THE AUDACITY OF RECOLLECTION

 

A Sermon Delivered to 

High Street Unitarian Universalist Church

March 15, 2026

          I have few fond memories of the George W. Bush era, but I want to share another person’s memory. This is from then-Senator Barack Obama’s memoir The Audacity of Hope describing his 2004 swearing-in at the start of the second Bush administration.

A young Marine at the door politely indicated that the photograph session was over and that the President needed to get to his next appointment. But before I could turn around to go the President himself appeared in the doorway and waved me over.

’Obama!’ the President said, shaking my hand. “Come here and meet Laura. Laura, you remember Obama. We saw him on TV during election night. Beautiful family. And that wife of yours—that’s one impressive lady.’

’We both got better than we deserve, Mr. President,’ I said, shaking the First Lady’s hand and hoping I’d wiped the crumbs off my face. The President turned to an aide nearby, who squirted a bog dollop of hand sanitizer in the President’s hand.

’Want some?’ the President asked. ‘Good stuff. Keeps you from getting colds.’

Not wanting to seem unhygienic, I took a squirt.

’Come over here for a second,’ he said, leading me off to one side of the room. ‘You know,’ he said quietly, ‘I hope you don’t mind me giving you a piece of advice.’

’Not at all, Mr. President.’

He nodded. ‘You’ve got a bright future,’ he said. ‘Very bright. But I’ve been in this town a while and, let me tell you, it can be tough. When you get a lot of attention like you’ve been getting, people start gunnin’ for ya. And it won’t necessarily be coming from my side, you understand. From yours, too. Everybody’ll be waiting for you to slip, know what I mean? So watch yourself.’

…[As] we walked to the door I told him a few stories from the campaign. It wasn’t until he had left the room that I realized I had briefly put my arm over his shoulder as we talked—an unconscious habit of mine, but one that I suspected might have made many of …the Secret Service agents in the room, more than a little uneasy.

          Now that is audacity. I’ll leave it to you to decide whether it’s an example of disrespectful behavior, or the more common meaning of a bold move. You always chance, when you act audaciously, having your brashness be confused with rudeness. That sort of audacity, that willingness to boldly say or act because the stakes are too high not to, that we must present ourselves.

In this climate almost nothing is more audacious than remembering that it was June 16, 2015, 11 years ago, Donald Trump appeared at the top of an escalator with gold gilding in New York’s tower named for him. Who would have predicted at that time we would still be under his sway, let alone talking about him, all these years later?

          It should have been an indication what he was capable of when his first words on taking the stage were, “That is some group of people. Thousands!” According to contemporary news accounts there were, at best, a few dozen people in attendance, certainly no more than a hundred. Any others Trump imagined were on the other ends of cameras, of which there were also only a few, and except for Fox and CNN, those were all local. Any idea that the truth of the situation might temper his tendencies was smashed when, after his inauguration in January 2117, Trump’s factotum, Sean Spicer, reported Trump’s crowd size at “a million and a half” attendees while professional crowd counters came up between 3 and 600,000, well below the first inauguration of Barack Obama conservatively estimated at over 1,000,000 people. It is also instructive that this was the first time we heard the phrase “alternative facts.”

          It’s important to Trump that his White House continues, in the face of multiple facts, to trumpet his guesstimate. [It is also important because memory matters. John Gardner reminds us in Grendel, his novelization of the Beowulf legend, memory is supernal in the way that someone’s lies, deceitful, flattering untruths, as the monster puts it, “changed the world, had torn up the past by its thick, gnarled roots and had transmuted it…[They] who knew the truth remembered it his way—and so did I.”]

          Here’s one of my memories. January 2009 I was teaching a class at a suburban business that began at about the point Obama would be finishing up. I listened to his speech while I drove from another class. We thought it would never happen, and here it was, the first Black American president. And he was talking about things that were important to me. I recall his humble tone and willingness to reach out to others. Here’s an excerpt from his speech:

On this day, we gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord. On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas that for far too long have strangled our politics. We remain a young nation. But in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things. The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history; to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea passed on from generation to generation: the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness.

          Now, I will remind you that, among other things, this was still three years before Joe Biden would convince Obama his position on marriage equality was outdated and he publicly supported same sex couples marrying, eventually becoming law. So even with the positives in that speech, there was greater room for better to come.

          I was so enthralled listening to this I sat in my car in the parking lot an extra 15 minutes, soaking up as much of that feeling as possible. Class, of course, began later than usual, but most of the other students walked in when I did. One, a Muslim woman from Africa, had arrived early and sat in another student’s car, and they listened to the entire speech together.

          [It may be worth noting that where I got this excerpt, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, promises a full transcript via a link to the White House. The White House has removed that transcript.]

          Am I remembering the lush sense of potential correctly? To test myself, I read an essay by one of my favorite New York Review writers, Darryl Pinckney, describing an appearance by then-Senator Obama in Indianapolis. “What Obama most projects is intellectual honesty, a sense that he has thought things through or is going to try to.”

          And a year later, writing about Obama’s inauguration: “President Obama’s speech was eloquent enough, starting with the fact that he used the word ‘I’ only three times throughout the course of his recollections on ‘the work of remaking America.’…[What] surprised many of us about Obama’s inaugural address was not the absence of rhetorical finery, but how basic and insistent was his reiteration of the premises on which he said we as a nation had always told ourselves we stood.”

          Further,

President Obama’s chastisement of the nation for the drift and low spirits of recent years exempted no one, including himself—everywhere he cautioned of the labor ahead…No slogans, no self-congratulation, but a definite end to the atmosphere of corruption. [He is pledged to transparency in governmental practice in order to ‘restore the vital trust between a people and their government…’]

In Harlem, they say that he is president of the world, [and the photographs of people watching the swearing-in ceremony from Kabul to Nairobi suggest that President Obama was at times so plainspoken in his speech in an effort to reach people who speak English in other countries, talking in a language the world could understand.] It was only after things were over that I remembered how much of the world had been watching…The dignity of the nation was gathered up into his assertion that ‘our security emanates from the justness of our cause, the force of our example, the tempering qualities of humility and restraint.’

