Can We “Accept” or “Get Over” Trump?

Last night I watched the film Wind River. A wildlife officer and hunter counsels Martin, whose 18 year old daughter has been raped and killed. The wildlife officer had lost his daughter to a similar fate. He says that a grief counselor had told him:

"I got good news and bad news. Bad news is you'll never be the same. You'll never be whole. Ever. What was taken from you can't be replaced. You're daughter's gone. Now the good news, as soon as you accept that, as soon as you let yourself suffer, allow yourself to grieve, You'll be able to visit her in your mind, and remember all the joy she gave you. All the love she knew. Right now, you don't even have that, do you? That's what not accepting this will rob from you. If you shy from the pain of it, then you rob yourself of every memory of her, my friend. Every one. From her first step to her last smile. You'll kill 'em all. Take the pain, Take the pain, Martin. It's the only way to keep her with you.”

The day after Thanksgiving Donald Trump re-tweeted advice from two black women in Milwaukee. Diamond and Silk are among his supporters and recommend that if anyone wanted to fight about Trump at Thanksgiving dinner,“He is your president. Deal with it. Or get over it. Build yourself a little bridge and climb up and get over it,”

I heard this on the radio and at first I couldn’t find it on the web. I wanted to know how to "get over" Trump. Searching for the story I stumbled on advice from psychologists and spiritual directors on how to “get over” the loss of a lover or the death of a loved one. Their advice all centered on acceptance, although I didn’t think that the advice was as good as what I heard in Wind River.

Christine Hassler was the first such counselor of my search. She advises us to accept our losses and if we cannot do that, it is because “we are still judging what happened.... Until you accept what happened with zero judgment of it being bad or wrong in any way, you continue to keep it alive inside you. What happened, happened. It’s in the past. Your judgments about it continue to keep it present and impact your future.... Let go of your opinions and victim stories – they are not serving you. As you do, you empower yourself to free yourself of anything you may have been carrying around like a heavy backpack. Take off the backpack so that you are free to fully embrace all the great stuff that is available to you in the here and now.”

Seems like good advice, but there is a difference between a loss that happens once and one that continues on and on. Trump daily assaults us with bluster, lies, and decisions reversing decades of efforts to make life better for millions of Americans. This is a loss that is “unacceptable,” as Charles Blow reminds us. If we accept these losses, if we accept Trump as our president (who lost the popular vote and won by a quirk in three states), we will have surrendered who and what we are and whatever truth there is in our national life. We can’t “get over” or “accept” the loss of democracy and government that exchanges the desire "to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity,” for the agrandizement of corporate billionaires and those who think they must ally with them.

John Pavlovitz, a Christian minister, writes I Think I Hate This President—and I Think I’m Okay With That. John struggles not to hate anyone as he had been taught, but then lists all of things and people he loves, opposed by Trump. So he hates what is hateful. “And because of the deep love that I have for this country, for its Constitution, and for it’s beautifully radiant diversity—yes, I hate this President. I hate what he and those alongside him are doing to good, loving, decent human beings who call this place home, and I’m going to keep hating such things because that is simply the other side of caring for the least. Silence in the face of oppression isn’t love it’s compliance, it’s participation. Opposing it is how I show who and what I am for. Hatred of injustice is a redemptive way of loving people most threatened by it.” Our anger is righteous.

We have already lost a lot. Long standing values and practices have been trashed. Parts of our government are gone or dissolving, so that we are unrepresented in important parts of the world and unprotected from those who advance themselves and even provide jobs by polluting our water and air and earth. Many aspects of representative democracy are crumbling. We have many reasons to fear unintended consequences of actions being taken that no sensible person would consider.

Acceptance as surrender will not do, but we must find a way to find peace within ourselves while we resist. We can “get over” Trump by surpassing and transcending his every word and action with good, letting nothing go by, letting no one think that he is normal or acceptable. When we have done that, we can claim peace for ourselves, at least until we must rise in resistance again, perhaps tomorrow.

