a service at First Parish in Billerica
, Massachusetts
November 29, 2020
Reading
From “Who Will We Be Without Trump?” by New York Times columnist Frank Bruni.
A friend was all worked up about the possibility of Trump 2024.
“I can’t go through this again!” she cried. But what I heard was that she couldn’t stop going through this. Her contempt for Donald Trump is too finely honed at this point, too essential a part of her psyche. Who would she be — conversationally, politically — without it?
Another friend sent me an email in which he’d worked out the economics of a web-only Trump news channel of the kind that Trump may — or may not — start. With minimal investment, Trump could rake in millions and millions!
We were supposed to be breathing a huge sigh of relief about Joe Biden’s victory. But instead he was finding a fresh source of outrage about Trump.
And here I am writing about Trump — again. It’s a tic, not one I’m proud of. But I’m surrendering to it now to acknowledge that I can’t continue doing so. None of us can. …
On Jan. 20 — praise be! — his presidency will be over. But his hold on us may not end as quickly and cleanly. And his departure from the White House will be more disorienting than some of us realize, posing its own challenges: for Democrats, for news organizations, for anyone who has grown accustomed over these past four years to an apocalyptic churn of events and emotions. …
I … worry that in the wake of Trump’s presidency, which both reflected and intensified the furious pitch of American politics, melodrama may be the new normal. I worry that while Americans are exhausted by it, we’re also habituated to it; that we’ll manufacture it where it doesn’t exist … [and] I worry that my worry is part of the problem.
Sermon
Back in the 90s, my wife Deb was battling breast cancer. I think I’ve told that story here before, so I won’t go into a lot of detail. But for months at a time, I was worried that she might die.
It never got to the point where I expected her to die in the next few days, but she was also never entirely in the clear. Surgery is always risky. And when high-dose chemotherapy had wiped out her immune system, I knew that any infection could proceed pretty quickly. And of course there were constant tests, any one of which might tell us that things had taken a bad turn. Treatment went on for a very intense nine months.
And then it was over. Microscopic cancer colonies might still be in there somewhere, the doctors told us, but maybe not. Come back in six months.
So she was home. She went back to work. We saw our friends, went to restaurants, took vacations. We could make plans now and not worry so much about needing to cancel them. Life could be more or less normal. Though we continued to be nervous, we were relieved, and happy that things were working out so well.
But we also didn’t know what to do with ourselves. For most of a year, we had lived with a sense of desperate intensity, constantly afraid that terrible news was coming, constantly worried that we might make some wrong decision and only later discover its horrible consequences.
And then that intensity was gone, and we had to recalibrate all our standards. Now, “bad news” meant that the movie we wanted to see was sold out. A “bad decision” meant buying the wrong pair of shoes, or misjudging rush hour traffic and being late. That comparative triviality took some getting used to.
Soldiers back from war often report something similar. Suddenly, “screwing up” doesn’t mean somebody is going to die. It just means that you’ve burned dinner, or that the project due Friday won’t get done until Monday. It can be hard to adjust, hard to take seriously the drastically smaller ups and downs of your new life.
In 2011, a New York Times reporter interviewed soldiers returning from Afghanistan and noted the difficulty of “dialing back the hypervigilance that served them well in combat.” A sergeant told the reporter: “The hardest part for me, I guess, is not being on edge.”
People who escape dysfunctional social relationships are often drawn back in. Abused spouses go back to their abusers, ex-members of cults return to the fold, and so on. Bad as they can be, those relationships are intense. Everything that happens in them feels terribly important. Healthier relationships -- where conflict still happens, but shouting and crying are rare, and no one ever winds up in the emergency room -- can seem flat by comparison.
You may wonder where I’m going with this.
Almost a month ago, we had an election. By a margin of more than six million votes, we told Donald Trump to pack his bags. It’s over. At noon on January 20th, he’ll be gone from the White House. There’s a counter on the internet that will tell you to the second just how much longer we have to wait.
When I signed up to do this service, I didn’t know how the election would come out. So I had several possible sermon topics in mind.
If Trump had gotten re-elected, I was planning to do a keep-the-faith talk, about how to maintain hope and endure four more years of a government so hostile to Unitarian Universalist values.
Another possibility was the Great Blue Wave — not just a new president, but a new Congress open to the kind of structural change American democracy needs. That outcome called for a visionary talk. Instead of tinkering around the edges of the status quo, let’s sit down with a blank sheet of paper and think about what we really want for this country.
What actually happened was somewhere in between. In some sense, the Great Blue Wave did roll in. Turnout was enormous, and Joe Biden got more votes than any presidential candidate in American history, over 80 million.
