't begin to guess at decided to join the ranks of Lee Harvey Oswald, James Earl Ray, Sirhan Sirhan, Arthur Bremer, Lynette Fromme, Mark David Chapman, and John Hinkley. 

At some point, frustration and rage can flare into the certainty that "I must do something, no matter who it hurts." Before any of us reaches that state, we need to recognize that it's never the right response. The right response is long, arduous, exhausting work that can't take the shortcuts provided by a fist or a knife or a gun or a bomb. President Biden put it well in his address after the shooting: “In America we resolve our differences at the ballot box... Not with bullets." But perhaps Norman Lear's All in the Family put it more succinctly when the actor Gregory Sierra, playing a Jewish vigilante, tells Rob Reiner's Mike that, "One day you're gonna find out this [making Reiner's hand into a fist] is the only answer." Mike tells him he's wrong "because this [making another fist] only gets you this." 

Loving Donald Trump

 

 A Sermon Delivered to High Street Unitarian Universalist Church, Macon, Georgia, June 30, 2024        

Last November I discovered that a woman I hadn’t seen in over three decades was going into hospice at her family’s home in Arizona. I’d tried to stay in touch, but what had been a loving relationship had dwindled to occasionally saying “Happy Birthday” to one another on Facebook. She would have turned 60 this past Friday. Denise didn’t tell me about her cancer diagnosis and hospice decision but her younger sister who stayed in touch with me had.

          I drove to Arizona to spend as much time with her as I could. It was a long trip, 27 hours each way. But despite the ensuing years our sitting down and talking together came easier than I expected. After a few days, she slipped into a coma from which she wouldn’t waken, and a few days after that Denise died quietly and peacefully.

          But in the words of the sainted Arlo Guthrie, “that’s not what I came to tell you about.” I came to talk about radical hospitality.

          Among the audio books to keep me company was Sacred Nature by Karen Armstrong. A theme she articulates often, how religion tells us to treat one another and the world around us, reflects a consistent theme to the world’s surviving practices.  We are most familiar with it as the Christian Golden Rule: “Do to others as you would have them do to you.” We have reached a point, Armstrong writes, at which “Any single world view is inadequate.” To survive, we must merge. Here in the US, we’re in the midst of a heat dome; this is the coolest summer of the rest of your life. Georgetown biologist Colin Carlson has estimated at least 4M people have died since the turn of the millennium due to malnutrition, floods, diarrhea, and malaria, ills within our scientific power to control.  People have messed around with the world enough that it’s become incumbent on us to reach out to other people and things just to maintain the Interdependent Web of which we’re all a part. If we would live in peace we must do so together. This requires what Armstrong calls a “profound empathy” and UUs call radical hospitality.

          Some religions make it a short rule: Hindus say “Don’t do to others what would hurt you.” Others don’t. Buddha quantified what he called The Four Immeasurables, loving-kindness, compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity. They have very involved explications in Buddhism so I will put them more simply.

          There is no one and nothing I can meet that is not loved by God or the universe. If I had the same history and experiences of another person or thing, my outlook would be the same. Recognizing the other’s outlook as valid as my own, I share the other person or thing’s successes as my own. In doing so, my existence and the other’s existence complement one another, and we live in peace.   

          My parting with Denise had not been on the best of terms so I asked myself, driving back from her death, can I look at the Four Immeasurables through the lens of Denise?

          Can I accept she was loved by God? Absolutely. If I had lived a similar life to hers, would I have seen life the same as she did? Well, that’s a little harder. Denise had a rough life that allowed her to be taken advantage of and experience health problems that I like to think I could avoid, but yes, I can envision that I would. Can I share her successes as if they were my own? Yes, I could. She bought a house on her own and filled it with people she considered family, something we had always said we would do. Finally, do we complement one another as if we were the same person? Absolutely. Despite the physical and emotional distances between us for all those years, that final act of talking felt harmonious.

          Well, maybe it’s easier to do this with someone who’s dead because they aren’t going to disagree with you. And even though we ended on a bad note that resonated for three plus decades, it is easy to feel this for someone you loved.