The pride with which people came away from the Mall was owing in great measure to their profound respect for President Obama. As much as he tried to merge into his message, or to lower expectations of what he’ll be able to accomplish, I was moved by the thought that we hadn’t seen his like before.

         [I don’t have to tell you who looks pretty bad in contrast.]

Am I guilty of looking at the recent past with rose-colored glasses? I may be. But like looking at Washington, Lincoln, FDR, JFK, even Reagan and, now he’s safely dead, Jimmy Carter, it’s hard to take off those glasses when contrasting them with whatever era we might be reading from. A previous administration almost always looks better than the current one.

          But remember the things we’ve lost to a Trump administration. Perhaps calling these policies “lost” is incorrect. We haven’t mislaid them and however we might feel they haven’t been taken from us. The current administration has decided these are somehow out of reach, either because of finances or a strained morality, but we worked long and hard to achieve them, to convince enough people of their rightness that they understood with us that a sane, good society needs them. They are things we believe in.

          We believe in a person's sovereignty over their own body.  While the Dobbs v Jackson decision was reached after Trump was defeated the first time it was after he had appointed 4 conservative justices to the Supreme Court, including at least one who by rights should have been Obama's nominee. The right of a woman to make her own pregnancy decisions is, or should be, inviolate.  Likewise, the right of an individual to determine what body they’re comfortable in is sacrosanct.

We believe in the separation of church and state. As Obama said, Americans have the right to choose in a god or a discipline we believe, or choose not to believe, and the right not to be subordinate to someone else’s belief or nonbelief.  We believe in programs like USAID, that helped develop foreign policy and lessen poverty, enhance healthcare worldwide and make economies stronger. Prior to its dismantling, USAID was credited with preventing 75 million deaths, many of them in underdeveloped nations [in Africa and Asia.]

          We believe in an independent Center for Disease Control. In 2024 there were a total of 284 cases of measles; in 2025, a full year of the Directorship of Robert F. Kennedy Jr brought that number to a staggering 2283 cases. In these first 3 months of 2026 there are already 1281 cases.

          We believe in meaningful work. Just since Donald Trump assumed office again manufacturing lost 88,000 jobs, more than 10,000,000 people have been out of work for at least 6 months, over 4.7 million people are underemployed, unemployment among the young has jumped from 9.3% of job-seekers in 2023 to 13.9%.

What kind of quality can we put on our sense of safety or security in the actions of our government? How do we even measure that? After the disastrous rollout of Covid 19 prevention under Trump during which it was suggested by him we inject ourselves or swallow noxious chemicals, some intended for other species, or shining ultraviolet light up our system, 1,124,000 people have died. Since Trump’s reelection and expanded powers for ICE and the CBP 48 people have been reported dying in detention centers around the country, and another 8 people, famously including two who were videotaped, were also killed by ICE agents in public. For many of us this is shockingly new, but for just as many others it’s dismayingly familiar. A veneer has been pulled back to display the rot beneath.

          We’ve seen the sacrifice of DEI, Diversity, Equality and Inclusion, on the altar of the lies of wasteful government initiatives, preferential treatment, and hurt feelings. These programs helped correct past wrongs and contemporary setbacks. When we say we believe in DEI we echo our Unitarian Universalist values of an individual’s inherent worth and dignity, of justice, equity and compassion.

These are the ideas and policies we believe in. We fought long and hard and some of us died to achieve them, and just because Trump and his followers don’t share our8 belief doesn’t mean they are gone. It’ll take time but we’ll get them back.

          Because when you believe in an ideal like equality or feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless or treating one another with respect and dignity, it’s not something you can cross out of a budget. We bought those things with muscle and blood. It’s not a pet rock or platform shoes. We can’t live up to our best without them.

          It’s a truism among political wonks that a leader is someone who watches which direction the people are going and runs out ahead shouting, “Follow me!” We don’t elect a leader to tell us what to do, we elect one to inspire us to do better.

          Can we do better than Donald Trump? Yes, we can. Can we do better than Barack Obama? Yes, we can. I don’t know what that looks like but they’re out there. We’ll know them when we hear them, the belief, the certainty in their voice and actions that we can and must be better. To quote the title of a James Carville book from the 90s that popped down the memory hole, We’re Right, They’re Wrong. There’s nothing wrong with certainty in helping others. We must hold to that belief if we’re going to return those values to their proper place.

         

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.

Some don't need to ask

I was having lunch at New Paltz's Gay 90s Bistro with a friend who lived in the same community house I had. After, we noticed a mutual friend was working the grill in the kitchen and he called her out. She stood behind the counter and he said, "Give us a hug."

She leaned across and, dutifully, did so. Then she leaned over and pulled me into one of her own. I said,"Oh, I get one too?" She said, "Of course you do. And you, you don't need to ask."

Decades later that's something that sticks with me. That there are people who need to demand hugs and those of us who get them without asking. Donald Trump, we know from his own admissions, is one of the former. Barack Obama, as we have seen for a decade, is the latter.

We can't just mark a ballot

Before becoming a minister, my field was literature.  The most important lesson in criticism is not to criticize a work for what it's not. I published a recent sermon a few days ago which garnered many responses on one of the FaceBook pages I link to, most of them negative. My sermon was not intended to be a call to the barricades. I would love to storm the Bastille, but tell me where it is in 22nd century America. Is it in the school board? The town hall? The state capitol? Congress? The White House? It's a genius of democracy that power is diffuse, and to use it we need to know who to address. I know my congregation audience. One response I especially appreciated was a friend coming forward to say she, who had never been to a public protest in her life, would attend the next one with me. That's the best I could want.

