Always forgive your enemies nothing annoys them so much. Oscar Wilde
I suppose I’ll have to add the force of gravity to my list of enemies. Lemony Snicket
Prodigious birth of love it is to me, That I must love a loathed enemy. William Shakespeare
The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because generally they are the same people. G.K. Chesterton
I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: Oh Lord, make my enemies ridiculous. And God granted it. Voltaire
Let’s have a toast. To the incompetence of our enemies. Holly Black
If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man’s life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Dear All,
This post is going to be on the “short but sweet end.” There are many lessons to be learned from this electoral season , including how far we all have fallen down the shaft of greed, indifference, grievance, enmity and ignorance. With so much political rhetoric seeking to tear us down and exploit divisions beyond what any evidence would suggest, it is time for us to hold our society and our responsibilities to it in a better light, beginning with the thoughtful casting of ballots over the next week or so.
However, you come down on the political spectrum, and this here is not my business, there are at least two core duties which I feel are my business and which we all need to keep in mind.
The first is to reject the notion that our country is so dysfunctional, so ridden with corruption, fear and hatred, that only a singular politician (or group thereof) can save us. That this is a claim made largely by a rapidly aging former president is certainly to be noted, but it is also a notion which is now baked into our political infrastructure of many stripes, a virtual credo of our unresponsive bureaucracies and elected officials who act as though they’ve been issued an American Express card with such privileges that the metal in which these cards of privilege are made of has yet to be invented.
We have messes to clean up to be sure, but we have also allowed the fog of personal and political grievance to seep into our private domains, allowing for the indulgence of more fear, more hostility, more indifference to pain and violence than is good for any of us. And rather than welcoming and sharing the sun that burns off the fog, too many of our churches have magnified the grievance, have given succor to some of our worst instincts, those which Jesus and indeed all the world’s great religious figures came to highlight and then to offer another path. I can only speak for my own tradition here, but I am constantly at practical odds with a growing number of “Christians” who have blinded themselves to the complexities of our collective souls, who have as well meandered so far from the teachings of Jesus that they now actually find such teachings quaint or naïve, apparently not what the God of Leviticus had in mind for “His” most ardent followers.
And this leads me to the second point, which in many ways merely flows from the first. In this political campaign, we have found precious little counterpoint to the more strategic, competent indulgence of enemies and expanding enemies lists which are ridiculous at one level but also an increasingly dangerous component of the social fabric we are now weaving. People we only know well enough to hate. People we fear as though the world were little more at present than a minefield full of the sorts of “horrible” folks not like us who increasingly populate our movie screens and social media feeds. Indeed, more and more of us seem convinced that the world offers little but scary people and scary movies, a world where your best options are to tend to your own business and vote for people who claim to be “tough enough” to keep the monsters at bay.
But as we know, fear and its co-pilot anxiety are the raw materials for societies whose best features are increasingly closeted. Not a shining city on a hill but a dark dungeon filled with potential enemies we don’t know, don’t want to know, and don’t have a shred of sympathy for. Not a model for the world but a country caught up in the muck of competition among political adversaries who have become acceptable, even desirable, depending on political proclivities. Not a beacon of freedom and opportunity for all but only for some, only for those who can buy their way to political influence without ever having to put themselves in front of a voting public, perhaps also for those who look like the “nice” folks we are, not the folks who invoke anger and discrimination in our often-unexamined selves.
Let us not delude ourselves: These legacies are likely going to be with us regardless of the electoral outcome in just a few days. We are likely in too deep to just walk away from electoral outcomes as though this one was just like the others. But we must cast our vote, we must encourage others to do likewise, and then we must all do our next part to clean up the messes our votes have failed to address, including enmity at the ready to deliver a package we surely don’t want and likely don’t even remember ordering.
I have heard people I generally respect talking about leaving the country in case their candidate is not elected. That is a choice I will not be making. This is the country of my birth, the country that many of my relatives fought and died alongside so many others to preserve. It is also the country that other countries in this world need to be better and do better, to at least project the value of equality, maturity, fairness and generosity even if these and others of their ilk are now more elusive and in shorter supply than we might wish.
We have work to do before election day. We have more work to do afterwards. Please stay the course.
gapwblog 