And yet, the turnout on the other side was also impressive. Trump’s losing campaign netted 74 million votes, which is millions more than Barack Obama got in his 2008 landslide, and 11 million more than Trump himself got in 2016. Unless Democrats sweep the runoffs in Georgia, Mitch McConnell will retain control of the Senate, and Nancy Pelosi’s majority in the House will be smaller, not larger. So if there was a Blue Wave, a lot of the red power structure survived it.
To me, the shock of this election was those 74 million Trump voters. I could almost understand people who voted for him the first time: Maybe they didn’t like Hillary Clinton. Maybe they believed that a businessman could run the government more efficiently. Maybe they were just generally frustrated and thought, “What the hell? He’ll shake things up. How bad can he be?”
But by now we’ve had four years to answer that question. We’ve seen Covid kill a quarter million of our fellow Americans. We’ve seen our nation inflict pointless cruelty on helpless people who come to our border looking for asylum — including separating families and then deporting the parents without giving their children back. In hundreds of cases, we’ve even lost the connection between them. We could find Osama bin Laden, but somehow we can’t find these kids’ parents.
We’ve seen the Justice Department protect allies of the President who commit crimes, and heard him demand that the attorney general arrest his rivals based on conspiracy theories rather than evidence. We’ve seen unprecedented levels of corruption, including millions of dollars of government money flowing into the President’s businesses. We’ve heard no apologies from him when mass shooters repeat his rhetoric to justify slaughtering Hispanics or Jews.
And after all that, 74 million Americans got their ballots and said, “That’s good. I want four years more.” I found that not just surprising, but unsettling. And for a week or so I thought this talk would focus on that issue: How can I come to terms with what the election has demonstrated about my fellow citizens? Because for UUs this is more than just a political challenge. It goes to the heart of our religion.
Our Unitarian principles commit us to democratic process. But democracy has to mean more than just majority rule. Real democracy involves forming a common vision of ourselves as a people, respecting one another, and developing some common core of facts on which to base our national conversation. When either party says to the other “We outnumber you, so we’re just going to vote you down” that isn’t the kind of democracy we’re looking for. So when President-elect Biden talks about healing America by reaching across the partisan divide, he’s speaking our language.
At a more personal level, our Universalist values tell us that no one is irredeemable. No one should be written off as unworthy of consideration. No matter how many times a person refuses to see the light as we see it, or to recognize what seem to us to be undeniable facts, we can’t stop trying to communicate or trying to understand.
And that’s a challenge right now, because our efforts to understand or communicate meet with so little reciprocity. Monday, Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson suggested a reading list for conservatives who want to understand “the opaque and inscrutable Joe Biden voter”. He was, of course, making fun of the mainstream media’s four-year long effort to understand white working-class Trump voters.
After 2016, he writes, “Reporters and researchers swarmed what seemed like every bereft factory town in the industrial Midwest, every hill and hollow of Appalachia, every windswept farming community throughout the Great Plains. I’m pretty sure television crews did, in fact, bring us reports from every single diner in the contiguous United States — at least, those where at least one regular patron wears overalls.”
“Logically, then, we should put aside those dog-eared copies of J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy and subject ‘the Biden voter’ to the same kind of microscopic scrutiny. Venture out of your bubble, Trump supporters, and try to understand how most of America thinks.”
Robinson was writing tongue-in-cheek, of course, because he knows that project will never be undertaken. Fox News reporters are not going to hang out at black barber shops in Detroit, or interview white suburban UUs to find out why so many church-going professionals voted against what regular Fox viewers must see as our self-interest.
The situation is quite the opposite, in fact. A popular slogan on Trump campaign merchandise, one repeated at rallies by Don Jr. himself, was “Make Liberals Cry Again”. For many on that side, our distress and disappointment is not an unfortunate byproduct of achieving their positive vision for America. It’s a goal in itself. Making us cry is something to celebrate. How should we respond to that?
I thought that theme might make a good talk, one that I probably need to write even more than you need to hear. I still think so, and maybe it will happen someday. But try as I might to assemble that talk, the voice of inspiration just wouldn’t speak to me; I couldn’t make it come together. And that was my first clue that maybe I was skipping over an important step in the process. Maybe the healing of America needs to start somewhere else.
My second clue came from the post-election media coverage. Ordinarily, when an opposition party wins the White House, the president-elect and the new administration instantly become the center of all attention. Who’s going to be the chief of staff? Who’s going to be in the cabinet? What's the first issue on their new agenda?
Usually, it’s like the Eagles sang: “There’s a new kid in town. Everybody’s talking about the new kid in town.”
But not this time. And like Frank Bruni, I find that I am part of that phenomenon. I write a weekly politics blog, and week after week, even after it became clear that Trump had lost, it’s been hard to talk about anybody else: Why won’t he concede? Would he ever let the Biden transition begin? What’s going on with all those absurd lawsuits? And with his calls to local election officials and Republican legislators in states Biden won? Why is he replacing the leadership in the Pentagon? Is he staging a coup? Can it possibly work? Who’s he going to pardon? Will he try to pardon himself? Will he resign so that Pence can pardon him? On and on and on.