           

          It may be easy too in the sense that I know little enough about other people’s lives I can accept them in the larger sense without knowing much about them. But Donald Trump. Now there’s someone about whose life we seem to know everything, most of it not very complimentary. [To give an instance, when I sent my title for this sermon out, it was called “Loving Donald Trump,” but somewhere along the line, probably for space reasons, it was shortened to “Loving Trump,” and I don’t think there’s any confusion about which Trump.] I volunteer at Daybreak here in Macon and among my friends there are two homeless men who support Donald Trump. One of them is black. Neither will experience any benefit I can see from his return to the presidency, but both support and pray for his candidacy. I love these men not despite but because of who they are. Can I love Donald Trump the same?

          Now before I answer I’m talking about radical love. Radical love and hospitality are cornerstones of our faith, and we justly pride ourselves on practicing them. I want to put to the test the love we refer when Jesus articulates the Golden Rule: to love God with all your heart and soul by loving your neighbor as yourself. This is the radical love we aspire to in the Beloved Community. Is Donald Trump my beloved neighbor?

          Let’s apply the Four Immeasurables. Can I accept that God loves Donald Trump? I don’t really have any skin in that game so sure, I can accept that when God looks at Trump, as when God looked at Pol Pot and Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler and Caligula and anyone you want to name, God loves him. Despite what Trump is, God loves him.

          What about the second, can I accept that if I had lived the experiences he had, would I act like Donald Trump? Um, okay, I guess. But I like to think I would act better than he does, I would do more for others with his wealth and prestige and do better things.

          Can I celebrate his successes with him? Insert record scratch sound. What? Now hold on. Celebrate his Supreme Court appointments who have taken away a woman’s right to choose abortion, even in the cases of incest and rape and death? Celebrate his success in separating his supporters from their money despite his wealth and the unlikelihood he will do anything to improve their lives? Celebrate the policies he’s provoked that ban books and education and healthcare to people who need it most? Celebrate his rolling back more environmental and economic regulations than any previous president, his attitude toward climate change best represented by his recent statement that climate change is good because it “means basically [you] have a little more beachfront property…”? No, no, I can’t celebrate those unholy things! No, finally, Trump and I cannot be complimentary, we cannot live in harmony. Shall I admit, then, that I can’t love my neighbor as myself, that I can’t be at peace with this portion of the world, because we all know someone, someone we love, who thinks as Trump does, and if I can’t be at peace with him can I be at peace with them? Moreover, should I echo the worst of them, calling them scum, defilers of the blood, my enemy? Should I in turn offer them violence and bloodshed because I don’t like their votes?

          Now I’ve read a lot of holy books in my time but none of them has said treat your enemy the way he treats you. In fact, they go out of their way to say, as Jesus did, “if your enemy strikes your right cheek, offer him the other one.” We are, the just and unjust alike, granted the same sunlight and rain. Determining who gets less is outside my pay grade.

          Religion, if it’s to have any meaning, demands better from me. If I would accept radical hospitality, I must accept God loves Donald Trump as much as God loves me, not despite who he is but because he is. Full stop.

          Would I be the same person Donald Trump is if I had the same experiences, without insisting I would be better? Yes. I’m not as different as I’d like to think, and his election in 2016 proved at least to me the fallacy I’d accepted, that the US is a special nation. And for that I ought to thank him; so, I admit, with his same experiences, I would see the world the same.

          Can I celebrate his successes with him? Now perhaps I have been looking at the wrong successes. Perhaps, like mine, his successes are on a smaller, more personal scale. Donald Trump is loved, and I’m not talking about his followers or people he benefits, but people who love him the way I love my family and friends. The way you love and are loved. By all evidence, the love Trump’s children have for him is unfeigned, and we all know how hard it can be to love our parents. To be a part of someone else’s life for any substantial amount of time and remain loving them is a success to which we all can relate.

          Finally, am I at peace with Donald Trump as Donald Trump, as Jesus or Buddha would be at peace with him? We are each allotted the same time on earth, a lifetime. Donald Trump will die and so will all his followers. So will I and so will everyone who I love. I would be remembered for my love for other people, and that is about the best I can hope for.