I'm uninterested in responding to the criticism. Again, from literature, the work stands or falls on its own. But it did leave me wanting to make a stronger statement about the responsibility we have as people of faith to call it as we see it. This administration is actively involved in crafting and doing evil to the people least able to defend themselves among us: immigrants, children, the undocumented, non-Christians, women, people who work with their hands, gays and lesbians, members of the trans~ community, the poor who rely on government services and the poor who work for minimum wage and less, the homeless, the mentally ill, native Americans, the sick and the dying. In short, the members of the Beloved Community who most need community.

We're reaching a vote soon that can do some real good, that can put into place the actors we're counting on to move the country back in the direction of helping, not hurting. Of giving, not greed. But even if we win every single seat we hope for it means nothing without our involvement. When Obama was elected, our work had only started, and it was going to be a long, hard slog, even with an ally in the presidency, to accomplish what we need to. When he won reelection, we needed to continue working, maybe work harder.

We have been lazy, leaving it to others to do the things we need done, as if we can mark a ballot every couple years and that does it. That's why one of the greatest presidents of my time has been followed by one of the worst, why he has taken it as his mission, and his supporters' mission, to dismantle even the few good things we accomplished to help people who need it. 

We can't change that direction with cobblestones or bullets, even by overturning tables in the temples. We have to work together, understand one another and our friends, and make the changes necessary. And then we have to pay attention. 

no one should still be protesting this shit

Guys I knew in high school have posted links on Facebook, from notes of solidarity with soon-to-be-former Officer Darren Wilson to strenuous denunciations of the Ferguson black community and Michael Brown and his family. I've responded to many of them, sometimes letting my frustration and anger show. I would love to simply sit back and let their remarks flow over me like it is water and I am a duck' s ass. But as I pointed out, that is the definition of privilege. And I am prodded by the words of Desmond Tutu, that if we try to be neutral in the face of oppression then we have joined the side of the oppressors.

What galls me, not only in relation to the arguments they've put forward, but about similar arguments that regressives as a group have parroted, is the idea, as if it has never occurred to them, that what they accuse Michael Brown-and it is severely fucked up that anyone would use that term, willfully blind to the notion a killed black kid should be accused of participating in his own death-of doing is exactly the same as many of them have themselves done in the past, or have known people who have done similar things. No one deserves to be shot for having stolen from a store. No one who is unarmed deserves to be shot for charging a cop who is hundreds of feet away. (And despite the claims of Fox News, neither question is settled.)

If there is a people in America who should least have to protest against still having to protest this shit, it should be black people. Yet we are here, over two centuries after a revolution declared all Americans free, a century and a half after the last slave-bearing ship entered an American port, after a destructive Civil War, nearly five decades after passage of acts devoted to reconciling civil rights, and nearly a decade after a majority of Americans elected and then reelected a half black man with a funny name, still, still, protesting this shit. I like to think the sons and daughters of these guys with whom I've been arguing will not have to hold a similar sign or have similar arguments, but I am learning that hope, in addition to being feathered, may also be vain.

we are not hedgehogs: progressive in a season of despair

Many of us are waking this morning to the news of the overwhelming victory by republican tea partiers in states and at local levels. This, their resurgence, after we have been promised that they were dying, a dinosaur interest group struggling one last time against pull of the tar pits. For those of us who suffer from seasonal affective disorder, this has become a season of despair, a Fall.

I will not lie to you, it is bad. In my own state, the governor who easily beat back a historic recall effort has won reelection by a wide margin. Regressive candidates won handily in a state whose watchwords not so long ago were "there is strength in a union." A congressman whose primary strength is his name recognition as a member of a reality show, won a third term.

On a national level, Wendy Davis, in whose campaign many of us saw a grassroots effort to turn around the deeply regressive state of Texas, lost in a landslide victory to a candidate who boasts of the two dozen lawsuits he's pushed against the federal government whose policies he must administer. Republicans not only held the House of Representatives, but won control of the Senate. A conservative friend has posted on Facebook, "[With Harry Reid no longer Senate leader,] America will see Obama is the real obstructionist." And I'm sure, from her perspective, this is true. If, as they've promised, the Tea Party members put forward impeachment proceedings against him, attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, draconian Mexican border rules like the infamous Arizona "Where are your papers?" law, and similar attempts, then yes, they will see that Obama is indeed obstructive.

There are, of course, small victories, most of which are the retention of incumbent Democrats, and the defeat of Pennsylvania governor Tom Corbett. That's about it. I wish I could say these Tea Party victories (and they are Tea Party victories, despite the strenuous effort of Republicans to deny their influence) were the result of mass fraud, disappeared ballots, or deliberate intimidation. But I can't. The truth is that their supporters turned out in greater numbers than ours did. And while many Americans decry the complacent, worse-than-useless politician, it is always the other guy's representative who needs to go, not mine. While the numbers for voter turnout aren't available yet, the chances are that they will mirror previous midterm election years, when people show in smaller, more centralized numbers (although if anecdote is allowed, the turnout in my little corner of the hub had already reached number 107 when I voted at 9:45 a.m., a heavy showing in a township of about 500 voters.

It is a hard time. We will see advances rolled back, people who rely on the government for help more marginalized, if not fully scapegoated as under Reagan, the further erosion of the remains of the middle class and greater emphasis on what the upper classes want, more scandals, greater instances of hypocrisy, angrier turning inward on ourselves and villainizing the outer world. Progressives could be forgiven our cynicism, if we turn hedgehog, burrowing into our dens to hibernate until the sweet resurgence of spring.