We must accept the reality of our losses, and absorb the pain of it all, but this is not the case of accepting the death of someone who will never return. We will see reason return because the seeds of destruction lie within everything Trump and the Congress are now doing. But the dangers are real. Is it possible that those who lived in Nazi Germany thought it best to "accept" and "get over" Hitler? Resistance is good. 

Trump likes to enrage us by his tweets and by his every stupefying statement, so don't bother listening to him. Just keep an eye on the analysis and reviews of the policies and votes that come from the swamp they have created. Share the good ones. Yeah, he tweets that stuff. Yeah, he says stupid and outrageous things. So what? We resist and we fight for justice and a better day. Remind yourself and others what we love, which is why we resist and do not "accept."

Our Veterans' Day Band Concert -- Hearing the Gettysburg Address Again for the First Time

Two things redeemed our Veterans’ Day concert by the Lake George Community Band from the deep, dark well of false patriotism and militarism into which we easily could have fallen.

First was a contemporary composition from 2003 commissioned by the NM Military Institute Regimental Bands of Roswell, NM. Each Time you Tell Their Story is a reading accompanied by concert band by Samuel R. Hazo:

No soldiers choose to die. It's what they risk being who and where they are. It's what they dare while saving someone else whose life means suddenly as much to them as theirs. Or more. To honor them, why speak of duty or the will of governments? Think first of love each time you tell their story. It gives their sacrifice a name and takes from war its glory.

This seemed a new way to express patriotism. Sacrifice is still the theme, but loss and grief are given larger status.

Second, we played a concert band piece which I assumed was old, but was published in 2009, was Lincoln at Gettysburg, a simple music setting for the great address. Lincoln’s speech seemed eerily current, and important for today because of the thoughts expressed about our nation, our values, and the internal war that continues to consume us. The first line is striking:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Liberty is claimed by all sides of current disputes, and oddly, we are more divided today than recently about the equality of people. Jefferson had not explicitly included colored slaves, native Americans, or Spanish residents of the thirteen colonies, and few who heard or read the Declaration of Independence would have thought of them. But when Lincoln was speaking of “all men” he was thinking of Negro slaves. Today when we hear “all men” most all of us hear it to be inclusive of women, gays and lesbians, transgendered people, as well as those of other races, ethnic backgrounds, and religions. That tells us how much we have changed! But Lincoln went on:

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.

Yes we are so engaged, and while we are not yet again killing each other, our hold on liberties and equality are being challenged and tested. This reading seemed so modern and not of history but of today.

Lincoln was asked to dedicate a great burial ground, which still reeked of human putrefaction at the time of the speeches, four months after the battle. But Lincoln declined to glorify the dead or the battle they fought, instead saying that the dead had dedicated the field themselves.

It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

This speaks of my America, which is not about the worship of guns, the revival of racial nationalism and the flag of the Confederacy, the acceptance of misogyny and sexual harassment, the increasing distance between not only rich and poor, but rich and the middle-class, the stupefying incompetence and false values of our Congress and Senate, and a man in the White House, unelected by the popular will of the people, who frightens children and makes women cry. All these things make us wonder if the deaths at Gettysburg were in vain.

Other works the band performed in addition to standard marches, included one that honored the death in battle of one of the first soldiers to die in Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003. I quote Walter Cronkite who explained once, that

Two forces drive war: National pride and human loss.  The first starts wars. The second sustains them. The first casualty creates an investment in blood that retreat would seem to dishonor.

No one wants to be first to die in a war, few will admit that a war was wrong when someone they loved died in it. and as John Kerry told Congress about the war in Vietnam, that no one wants to be the last soldier to die in a war.

My question is, "How can we glorify in any way the death of soldiers in a war so ill-conceived and false as our war in Iraq?" Is there a way to write music to express shame and regret? Composers today seem more inclined to express the power and destruction of war, and the loss of loved, real people.

