I remember when presidential campaigns officially began on Labor Day. Networking and fund-raising began much earlier, but politics didn’t dominate our world all year, every year.
For much of our history, politics was a short-term, part-time job. My state legislature met every two years and legislators were paid per diem to cover travel expenses. How quaint!
Now, politics is full-time work and full-time fund-raising. Politicians and the public are exhausted In the wake of 24/7 news, social media, and Citizens United.
My grandfather watched Saturday baseball on TV. Ads were mostly political or pet-related. Pop often dozed. A loud commercial woke him. He said, “Politics and dog ticks,” then dozed off again.
My late mother, born on June 22, 1924, was the third of seven children. She graduated from high school a month before her 16th birthday and began working at the local telephone company in Jellico, Tennessee. The switchboard was on the second floor of a downtown business. When working overnight, her sister (7 years younger) was sent by their mom to spend the night at the phone company–security in numbers, apparently. By 20, my Mom was married and working (with my Dad) on the Manhattan Project at Oak Ridge. By 26, she was a full-time mom. She re-entered the work force at 33 when I entered first grade. She was a natural leader and one of my best teachers.
A poignant Heather Cox Richardson post about Julia Ward Howe (1819-1910) in Letters from an American made me appreciate my Mom more. Howe was the fourth of seven children. She bore six children and in 1870 launched Mothers’ Day as part of the women’s suffrage movement, 38 years before Anna Jarvis began Mother’s Day to honor her mother. To honor my Mom as her 100th birthday approaches, I’m moving the apostrophe. From now on, for me it’s Mothers’ Day. Planet Earth needs more women leaders. Society has too much testosterone and not enough estrogen. It’s killing us, literally. This is how Richardson closed last night’s installment of Letters from an American:
(Howe) threw herself into the struggle for women’s suffrage, understanding that in order to create a more just and peaceful society, women must take up their rightful place as equal participants in American politics.
While we celebratethe modern version of Mother’s Day on May 12, in this momentous year of 2024 it’s worth remembering the original Mothers’ Day and Julia Ward Howe’s conviction that women must have the same rights as men, and that they must make their voices heard.
From “Meeting My Muse: A Switchboard Operators Story,” (an interview with Carol Bartle of the Tacoma Pioneer Telephone Museum), by Julia Levy, April 29, 2022, The Switchboard (Substack)
In 1940, a paper by Harvard senior John Kennedy was published as Why England Slept. I thought of JFK’s sobering title when our son Rob forwarded a Time article, “If He Wins,” by Eric Cortellessa, who interviewed the former and would-be president and some of his close collaborators.
Donald Trump’s Republican Party–win or lose–will inflict great damage on America in 2024. As I read Cortrellessa’s description of Trump’s intentions, I began humming a new version of Aretha Franklin’s RESPECT, substituting the main objective of a second Trump term: REVENGE.
Trump’s litmus test for appointees will be whether they affirm Trump’s lie that he won in 2020:
Policy groups are creating a government-in-waiting full of true believers. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 has drawn up plans for legislation and Executive Orders as it trains prospective personnel for a second Trump term. The Center for Renewing America, led by Russell Vought, Trump’s former director of the Office of Management and Budget, is dedicated to disempowering the so-called administrative state, the collection of bureaucrats with the power to control everything from drug-safety determinations to the contents of school lunches. The America First Policy Institute is a research haven of pro-Trump right-wing populists. America First Legal, led by Trump’s immigration adviser Stephen Miller, is mounting court battles against the Biden Administration.
After several months at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station and a swing for some hiking through Tazmania, our son Cully stopped to visit on his way home to Maine. Tazmania helped him re-orient to the sights and scents of Fall. An occasional re-orientation helps us move beyond ideology.
William Barr isn’t there yet. When Kaitlan Collins asked why he will vote for Donald Trump, Barr said, “I think the real threat to democracy is the progressive movement and the Biden administration.”
Justice Samuel Alito seems enamored with making sweeping ideological policy rather than focusing on the specific case before the court, opining that the immunity case can be “one for the ages.”
Our son Rob sent this YouTube link to a poignant 30-second political ad reflecting the impact of recent ideologically-driven state legislation regarding reproduction.
Dartmouth College’s approach to the conflict between Hamas and Israel was the “Last Minute” segment on last night’s Sixty Minutes. Bill Whitaker concluded the segment with, “American education might benefit from a few more Dartmouths.”
Tyranny of the Urgent was a 1967 InterVarsity Press booklet by Charles Hummel. Among the urgent issues before us in 2024, the sad embrace of religious nationalism by evangelical Christianity helps me understand a variety of related issues. Diana Butler Bass helps me understand the insidious temptations of religious nationalism and its impact behind many of today’s headlines.
Bass is a long-time observer of the influence of right-wing politicians over evangelical Christianity. She has a strong presence on YouTube. She’s written eleven books. Her posts from The Cottage are available at Substack. A January 25, 2024 post replies to: “I don’t understand how Christians, especially evangelicals, can support Donald Trump. I don’t understand any of this.”