          So that’s it, right? I accept the misdeeds of my enemy and we live in harmony, yes? No, of course not. Because here’s where the radical part of hospitality comes in. Because as Jesus and Buddha and the rest taught, once you’ve become enlightened or seen the kingdom of heaven or the Beloved Community, it is your responsibility to bring it about. I learned that as a shaven-headed would-be monk four decades ago when the abbot at the monastery where I was studying agreed I had reached a level of enlightenment and said, “I’m so sorry.” Because recognizing the injustice surrounding you means you can’t ignore what’s wrong any longer.

My wife has pointed out to me that this is “Sermon Bob,” not “Bob Who Lives with Me Every Day”, who is sharing these things. And it’s true. I don’t live my life like this daily, maybe not even weekly. I continue to post Facebook memes of Wonder Woman punching Donald Trump and I point out the incongruity of posting the 10 commandments in places children can be shot. But there’s every reason for me to try to live to be someone better. Pointing out and correcting the foibles of others doesn’t mean I don’t have them myself. Flicking the speck out of my neighbor’s eye impels me to be aware of the log in mine. [We saw an instance of this a week ago when Reverend JeKaren Olaoya, during a contentious moment of argument, instead of calling out the offending comments turned to those offended to reaffirm they are loved. This is one way the Beloved Community operates.]

          But, as parents know, it’s not always enough to love someone. You have to correct misbehavior and provide proper behavior if the other is to become a good child, father, mother, brother, sister, parent. In the Beloved Community, we are responsible for one another. So do not complain that Donald Trump and his followers are destroying democracy and human rights, show them how they are doing it, and what the correct response should be.

          We face an alarming future, and by “we” I mean our younger people, their children, and their children’s children. It is likely the world’s situation will get a lot worse. It isn’t just Donald Trump and his supporters. They have appeared after multiple decades of waste and overuse and as the African adage goes, “When the water hole shrinks, the animals get meaner.” There are things we can do. When we hear or read of a Trump supporter parroting our need for “a united Reich” or for separating migrant children from their parents or banning Muslims from entering the US or that US media is the enemy of the people or any number of offenses, it is incumbent on us to say, “No. No, that’s not right.” Don’t argue with them, don’t bring up facts or statistics proving your point because they won’t listen, and they certainly won’t admit they’re wrong as we won’t admit we’re wrong. As Canadian wrestler Sami Zayn reminds us, “Everyone is the hero in their own story.”  Correct them as you would a child. “No. Don’t do that because it hurts other people. We must live with those other people and if we’re going to live together, we must stop hurting them.” Our message must be that simple: Don’t hurt them. They’re our neighbors and our friends and our loved ones. Even the ones like me who love Donald Trump.

         

Justice won

 

Did I crow? Yes, I did. A little. 

Did I rub it in the faces of my online trump-supporting friends? Yes, I did. A little.

I'm not proud of it. But I submit it's the natural reaction after nearly a decade of malfeasance practiced openly but unpunished. Those of us on the right side of history have been fretting that there were two forms of American justice, and trump's crimes put him on one side of a line most of us can't cross. I admit it, I have at times felt defeated by the slow arc of jurisprudence. 

But beginning with his financial loss to E. Jean Carroll we began to see openings in the teflon. It was enough to make us hope we would see the American people would prevail in their multiple cases, and just enough that even though it became customary for leftists to bemoan the state of his attorneys' court appearances--"I fear he's going to get away with this just like he did with [fill in your own example]"--many of us recognized that our doing so was an example of suggesting the worst in order to ward off the evil eye.  

It's not over, of course, and it's not even the best or worst of news. But it's a developing stain he won't be able to separate himself from no matter what else he may do or say. In the Beloved Community we don't celebrate our enemy's defeats but we do celebrate justice's successes. I'm not convinced he'll get prison time or his victims will see the millions to which they're entitled. But I am convinced that in the only court that matters to him, his own mind, he has been struck a blow he will never recover from. And that's enough for me. 

Sitting on the Curb Together

Late last week I was at Daybreak on my regular Thursday walkaround. The place closes down at 11 to allow staff an hour lunch, so a number of people collect out back, smoking, napping in the sun, sitting and relaxing. This happens every weekday but I go there on Thursdays.