But there is no such promise. Unlike spring, progressivism isn't a given, a season naturally following the winter of despair. It will not come on its own and all we need to do is duck our heads and wait. We are not hedgehogs. Spring is not guaranteed, we must bring it, bud by bud, thaw by thaw. We can no more give in to easy cynicism than we can dig a hole in the backyard and curl up in it. We will not survive in either case. We must call shit for what it is, and we must continue, despite the odds, despite how unseemly it may seem, despite how much we must ourselves pay for it in terms of public and personal condemnation, to fight and fight hard. When Barack Obama won the presidency nothing was settled, we knew we would have to continue working, sometimes in opposition to him. Nothing has changed. We must be underdogs victorious.

"I may be...on the wrong side of history"

In connection with a project, I have been reading the "Faith" chapter of Barack Obama's The Audacity of Hope and came across the following passage.  I will be the first to admit that on many issues--following through with his attempts to close Guantanamo, continuing his predecessor's wars and predator drone programs, his recent defence of the worst aspects of the Patriot Act--he has proved to accomplish less than I would like.  But in this passage he recognizes he was wrong in a political stance and in his own beliefs, and then admits it. It reinforces my belief in the basic dignity and humanity of my president.

For many practicing Christians, the...inability to compromise may apply to gay marriage.  I find such a position troubling, pasticularly in a society in which Christian men and women have been known to engage in adultery or other violations of their faith without penalty...I believe that American society can choose to carve out a special place for the union of a man and a woman as the unit of child rearing most common to every culture.  I am not willing to have the state deny American citizens a civil union that confers equivalent rights on such basic matters a hospital visitation or health insurance coverage simply because the people they love are of the same sex--nor am I willing to accept a reading of the Bible that considers an obscure line in Romans to be more defining of Christianity than the Sermon on the Mount.

Perhaps I am sensitive on this issue because I have seen the pain my own carelessness has caused.  Before my election [to the Illinois senate]...I received a phone message from one of my strongest supporters.  She was a small-business owner, a mother, and a thoughtful, generous person.  She was also a lesbian who had lived in a monogamous relationship with her partner for the last decade.

She knew when she decided to support me that I was opposed to same-sex marriage, and she had heard me argue that, in the absence of any meaningful consensus, the heightened focus on marriage was a distraction from other, obtainable measures to prevent discrimination against gays and lesbians.  Her phone message in this instance had been prompted by a radio interview she had heard in which I had referenced my religious traditions in explaining my position on the issue.  She told me that she had been hurt by my remarks; she felt that by bringing religion into the equation, I was suggesting that she, and others like her, were somehow bad people.

I felt bad, and told her so in a return call...I was reminded that no matter how much Christians who oppose homosexuality may claim that they hate the sin but love the sinner, such a judgement inflicts pain on good people--people who are made in the image of God, and who are often truer to Christ's message than those who condemn them.  And I was reminded that it is my obligation, not only as an elected official in a pluralistic society but also as a Christian, to remain open to the possibility that my unwillingness to support gay marriage is misguided...I must admit that I may have been infected with society's prejudices and predilictions and attributed them to God; that Jesus' call to love one another might demand a different conclusion; and that in years hence I may be seen as someone who was on the wrong side of history.  I don't believe such doubts make me a bad Christian.  I believe they make me human...[my emphasis]

on the 10th anniversary of the war in iraq

In all the hubbub it is important to keep this in mind:  We were right.

it is time for us to be prophets

I am an unabashed liberal.  I have been reading in a number of places and hearing from a number of people that now, on the other side of political victory, it is time to lead our nation to heal, to draw us back together into a single community. 

It is not. 

No, it is time to press our advantage for all it is worth and remind our opponents--by which I don't mean Romney-supporters but supporters of hurtful policies and beliefs who may have supported Romney or not but certainly supported the losing side--that they are finally, undeniably, irrecoverably wrong.

We should model ourselves on the prophets of the Older Testament who did not suggest that the way to save the Hebrew people was for everyone to get over their differences and see one another's point of view.  Deborah reminds the general Barak(!) that victory comes to the one who takes presses a situation's advantage.  Amos directs his angry words at the "fat cows" who "oppress the poor and crush the needy."  Jeremiah railed against the false prophets and their followers, "They were not even ashamed at all; They did not even know how to blush...I will pour out their own wickedness on them." 

It is time for us to be prophets, to tell them that they are wrong.  Those who believe Fox News tells them the truth; they are wrong.  Those who are convinced the president was born in a foreign country and is an illegitimate leader; they are wrong.  Those who behave as if "God helps he who helps himself" is a Biblical teaching; they are wrong.  Those who are certain that a ring and pledge of purity will somehow keep teen pregnancy at bay; they are wrong.  Those who think that their casual racism is somehow protected self-expression; they are wrong.  Those who feel themselves "taxed enough already"; they are wrong.  It is time to stop being humble about our views, as if they are somehow less-realistic, less-rigorous, less-accepted by the American people. 



We won and we won big.  We saw more clearly where the country is headed and what people are concerned with.  We must not be embarrassed by our having been right.  We are the ones with vision and we are the ones who have been proved right.  We may not be right in the future--in fact, about some things we are as certain to be wrong in the future as we are right now.  But we are right today.  Own that. 

homily in a time of soul-stirring victory

I have a number of friends and acquaintances who are conservative, both politically and religiously, and many of them crossed party and denominational lines to return President Obama to office and to overturn some poor legislation that limited others' rights.  For them, the benefit to other people trumped their own views of sound economic policy or morality.

This is hope of my faith, that when it comes down to the edge of the knife, I will do what helps rather than hurts another person.  The point of a faith or a moral code is to help you learn to live a better life, and most say the way to do that is through providing a better life for others.  In very practical, desert-island-type terms, we have nothing if not one another.

Most people understand this.  It's why they vote in the first place.  I'm convinced the policies of the Obama Administration are beneficial to the majority of American people, even if, in the words of the Reagan soundbite, I'm worse off than I was four years ago.  Bad as things are for me, they aren't all that bad.  I'm voting to help the people worse off than I am. 