… I am a Christian (even though that label is more than a bit awkward these days) and I write from that perspective, with a generous heart toward wisdom wherever it is found. The “creed” that guides me most closely aligns with these 1,000 year old words from the mystical poet Ibn Arabi:
There was a time I would reject those who were not of my faith. But now, my heart has grown capable of taking on all forms. It is a pasture for gazelles, An abbey for monks. A table for the Torah, Kaaba for the pilgrim. My religion is love. Whichever the route love’s caravan shall take, That shall be the path of my faith.
Or, in the simple words of Jesus: “Love God, and love your neighbor as yourself.”
Technology helps me adapt an ancient faith rhythm–an early focus for the day, which I consider prayer, a consciousness that seeks to embrace all reality within the realm of self-transcending grace.
A cup of coffee accompanies Substack emails of the day, sent overnight from several trusted sources: Heather Cox Richardson, Robert Hubbell, and Joyce Vance. Then follows a daily meditation (also emailed overnight) from Richard Rohr’s Center for Action and Contemplation.
Yesterday, a second cup of coffee was accompanied by a Diana Butler Bass newsletter (which comes twice weekly via Substack email). Her passion is the history of religion and she always moves me deeper into a realm of consciousness that for me is a realm of prayer.
Bass knows evangelical Christianity’s foray into religious nationalism. (More about her on Friday.) Yesterday, Bass covered an evangelical battle among Congressional Republicans.
Earth Day began 54 years ago in 1970. Heather Cox Richardson captures its historical context in her “Letters from an American” post for today, which notes the bi-partisan beginning of the environmental movement, facilitated by President Richard M. Nixon:
In February 1970, President Nixon sent to Congress a special message “on environmental quality.” “[W]e…have too casually and too long abused our natural environment,” he wrote. “The time has come when we can wait no longer to repair the damage already done, and to establish new criteria to guide us in the future.”
Richardson closed her post with a quote from President Joe Biden, who encouraged “all Americans to reflect on the need to protect our precious planet; to heed the call to combat our climate and biodiversity crises while growing the economy; and to keep working for a healthier, safer, more equitable future for all.”
Professor Ron Robel (1934-2007) asked why I was a prospective History major. I said, “American history.” He replied, “Oh, how tragic!” Robel’s passion was Asian history. Later, I switched to Political Science, but if I had known someone like Heather Cox Richardson, I would have stayed the course.
As a white kid in Alabama, I was “protected” from much of American history. Ron DeSantis isn’t the first politician seeking to sanitize history. Richardson reveals that I have much to learn. Good historians can help us avoid a collective amnesia that is harmful, and can be fatal, to a society.
Richardson’s April 12, 2024 installment of “Letters from an American” describes the context of South Carolina’s April 12, 1861 attack on the US installation at Fort Sumter. Leaders of both South and North underestimated their opponents’ determination, which led to 620,000 deaths. One excerpt:
Southern white elites celebrated the idea of a new nation, one they dominated, convinced that the despised Yankees would never fight. “So far as civil war is concerned,” one Atlanta newspaper wrote in January 1861, “we have no fears of that in Atlanta.” White southerners boasted that “a lady’s thimble will hold all the blood that will be shed” in establishing a new nation.
The General Conference of the United Methodist Church will gather in Charlotte, North Carolina from April 23 through May 3. On April 10, UM News published an 11-minute video preview of General Conference by journalist Heather Hahn, a multi-media news reporter for UM News..
Hahn is a graduate of Austin College in Sherman, Texas and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism (1998). From 2000-2009, Hahn worked for two newspapers in Louisiana and Arkansas, for one year as editor of the Arkansas United Methodist Newspaper, and since 2010 she has worked for United Methodist Communications in Nashville, Tennessee (the parent of UM News).
For 14 years, Hahn has provided exemplary coverage of the complex, controversial events leading to the upcoming General Conference. No one has a clearer understanding of the issues. No one has been as consistently fair and honest about those issues. Hahn’s 11-minute video and transcript are available here: “General Conference recap: Homosexuality debate.”
Good Friday! This day on the Christian calendar connects us with everyone and everything–a fleeting moment on a small planet that one day will be no more in the vast evolution of the Universe. It offers meaning and hope for all creatures and all things everywhere.
Good Friday recalls the suffering and death of Jesus–a transformative event of searing pain. We’ve all been there in one way or another. Mike Harper said, “Everyone gets a turn.” Ted Runyon said, “The uniqueness of Jesus is his universality. Everyone suffers.”
Today, we are with Buddhists on a way out of suffering through suffering. We are with Muslims on the fast of Ramadan who see hungry children. We are with Jews on Yom Kippur who ponder the mystery of undeserved atonement that underlies all grace.
Today, we remember a singular person’s long-ago suffering that provides a context for, and a universal link with, all who suffer in general and with each one who suffers in particular–a sobering, yet mysteriously hopeful, reminder that we’re in this together.
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