The volunteer coordinator calls it my "social day" because what I do is wander around in back and ask people how they are. Most times they answer in the affirmative and I might sit with them to catch up on stuff. But when they say "Not so good," I make a point of sitting or squatting with them to hear their story. 

That's all I do, listen to their stories. I'm not a social worker or RN or therapist, I don't have access to any resources and my knowledge of what's available, even a year after moving here, is woefully inadequate. But I can listen and I'm aware from my own time on the road that this is often something not available to lonely people; someone who will uncritically and calmly sit with them and listen to what's going on. I can't solve any of their issues and they're aware of that, but I can make them a little less lonely.

In seminary, this ministry was emphasized to me by the story of Job and his friends. While it's true they try to explain away his mistreatment by God by placing the blame on him, what they do before that is

set out from their homes and met together by agreement to go and sympathize with him and comfort him. When they saw him from a distance, they could hardly recognize him; they began to weep aloud, and they tore their robes and sprinkled dust on their heads. Then they sat on the ground with him for seven days and seven nights. No one said a word to him, because they saw how great his suffering was.

This is the critical part of ministry for me, that rather than immediately setting out to interpret his suffering, his friends sit with him and share his misery. For a week and silently. That is truly sharing in someone's grief.

I don't try to put myself in the shoes of Job's friends because they are convinced of their own righteousness and eventually give in to judgement. But I do accept the wisdom of their first actions, to sit on the ground and be with the one who is suffering.

So this past Thursday I noticed one of my regulars sitting on the curb away from the property and drinking a beer. She looked unhappy, so when I could I wandered over and sat down, said I was glad to see her and asked how she was. 

Her issue was nothing new to her, it's a problem she's been trying to solve since January, and I'd heard it before at length. But I didn't say anything about that, I just listened. After she finished her beer she stood up to go inside and we walked over together. She said, "Thanks for sitting there with me." I said, "That's what I do, it's about all I'm good at." 

That's when she said something that floored me. At first I was unsure I'd understood her and asked "What?" She turned around and looked me full in the face and said, enunciating every word, "You keep people from ending their lives."

I don't know if she meant overall people who do that or just me, although I'm certain in that moment she meant just me. It pierced me. That is, I believe, the closest I'll ever come to a personal divine message.

 

It's About How We React

 

No doubt, it has to be one of the most frightening experiences, made more so by the recognition there isn't anything you can do about it. That it doesn't happen more often is a miracle of design in itself. That anyone can remain calm in the wind and blast of it is amazing.

I speak, of course, of Donald trump's appalling ascendence in the republican polls.

A week ago, this happened as well. The panel of an Alaska Airlines plane dropped off midair. No warning, no immediate explanation, just a sudden bang and blast of cold air. Who wouldn't scream at that? Well, not the pilot. Note the calm in her voice. Apparently none of the passengers either. All witnesses report that, whatever people might have been feeling as individuals, the immediate effect other than the sound of rushing air was silence. 

And while that also precipitates the certainty of doom and collapse, I want to point out what the passengers and flight crew of Flight 1282 out of Portland did not do. They did not panic. They did not put themselves or others in danger by ignoring the dropping air masks or unbuckling their seatbelts in order to move back further from what more than one witness has called "the gaping hole two-thirds the size of a refrigerator." 

What they did was, after I'm certain an immediate round of screams and expressions of astonishment, to behave the way people are supposed to in an emergency: they trusted themselves to the professionalism of the trained crew to keep them safe and return them to land. And it happened, exactly the way it should have. If it weren't for the novelty that a panel blew off in view of the passengers it might not have even been reported beyond the local news. 

The latter is the way we must react to the news of the former. After acknowledging trump's resurgence  as something unprecedented, we need to relax, damp our individual panic, allow that it is happening, and allow the crew, which is us too, to get us through this safely and securely. It's unlikely trump will reach the presidency again, and if he does we will deal with it, but American voters are our own best pilots. We know what we must do and trust ourselves to get us back on the ground without casualty.