A lot of people don't see it that way and that's all right.  To paraphrase something from my tradition, we don't have to vote alike to love alike.  A lot of those people are hurt and bruising this morning, the  same way me and my friends were hurt and bruising in 2004.  It's part of our faith, not just as social and religious liberals but as people who care about other people, to be kind to them.  That does not mean we don't point out to them they're wrong because everyone, all the time, needs to give what he and she believes a thorough airing-out, especially after a resounding public defeat.  But it does mean we don't rub their faces in it or taunt them.  It's hard not to do that; I'm already guilty of it myself.  It's a human response to celebrate victory over an opponant especially when that opponant has led you a hard race.  So while we need to get that out of our systems, we can't let it become our sole response to this victory.  We learned something from the way the president responded to his victory, tweeting, not a snide dismissal of the opposition or a glorification of himself, but the words "four more years"--no emphasis--and a photo of he and his wife embracing.  That is what an election ought to be about: embracing one another.  There's a time for celebration--we've earned it--and then there's work. 

If you were on the victors' side, take this opportunity to cheer.  Cheering is good for the lungs.  If you were not, be as gracious in defeat as you would have expected of us.  And then smile, embrace, and get to work.  We have a hell of a lot to do.

freedom means the right to say hurtful things

I've spent a week coming to terms with this subject. all the mishigas that's been thrown at obama since his inauguration--the posters and the comments and rush limbaugh playing "barack the magic negro"--has always struck me as a uniquely american prejudicial reaction to a situation the people making the comments can't deal with. I haven't been unaware of the ratcheting up of conflict between ultraorthodox and the increasingly more secular israeli government. but the almost casual use of neonazi symbology, spoken and visual, is new to me.

if making hitler accusations were only by younger israelis who have only glancing contact with actual victims of nazis, that could be almost understandable, at least from the perspective of terms being used for emotional value. but to shout "nazi!" and use swastikas in a nation where 200,000 holocaust survivors, presumably many of them grandparents and aunts and uncles, goes beyond simple shock value into the arena of oedipal conflict.

but I'm not comfortable either with outlawing their use. doing so is the social equivalent of telling your rebelling teen he can't swear and usually has about the same outcome. I'm not a free speech purist--it's wrong to shout "fire!" in a crowded building even if the place is on fire, and I don't care how much evidence you might have amassed, the world is not run by jews--but I have to agree with the statement on the israeli civil rights website, that "freedom of expression means the right to say difficult things that even might be hurtful." in the u.s. this can mean letting neonazis march in skokie where a lot of holocaust survivors settled after release or letting the phelps family protest at military funerals. the activities aren't comfortable situations and in fact spit in the faces of their targets. similarly, rush limbaugh's calling an otherwise unknown law student a slut should be as allowed as the choice of his advertisers to drop his show. but if freedom of speech means anything it means allowing offensive things to be said (but as seen in the case of limbaugh also means there ought to be consequences). but I don't think the consequences should be legal.

a fully enclosed paranoid universe

crooks and liars has an excellent essay by matt osborne positing that the social conservative right and the religious right have become a single entity, at least as played out in the tea party. he notes they have a creation story, a creed, rituals and sacred words, and other holy articles that mimic fundamentalist belief systems. someone brings up, in the comments, an excellent point regarding the distinction between fundamentalism, evangelicalism, dominionism and "plain old protestantism," and thinks it threatens the foundation of osborne's point, but I don't agree. true, those -isms are rarely more than wary cousins to one another, but as with the tendency of the tea party to ignore the differences between, say, liberals and progressives in order to make their salient points, it's just as fair to elide distinctions between prosperity gospel adherents and premillenial dispensationalists in order to make the larger point that there has been an awkward shift to a new religion of the righteous that is "a fully enclosed paranoid universe where the ice is not melting, the government is too big, and freedom is threatened by change."

do the best things in the worst times

this morning I served pulpit supply--was the guest preacher--at 2 ucc congregations in colby and athens, wi, where I was welcomed and treated well, but I don't expect I'll be asked by either of them to return. the sermon below is what I wrote for them. I was somewhat at a disadvantage since I only had to write a 5-6 page sermon but I didn't have time to do that so I wrote an 8 page sermon that I hacked and slashed down to 6 and a half. this is the result.

Psalms 133 Sermon


“Do the Best Things in the Worst Times”
A Sermon Delivered to The 1st United Church of Christ,
Colby and Athens, Wisconsin, August 14, 2011,

I looked it up and you folks weren't part of the recall election last Tuesday. You missed a great election. I live in the 10th district where there are particularly harsh feelings about our state senator and what she has and hasn’t done for the people of her district in the last decade. We’re gearing up for yet another in other districts next week. In this last election, as elections are wont to do, some people came away happy and many came away angry. That’s as it’s always been. From the perspective of an American voter in the early 21st century, it certainly looks like the country is as divided as it’s ever been, maybe more so than at any time in American history. Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and progressives, these positions are miles apart, aren’t they, seemingly irreconcilable. It’s never been this divisive, we’ve never been as separate before, certainly not in our lifetimes.

Only if “our lifetimes” don’t include the protests against the war in Vietnam when it seemed not a week went by without some violent demonstration, counterdemonstration, the bombings at the University in Madison or the police responses at the Chicago Democratic National Convention and Kent State. We have yet to experience many political conflagrations, certainly not like Norway, for instance, has. And for some of us, “our lifetimes” include the Great Depression, during which them what had went to whatever lengths they felt necessary—up to and including hiring private police forces who infamously used clubs and revolvers and set fires at mines like Ludlow, Lattimer and Columbine—to keep them what hadn’t who were beginning to unionize. And while none of us can count it as happening in “our lifetimes,” certainly today’s divisions are as nothing compared with the period of 1840-1865 when slavery and freedom were such contentious issues the country took up arms against itself to settle the matter.