The issue becomes political, because many went to fight in Iraq not for oil or even glory, but in revenge for 9/11. Revenge is famously unrewarding. We are more inclined to music that is inspiring, invigorating, exuberant, solemn and hymn-like, with emotional lyric lines, and crashing cymbals, with a lively and defiant finish. These are the words publishers used to describe the compositions we played for Veterans’ Day.

The problem of military music partly lies with the music publishers and the music education establishment. All protest music from the ‘60's has disappeared from the publishers’ lists. Patriotism and militarism sell. Remembrance and the hope of glory sell. The bands can draw crowds of veterans. Politicians applaud and give funds for music programs. Veterans organizations give money to community bands who agree to honor them! The military loves the assistance in recruiting new, young soldiers, who will be veterans soon enough, or among those honored fallen. And the music is written for other purposes: to provide music for a certain "grade" of performance, to provide examples and "studies" requiring difficult or unusual instrument fingerings and rhythms, to cut another notch on a composer's conducting baton and resume.

The sister of a bandmate won’t attend our concerts because she believes such music and performances glorify war. I agree. Those who attend are inspired and encouraged to feel that they now “support our troops.” Government policy is forgotten or never to be thought about. Martial music makes you want to march, but someone else tells you in what direction to go.

Don’t Politicize Veterans’ Day!

Betty Little, our NY Dist. 45 State Senator , spoke Nov. 3 at a breakfast event honoring our veterans, sponsored by the Glens Falls Senior Center. She was the first speaker and in her first few minutes, she commented on how good it was to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, how important the flag is, and how protests surrounding the flag and the National Anthem are wrong.

I reacted so angrily that I left the event because I hadn’t understood until that moment how an issue becomes politicized and how twisted our national life has become. Politicization takes something that belongs to everyone and divides us by suggesting that the issue belongs to one political view or party. Politicians love to speak to and for veterans because the appeal is emotional, because so many of us have personal ties to one or more of the 380,000 who died in battle or from battle injuries since 1941. Mostly veterans are attractive to politicians because they constitute 22% of our population, a sizable voting bloc.

But Americans who have served or died in war included Republicans, Democrats, and Socialists, Christians, Jews, Muslims, and atheists, and were of all colors. Such service and losses are not political. We hope that our soldiers fought and died for liberty and justice for all, for the values in our Constitution, including our freedom to protest against every sort of injustice. Our first amendment protects dissent and protest against our nation, flag, anthem and pledge. To be against protest is to be against freedom of speech, and threatens our democracy with tyranny.

Citizens tend to support politicians in time of war, even when our national response to world problems with military solutions is unwise. Patriotism is love of country and pride in our values and many accomplishments, which mostly are not military. Criticism of the NFL and other protesters may gain a politician some votes, but not honestly. Senator Little is entitled to her views about the flag and the NFL, but they have nothing to do with honoring veterans.

Since the Vietnam War and Richard Nixon, the Republican party has claimed that opposing the use of military force for any purpose, is to oppose the United States and be against all who serve and have served. This has always been a lie. To want our nation to have a just and rational foreign policy is the highest kind of patriotism. Instead, we have had too much patriotism of the sort that encourages military service in support of bad policy, profiteering, and political gain.

Some in the military understand this, perhaps better than those of us who do not serve. A few years ago I heard the head of a local American Legion unit say, “Americans are willing to serve, but we want the cause to be just and the use of the military sensible.”

Once we enter a war, we cannot easily get out, so that wars perpetuate themselves. Walter Cronkite explained this once: “Two forces drive war: National pride and human loss.  The first starts wars. The second sustains them. The first casualty creates an investment in blood that retreat would seem to dishonor.” Few will admit that a war was wrong when someone they loved died in it.

(A portion of this post was sent to The Chronicle, a weekly newspaper in Glens Falls NY.)