But wait. Isn’t there a new kid in town? Of course there is. And he’s doing the kinds of things presidents-elect typically do. For example, he quickly rolled out his team to deal with our most pressing problem: the pandemic.
But by the standards of the last four years, that event was missing a certain pizzazz. His team was all doctors and public health experts. Not a quack or a charlatan in the bunch. Not even somebody from Biden’s family.
And what did those well-qualified experts tell us to do? Stuff we’d already heard: wear a mask, wash your hands, stay out of crowds. There’s a vaccine coming, and it’s going to work, but it’s not going to be a miracle. Distributing it will be an enormous logistical problem that takes months. They’re going to do the best they can.
Then Biden got up there and repeated the same things. He didn’t promise the virus was going to go away by magic. He didn’t offer us a miracle cure or suggest that we inject bleach. He didn’t yield the podium to the My Pillow guy or some other campaign donor with something crazy to say.
That’s news, I guess. But what can I write about that will grab my readers’ attention? And more important: What am I supposed to feel? If government becomes sane and sensible, where’s my next jolt of adrenaline going to come from?
Eventually it dawned on me: For five years now, pretty much since he came down the escalator in 2015, I’ve been in an abusive relationship with Donald Trump.
Day after day, I have approached my news sources by armoring myself against attack. I have expected that each day I will somehow be insulted or threatened by my President. Or he will do or say something that will make me feel ashamed of the country I love and want to take pride in. In my name, he will attack the environment or harm innocent people or involve me in some other sin that I can never make right.
I came to expect that again and again, he would abuse his power in some way I didn’t see coming, because I had taken the norms of American democracy for granted. I had imagined that somehow the laws and the Constitution would enforce themselves, without any human process that could be disrupted or ignored.
Day after day I would think, “He can’t do that” only to realize that yes, he can. He can set up concentration camps on our border. He can create a masked federal police force and unleash it on the streets of cities where the mayor and the governor don’t want it. He can slow down the Post Office to keep mail-in ballots from arriving in time to be counted. He can threaten to take federal emergency money away from states whose governors aren’t nice enough to him, and foreign aid away from countries that refuse to do him political favors. He can trade pardons for the silence of his co-conspirators. He can shrug off responsibility when his supporters mail pipe bombs to his critics or plot to kidnap the governor of Michigan.
Yes he can.
And because I have so often failed to anticipate what he can do, I have lived for years with a constant sense of dread. What else haven’t I thought of?
That’s what has made his attempts to overturn the election results so riveting. I didn’t see how it could possibly work. But what if I was missing something? What if I was taking for granted some boundary that he could just step over, as he has stepped over so many others?
So for years, I have lived with unrelenting feelings of fear and outrage and shame. An alarm bell has been constantly ringing in my head, telling me that I need to do something, but I don’t know what.
It has been a difficult, terrible four years. But at the same time, it has also been very, very intense.
So after all this, can I really just go back to normal? Or have I gotten, in Frank Bruni’s words, habituated to melodrama. Do I need that regular jolt of adrenaline? If there is no daily outrage, where will my sense of mission come from? What happens to the dragonslayers after the dragon is gone?
On a more mundane level: What’s going to happen to my blog when my readers realize that they don’t need to watch politics as closely as they’ve been doing? When they realize that they can let down their guard for weeks at a time, trusting that the administration will do more-or-less the right thing most of the time? What am I going to write about when the drama of the rise of fascism is replaced by the day-to-day slog of good government?
What we’ve been seeing from the Biden transition these last few weeks is what normal governance is supposed to look like: Presidents choose qualified people, who then say and do sensible things. But watching a well-run government closely is an acquired taste. It’s not the kind of circus we’ve gotten used to.
So it’s a real question: What am I going to do after January 20th, when my emotions are my own again? When my buttons are not repeatedly being pushed? When I am not constantly being trolled? When I can approach the news every morning without already knowing how it’s going to make me feel?
On the one hand, that sounds wonderful. And I believe that eventually it will be wonderful, in more ways than I currently appreciate. That ongoing abuse has probably done me more damage than I realize. And defending myself against it probably has been weighing me down more than I knew.
But on the other hand, experience tells me that this adjustment is going to be a harder than it looks. The psychological wear and tear of the last four years isn’t going to repair itself instantly on Inauguration Day.
President-elect Biden is totally right when he says that America needs to heal its partisan divide. And as a UU, I hope that someday soon I’ll be ready to pitch in and work on that project. But I’m not there yet, and I’m not going to pretend that I am. Before there can be healing between people, I think there needs to be some healing within people.
People like me.
At least that’s where I intend to start.