None of us is immune to the wish-fulfillment of blame. Just the other day I told my wife I’d been thinking that afternoon about leaving her and moving out into the middle of the woods with no phone and no car and no internet and spending my days standing at the end of my driveway and shaking my fist at everyone who passes. She reminded me that if I left her I’d need to take three of our animals and their upkeep would surely cut into my fist-shaking time so I might as well stay home.

Some people blame President Obama for the country’s divisiveness and some people blame Republicans as if somehow one side or the other wants to govern a divided, off-kilter nation. Some blame public religion or the lack of public religions as if churches and synagogues and mosques don’t all have their own schisms and issues going on. Something has left us feeling like there’s something between us, as if there’s, not a wall exactly, but a sense of disconnect. We’re missing one another, walking past each other, even though we’re saying “Hi” and shaking hands, as if the other person somehow isn’t quite there.

The Psalm we read this morning seems almost to comment on this disconnect. “How pleasant it is,” the psalmist writes, “when kindred live together in unity!” Had that been written today I’d suspect the author of sarcasm at the least, dismay at the worst.

Because we don’t live in unity, do we? I mean, well, we might here in this church and even here in this town, but as a state? As a nation? No, sir, not a bit of it. We’re constantly yelling at one another over the radio and the television and the internet—you always know someone doesn’t trust his words WHEN HE TYPES OUT HIS MESSAGE IN ALL CAPS—and sometimes at the family barbecue and at work. Some of us are frustrated because we’re working two and three jobs and some of us because we aren’t even working one. Sometimes it seems the single difference between the uprisings going on this year in some Arab nations or Great Britain and the US is that no one here has thought to start heaving bricks at cops. That may change. After all, this is America, where we have more handguns available than bricks.

But the psalmist isn’t being sarcastic. He or she isn’t being ironic. He or she is quite sincere. How can that be, since the psalmist was living in a wonderful age when everyone was closer to god and thought of god all the time, paid attention to god and followed god’s laws to the best of his or her ability, or at least wasn’t actively fighting god and religion the way some people seem to do now? I'm not a believer in a golden age but think on this. A mere 2 years ago we saw an incredible outpouring of relief and hope—I felt it and I’m certain many of you did too—when Barack Obama, whose campaign slogan was the positive "yes, we can," was elected. We've lost that hope somewhere between then and now. We have moved from the radical notion that "yes, we can" to a politics of "no, you can't."

This is not entirely unexpected but what makes it particularly galling is that, amid the national and local talk of economic feasibility, of cost benefit and entitlement and loss and "what it costs the taxpayers," there is no corresponding talk about human beings. Of sharing. Of helping one another. Of community. We have entered a time and political place when a majority of citizens seem to feel the motto of the US ought to be changed from e pluribus unum, "out of many, one," to meeum habeo, "I got mine."

Has it ever been any different? Well, sure, right there, Psalm 133. That’s certainly a golden moment when everyone was looking out for one another. If only we could resurrect that time, go back to everyone looking out for his neighbor and there wasn’t all this infighting and backstabbing and calling one another names.

As Ernest Hemingway famously wrote, “It’s pretty to think so.” The truth is there’s never any golden time, never a silver or a bronze age as compared with our contemporary lead one when people had one another’s best interests at heart and truly loved their neighbors and had one another uppermost in their thoughts. Scholars don’t know when individual psalms were created or even written down but the book as it comes down to contemporary readers was probably anthologized during the 4th Century BCE, the period after the Babylonian Empire was conquered by the Persians whose king, Xerxes—you may remember him as the villain of the movie 300—allowed the Israelites to return to their homeland and helped in the restoration of the Second Temple. Some of them predate the Babylonian Exile and the destruction of the Temple. The transcriber of 133 is writing at a time when the people of Israel have come together out of a century—for the Jews of the northern kingdom, two centuries—of exile and second-class citizenship in a foreign land. To be sure, not everyone was moved out of what was once Israel and Judah, only the nobility and the most important citizens. Thousands of others were left essentially leaderless and without protection, victimized by anyone who might have happened along with a superior weapon and nothing to lose.

When we think about exile today we think of refugee camps, of malaria and stagnant water and death by diseases easily cured in less-crowded places, and it was like that in those times too. The book of Psalms is divided into several types, the most common of which, you might not be surprised to learn, is the individual lament, the crying out to god for help for oneself. There are also communal laments whose tragedies reflect contemporary experiences in the Sudan and Somalia:

"My days pass away like smoke, and my bones burn like a furnace. My heart is stricken and withered like grass; I am too wasted to eat my bread. Because of my loud groaning my bones cling to my skin…All day long my enemies taunt me; those who deride me use my name for a curse. For I eat ashes like bread, and mingle tears with my drink, because of your indignation and anger; for you have lifted me up and thrown me aside. My days are like an evening shadow; I wither away like grass."

There are also songs or psalms of trust, of individual and communal thanksgiving. “O Lord, my God, I will give thanks to you forever.” There are paeans to divinity and creation, songs of celebration and liturgies, psalms of kingship and royalty and celebrating the lineage of David (many of these were written during the times when Israel and Judah, the northern and southern kingdoms, were kingdoms ruled by David’s descendants). There are psalms celebrating Zion and pilgrimage and there are songs about wisdom. There are songs of immense beauty and trust: “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures; he leads me beside still waters; he restores my soul. He leads me in right paths for his name’s sake.” And there are songs of great cruelty and vengeance: “Happy shall be they who pay [Babylon] back what you have done to us! Happy shall they be who take your babies and dash their brains against the rock!” The Psalms are a repository for nearly every emotion, good and bad, a people in exile felt.