Are We Still Friends If We Fight? – A Sermon

I Corinthians 13 and Luke 6:27-36

OOPS
When I told my wife what I was preaching on this week, 
she called me a hypocrite.
She is right, the first thing I need to say is 
that I am not filled with love for my enemies.
Love for those beyond my family 
       is not something I can claim much; 
I can only aspire to it.
I think I can explain some of my difficulty.

I have two stories I would like to tell.
That’s how we are supposed to spice up a sermon, 
        with stories from real life.
Unfortunately, I asked my preacher friends on the internet
whether it is ethical to tell stories about real people, 
even if you don’t name them, or if they live miles away.
I was told by several people not to do it without their permission.
They are probably right, so I pulled a whole page from this sermon.

The stories were about disputes I had with two different people;
Each one of them accused people of a different nationality 
of being less than worthy of our respect.
Each dispute was about politics.
In the first one I responded badly.
I did better in the second.

UGH
I’ll bet most of you could tell similar stories.
My life isn’t the only one that has been made difficult 
by our political and social divisions.
Maybe yours has been, too.
I am not saying anything you don’t know,
about how divided people are from each other.
Many people report losing friends in the past year 
        because of political differences.

Family disputes have risen, too.
Fear of this year’s Thanksgiving dinner has risen
because in too many families there is someone 
who is going to say something 
        that causes others to explode in anger.

It isn’t just families; it’s churches, too.
We might think that Christians would all see the world 
        in similar ways, and share the same values, but it is not so.
There is not one church of Jesus. 
Churches are as fractured as political parties.
Churches don’t have the membership or influence they once had.
And all the other institutions in society are declining 
        or changing drastically 
from what they used to be in our lifetimes.

Each of us is influenced more and more
by values we adopt from sources other than the church.
Our values have changed.
In 201l, the Public Religion Research Institutes asked in a poll 
whether elected officials "could fulfill their public duties 
if they committed immoral acts in their private lives.” 
61% of white evangelical Protestants said "no.”
In October of 2016, PRRI repeated the poll. 
This time, only 20% said immoral personal acts 
disqualified a politician from public office.

AHA
What is going on? My friend says we have different worldviews.
A dictionary tells me that 
“A worldview is the set of beliefs 
about the fundamental nature of Reality.
  These beliefs ground and influence 
all our perceiving, thinking, knowing, and doing. 
  Our worldview is our philosophy, mindset, set of values,
                outlook on life, ideology, faith, or even religion.”

So Worldview is about values, many of them grounded in religion.
Jesus and Paul taught values.
Here they are in our readings today.
To be a Christian is to value love so highly 
that we are asked to love our enemies.
We are asked to be generous and forgiving, welcoming, patient, 
and compassionate, and many other good things.
  
WHEE
The last time I was here, as everyone remembers really well (!),
I spoke of values and how they are key to understanding God.
I said God is whatever lies behind or underneath or above 
our deep symbols and values.
That’s pretty abstract, but this thought is carried to an extreme 
in the Bible itself, in the 1st letter of John, where we read that 
“God is love.”
Such a statement invites us to say then that “love is God,” 
although the Bible won’t go that far, 
        and the church hasn’t either, but recently some of us have. 

If we have been in a Christian church for very long,
we have learned the golden rule, 
included in the passage from Luke this morning: 
“Do to others as you would have them do to you.”

What is the street version, the cynical version of this teaching,
[“Do to others before they do to you.”]
What is the cynical idea of what “golden rule” means:
[“Whoever has the gold, rules.”]
These alternative rules tell us how the world really works:
Helping others doesn’t help you get ahead.
Thinking of others first just puts you behind.
These rules imply that Jesus is a wimp.
      His teachings are for losers.
The value here is not love, but survival, and dominance.
The way to survival and dominance here 
      is not the value of giving, but greed.
The goal here is not compassion, but competition.
The values underlying competition are animosity, 
even meanness, and cruelty, if they are necessary to get ahead.