But in 133, subtitled a song of ascent, one which people sung as they made pilgrimage up the hills of Jerusalem, the people are coming together again after being apart for so long and they sing about the pleasure of being with one another as a community and as a people. You must understand, in this time and place, if you had no people and you had no land, and no way to make certain other people recognized those two things, then you were the equivalent of an unbranded steer in 1870s Abilene, Texas. Free to be owned and done with by anyone who took the trouble to acquire you and with no more access to redress than that steer had. It was a blessing to be with one another again. To be one people. To be a single, unified group.

Our Muslim friends and neighbors are currently celebrating Ramadan which takes as its initial offer that, like Gandhi said, we should be the change we want to see in the world—Surah 2: 183 and 185 of the Qur’an reads “O you who believe, fasting is decreed for you, as it was decreed for those before you, that you may attain salvation…Ramadan is the month during which the Quran was revealed, providing guidance for the people, clear teachings, and the statute book. Those of you who witness this month shall fast…GOD wishes for you convenience, not hardship, that you may fulfill your obligations, and to glorify GOD for guiding you, and to express your appreciation”—and adds to it the idea that we should all do it together. This is communal experience at its best, acknowledging the shared hunger for something outside oneself and then coming together to expunge that hunger as a community.

African culture reproaches us to remember, “I am because we are.” Annie Dillard in her book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek reminds us that we have an obligation “to keep the world from falling apart.” To do this we must come together to, as author Richard Gilbert puts it, “do the best things in the worst times.” We do this to bring about what my denomination, Unitarian Universalism, calls the Beloved Community and what Christians call the Kingdom of God.

What is this hard work we should do, what should this community look like? I don’t exactly know and for each of us it might be a little different. E.B. White, author of children’s classics Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little, admitted he woke each morning “torn between the desire to improve the world and the desire to enjoy the world. This,” he notes, “makes it hard to plan the day.”

But this I do know. Take a moment to look to the left of you, and then to the right. Take a moment to smile at the person you see. Take his or her hand. Feel the warmth of their hands, the pulse just fluttering beneath the surface, the strong life that is there. How good it is when we are together. These are the companions you are to do this work with. You will find no better.

people are political animals

aristotle said it 1st but it bears repeating. wherever 2 or more are gathered, so there will be a caucus.

here on the rim we went through another seismic shakeup that wasn't, with a result similar in 1 district to another seismic shakeup-that-wasn't just in april. (I've begun to be asked when voting to provide identification which the state republicans, in a solution in search of a problem, insist will counter voter fraud, but seems to have no impact on actual voter fraud.) the democratic party won 2 seats in the recall--and there is reason to see hope in that--but lost the other 4 by margins that the gop will surely consider an electoral mandate. there will continue to be no compromise on the part of the state ruling group.

I'm not a believer in a golden age. but a mere 2 years ago there was an incredible outpouring of relief and hopefulness when barack obama, a candidate whose campaign slogan was the positive "yes, we can," was elected. we've lost that hope somewhere as we have moved from a political culture of "yes, we can" to a politics of "no, you can't."

this is not entirely unexpected but what makes it particularly galling is that, amid the national and local talk of economic feasibility, of cost benefit and entitlement and loss and "what it costs the taxpayers," there is no corresponding talk about human beings. of sharing. of community. of helping 1 another. we have entered a time and political place when a majority of voters--as opposed to a majority of citizens--feel the motto of the us ought to be changed from e pluribus unum, "out of many, one," to meeum habeo, "I got mine."

decades ago, after I'd graduated from college the 1st time but was still hanging around new paltz, word got around that the student senate had voted to cancel spring weekend. this was a special time for people in the area, a weekend when a major bands were brought in to play free concerts in the rear fields of the campus, a place dubbed "the tripping fields" by grace slick when jefferson airplane and the who played there in 69. it was an incredibly unpopular decision but the senate had good, solid reasons for doing so: every year the senate, which footed the bill from student activity fees, lost money because of injuries, arrests, vandelism to the property and cleanup. I'd attended for years and the place on monday morning looked like parts of britain currently look.

a guy I knew from my time as sports editor, marty, was on the senate and he and a small coterie of senators had spread the word that there should have been public discussion of the decision since it had an impact on a huge number of people. the following week a special session of the senate was held and the meeting, which normally took place in one of the smaller rooms of the student center, opened in the auditorium, which had been outfitted with bleachers and stacking chairs. it was packed, and by the time I got there a half hour before the meeting, it was standing room only.

to call the meeting contentious would be an understatement. it was raucous and loud and the senators tried valiently but in vain to keep the crowd from interrupting proceedings. it soon emerged that the senate was overwhelmingly against footing the bill for a drunken orgy every year.

but the noise and the tumult was democracy in action. soon the senate voted to hold its meeting in executive session, which meant only senators present, a vote that was immensely unpopular with the visitors. marty led the effort to rescind that vote, listening to the hundreds of people who'd come to make comment on the decision. there was 1 guy, I never knew his name, but he was among the loudest and most adamant that spring weekend ought to continue as it had and that he was there to make certain that it did. marty seemed to look on him as an ally in the crowd.

1 by 1 the senators recanted their votes on the executive session and the noise when they reappeared in the auditorium was deafening. 1 by 1 people stood up and addressed the senate and the group and it was obvious that springweekend, whatever the cost, was a popular and extraordinarily well-received tradition. 1 by 1 the senate votes changed until, at about midnight, the vote stood at a plurality of senators in favor of continuing the practice, damn the cost.

the place erupted in applause. and almost immediately emptied out. but the meeting wasn't over yet: there were still a number of issues to consider like a possible rise in student fees to cover the costs, new rules for student organizations, additions to the campus code of conduct and others.

I remember marty standing in the center of the room saying vainly, "stay and have a voice about what to do with these issues too." but everyone swarmed out of the room, and I remember marty addressing the guy he'd seen as his ally and the guy saying, "I got what I wanted." soon, there was no one in the room except the senators and about 12 people, including me, and I left soon after because it was getting late and the bars would close soon.

is anyone to blame?

because I have failed to see these quotes from the actual s&p report in most news media--with the exception of thom hartmann, rachel maddow, and susie madrak at crooks & liars--I think it's important to keep a record of them. the report lays out, quite explicitly, why s&p downgraded the nation's credit rating and the parties it feels are responsible. the emphases are mine. the full report is here.

"We lowered our long-term rating on the U.S. because we believe that the prolonged controversy over raising the statutory debt ceiling and the related fiscal policy debate indicate that further near-term progress containing the growth in public spending, especially on entitlements, or on reaching an agreement on raising revenues is less likely than we previously assumed and will remain a contentious and fitful process...

"Our lowering of the rating was prompted by our view on the rising public
debt burden and our perception of greater policymaking uncertainty, consistent
with our criteria...Nevertheless, we view the U.S. federal government's other economic, external, and monetary credit attributes, which form the basis for the sovereign rating, as broadly unchanged...

"The political brinksmanship of recent months highlights what we see as America's governance and policymaking becoming less stable, less effective, and less predictable than what we previously believed. The statutory debt ceiling and the threat of default have become political bargaining chips in the debate over fiscal policy. Despite this year's wide-ranging debate, in our view, the differences between political parties have proven to be extraordinarily difficult to bridge, and, as we see it, the resulting agreement fell well short of the comprehensive fiscal consolidation program that some proponents had envisaged until quite recently...

"Our opinion is that elected officials remain wary of tackling the structural issues required to effectively address the rising U.S. public debt burden in a manner consistent with a 'AAA' rating and with 'AAA' rated sovereign peers...In our view, the difficulty in framing a consensus on fiscal policy weakens the government's ability to manage public finances and diverts attention from the debate over how to achieve more balanced and dynamic economic growth in an era of fiscal stringency and private-sector deleveraging...A new political consensus might (or might not) emerge after the 2012 elections, but we believe that by then, the government debt burden will likely be higher, the needed medium-term fiscal adjustment potentially greater, and the inflection point on the U.S. population's demographics and other age-related spending drivers closer at hand...

"The [2011 budget control] act [amendment] calls for as much as $2.4 trillion of reductions in expenditure growth over the 10 years through 2021. These cuts will be implemented in two steps: the $917 billion agreed to initially, followed by an additional $1.5 trillion that the newly formed Congressional Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction is supposed to recommend by November 2011. The act contains no measures to raise taxes or otherwise enhance revenues, though the committee could recommend them...

"We view the act's measures as a step toward fiscal consolidation. However, ...[even]
assuming that at least $2.1 trillion of the spending reductions the act envisages are implemented, we maintain our view that the U.S. net general government debt burden (all levels of government combined, excluding liquid financial assets) will likely continue to grow. Under our revised base case fiscal scenario--which we consider to be consistent with a 'AA+' long-term rating and a negative outlook--we now project that net general government debt would rise from an estimated 74% of GDP by the end of 2011 to 79% in 2015 and 85% by 2021. Even the projected 2015 ratio of sovereign indebtedness is high in relation to those of peer credits and, as noted, would continue to rise under the act's revised policy settings...

"Compared with previous projections, our revised base case scenario now
assumes that the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, due to expire by the end of 2012,
remain in place. We have changed our assumption on this because the majority
of Republicans in Congress continue to resist any measure that would raise
revenues, a position we believe Congress reinforced by passing the act..."

also, as a notatall academic exercise, compare this map of nations which retain s&p's aaa+ rating with this map of nations with universal healthcare.

a world of infinite complexity

"I learned, to my surprise, that most of the radical ideas my friends and I were suggesting had already been thought of, considered, analyzed, and had problems in their implementation that we had never dreamed of. I learned to respect many of the men who worked in huge bureaucracies, who limited their own freedom, and who made it possible occassionally for the radical ideas of others to be implemented. I learned that the difficulty with many radical ideas lay in the fact that so many varied interests played a role in government, and that most of them were legitimate interests. it was a big country, and it contained more kinds of people than were dreamed of on the shores of the hudson. I learned, in quite strictly conservative fashion, to develop a certain respect for what was: in a world of infinite complexity, some things had emerged and survived, and if the country was in many ways better than it might be or had been (just as in many ways it was much worse than it might be or would be), then something was owed to its political institutions and organizational structures."

--from "on being deradicalized; or, the confessions of nat glazer" by nathan glazer in the october 1970 issue of commentary; quoted in intellectual skywriting: literary politics and the new york review of books by philip nobile. (emphasis added)

is it evolution if, in 40 years, conservativism's primary message shifts from a 1sthand appreciation for the efforts of government and government workers (glazer, a 50s radical, came to conservatism after having worked in the kennedy administration; as a founder of the public interest, his neoconservative credentials are pretty solid) to a wish to drown them in the bathtub?

the debt ceiling is an anachronism

I'm not terribly up on financial stuff--that's for my wife, who translates financial legalese into moreorless general conversation for a living after all--and although I did spend a semester studying economics before receiving my 1st adjunctship, it's something I'm happy to leave to her gentle mercies. but this explanation of the debt ceiling from a recent new yorker comes heavily recommended by her and it's understandable even to a money neophyte like myself. the lesson I come away from it with is that, like most gun deaths, the debt ceiling is something wholly within our political power to eradicate or at least to seriously curb and it's only lack of willingness or, as surowiecki puts it about ceiling talk regressivenenss, because "the republicans seem to be more willing than the democrats to let the country default" (read: "more willing to accept collateral civilian deaths") that our summer has been wasted with this irrelevent topic. as surowiecki also points out, "when some tea partiers said they wouldn't vote to raise the ceiling under any circumstances, they became irrelevant to the conversation." to our shame and discomfort we did not let them remain so.