Note that the famous love chapter extols love, 
but does not tell us what it is.
Instead it tells what love is not.
These things are not included in love: 
envy, boasting, arrogance or bluster, 
rudeness or making a scene, 
insisting on our own way, 
being irritable or throwing fits, 
resentfulness or negativity, and injustice.

So what are the opposite, positive values which are preferable?
I looked up the antonym, the opposite of each word.
They are: Charitableness, peacefulness, humility, and patience, 
kindness, positivity, and doing justice.
These are the positive values that make up "love."

Many church members have told me over the years 
that their favorite verse in the Bible is Micah 6:8:
“He has told you, O mortal, what is good;
    and what does the Lord require of you
  but to do justice, and to love kindness,
  and to walk humbly with your God?”

We were supposed to learn such things in Sunday School,
or hear them in Sunday sermons, 
        enough for them to inspire us.
But we seem to be learning from Jesus or God less 
than from other role models.

YEAH
So how do we deal with family and friends, and co-workers?
When someone says something shocking to you –
it might be prejudice against another group of people.
it might be contrary to what you think 
                are good Christian values.
It might be a different political opinion than you hold.

The first thing is to be silent. I did not do this.
Only thinking about afterward can I say: Stop and think. 
Maybe count to ten.
Do not respond from the emotional region of your brain.
Respond calmly and without raising your voice.

You might say “I disagree with you on that.”
Or, “I don’t believe that.”

Maybe the best thing to say is “Tell me why you think that.”
Or, “How does that make our lives better.”

If the fight occurs anyway, 
follow the advice in the letter to the Ephesians,
“Do not let the sun set on your anger.”
That was my rule always, when I was a pastor.
Apologize for your part of the dispute.
Saying you are sorry is not a sign of weakness.
Apologies tend to make us gain respect and strength.
But apologies have to be real:
 “I’m sorry if you were offended” is not an apology.

Another helpful strategy is to turn the conversation to something
the two of you have in common, and build from that.

Or to say “I value you as a friend, 
        and I don’t want to fight with you.”
This gives permission to the other person to back off, too.
Or respond to the other person’s need as I did last week:
“Tell me about your shoulder pain. 
          I had shoulder surgery last March.”
In that case we both talked at length about 
        what had happened to us, 
we found that he knew my doctor,
and wanted to know about the doctor that did my surgery.

Am I going to do better in such situations in the future?
Maybe, but maybe not.
I have studied conflict management in at least three, heavy courses.
I have a fair track record at managing groups 
and working with congregations in conflict.
One on one is a different matter. 
A large group is easier.
Christians can learn to fight fair in a group.
But the risk that one party of two will leave 
and break the bond between them is huge.

Even the possibility of losing friends 
        isn’t the biggest problem before us.
My friend says we should agree to disagree.
I do not like that.
It means that there is an ocean of topics and important issues 
that we cannot talk about with each other.

If friends cannot speak about issues facing the entire nation,
there can be no genuine representative democracy,
which requires citizen participation, 
                not only in the voting booth,
but in dialogue with each other.
The ancient Greeks and Romans devised ways to do that.
But worked for them only for a short period of human history.

If we cannot have difficult conversations in our churches,
that will be the end of the teaching of Christian values.
BTW, Congress voted recently in their budget bill (not yet passed)
to end IRS enforcement of the rule 
that prevents churches from preaching politics 
and raising money for political causes.
  If you don’t like that, write your Congressman and Senators.

So I am working up courage to open a conversation with a friend
about something that we both care about 
                but about which we disagree.
We cannot continue in this country 
                to ignore the great issues of our time
by only speaking of them with those with whom we agree.

I’ll bet there are issues that cannot be spoken of 
        in your congregation.
Too sensitive, too difficult, too controversial.

I would like to think that there is hope in returning 
        to the basic values we learned from the Bible and the church.
Do you think there is hope?
And will you do something about it?


May we all strive for the highest kind of love,
in which we do for others what we would want, 
Even when we do not want to do it for the other.