Sunday Sermonette: Happy Holidays
We spent Election Night in the home of a dear friend. She’s transgender, liberal, a lawyer, and an excellent hostess. She made a vegetarian lasagna and we brought some snacks. After dinner we settled down to watch the returns come in.
As it grew later and states we thought were would quickly turn blue stayed resolutely “too close to call” or worse, our spirits sank and the light veggie lasagna weighed heavily in the pits of our stomachs. How could we have been so wrong?
I dealt with it by reassuring myself that I lived in a liberal blue state. No matter what happens to ObamaCare, we will still have RomneyCare - it’s been the law in Massachusetts for over ten years. We’ll still have marriage equality - that’s been the law for over 12 years. We live in one of the more liberal enclaves.
We had choir practice on Wednesday night. Getting together with a couple dozen friends to sing always makes me feel better. A couple days later, a friend lit a fire in her back yard pit and invited a bunch of us over to sing old folk songs. We had a couple guitars, a mandolin, and a ukulele between us, some great kale soup, and Tom Paxton’s “Lament for a Lost Election.” It’s pretty simple, you may have heard it. Sing along with me now: “Shit!”
I began to think that we might get through the next four years.
But I was quickly reminded that I’m an financially comfortable old white cis male in a heterosexual marriage. I’m always wearing my big invisible cloak of privilege. I learned that a few of my LGBT friends have already been harassed, right here on the Cape, in what we like to call the big city of Hyannis. Our transgender neighbor who made the lasagna was followed around Home Depot by a couple of unpleasant people making unpleasant comments. The Unindicted Co-Conspirator’s old boss, one of the top lawyers in the country and a dignified Asian-American gentleman, was hassled in a gas station near Boston.
If the newly-emboldened deplorables, the racists and homophobes and xenophobes and misogynists, the so-called “Alt-Right” white supremacists, feel they can vent their hate with impunity here in liberal Massachusetts, what must it be like in redder states? If a wealthy and powerful older man can be the target, what hope do the kids have? At times, this feels like a foreign country, and not one of the nicer ones.
This was the first post-factual election. Facebook and Twitter provided a megaphone for distortions, slander, and outright lies. A truly appalling percentage of what came out of the winning candidate’s mouth or Twitter feed, or spoken by his surrogates, was demonstrably false. By the time you managed to fact-check, assuming you were one of the minority who did, people had moved on to the next outrage.
Many of us atheists know from personal experience how easy it is to be fooled, and how easily we fool ourselves. We know the first casualty is trust in objective facts. We were taught that they were less important than relying on an invisible and ill-defined higher Truth. “Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding,” as it says in Proverbs 3:5. Without facts, we cannot be free. If we accept things as True rather than confirming they are in fact true, then there is no basis to criticize those in power, because Higher Truth always seems to be on their side. “If nothing is true,” wrote Professor Tom Snyder of Yale, “then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.”
It’s going to be a tough four years. For some of us, it’s going to be a tough four days, as we face the prospect of Thanksgiving dinner with triumphal family members steeped the resentful conspiracy theories of Breitbart and Fox. Arguing with relatives is not necessarily speaking truth to power. We’re all going to need kindness to get through this. We all have more that unites us, no matter what the divisive demagogues say.
Although it’s a crass commercial advertisement, I cannot help but enjoy the sentiment of the following.
Happy holidays!
As it grew later and states we thought were would quickly turn blue stayed resolutely “too close to call” or worse, our spirits sank and the light veggie lasagna weighed heavily in the pits of our stomachs. How could we have been so wrong?
I dealt with it by reassuring myself that I lived in a liberal blue state. No matter what happens to ObamaCare, we will still have RomneyCare - it’s been the law in Massachusetts for over ten years. We’ll still have marriage equality - that’s been the law for over 12 years. We live in one of the more liberal enclaves.
We had choir practice on Wednesday night. Getting together with a couple dozen friends to sing always makes me feel better. A couple days later, a friend lit a fire in her back yard pit and invited a bunch of us over to sing old folk songs. We had a couple guitars, a mandolin, and a ukulele between us, some great kale soup, and Tom Paxton’s “Lament for a Lost Election.” It’s pretty simple, you may have heard it. Sing along with me now: “Shit!”
I began to think that we might get through the next four years.
But I was quickly reminded that I’m an financially comfortable old white cis male in a heterosexual marriage. I’m always wearing my big invisible cloak of privilege. I learned that a few of my LGBT friends have already been harassed, right here on the Cape, in what we like to call the big city of Hyannis. Our transgender neighbor who made the lasagna was followed around Home Depot by a couple of unpleasant people making unpleasant comments. The Unindicted Co-Conspirator’s old boss, one of the top lawyers in the country and a dignified Asian-American gentleman, was hassled in a gas station near Boston.
If the newly-emboldened deplorables, the racists and homophobes and xenophobes and misogynists, the so-called “Alt-Right” white supremacists, feel they can vent their hate with impunity here in liberal Massachusetts, what must it be like in redder states? If a wealthy and powerful older man can be the target, what hope do the kids have? At times, this feels like a foreign country, and not one of the nicer ones.
This was the first post-factual election. Facebook and Twitter provided a megaphone for distortions, slander, and outright lies. A truly appalling percentage of what came out of the winning candidate’s mouth or Twitter feed, or spoken by his surrogates, was demonstrably false. By the time you managed to fact-check, assuming you were one of the minority who did, people had moved on to the next outrage.
Many of us atheists know from personal experience how easy it is to be fooled, and how easily we fool ourselves. We know the first casualty is trust in objective facts. We were taught that they were less important than relying on an invisible and ill-defined higher Truth. “Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding,” as it says in Proverbs 3:5. Without facts, we cannot be free. If we accept things as True rather than confirming they are in fact true, then there is no basis to criticize those in power, because Higher Truth always seems to be on their side. “If nothing is true,” wrote Professor Tom Snyder of Yale, “then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.”
It’s going to be a tough four years. For some of us, it’s going to be a tough four days, as we face the prospect of Thanksgiving dinner with triumphal family members steeped the resentful conspiracy theories of Breitbart and Fox. Arguing with relatives is not necessarily speaking truth to power. We’re all going to need kindness to get through this. We all have more that unites us, no matter what the divisive demagogues say.
Although it’s a crass commercial advertisement, I cannot help but enjoy the sentiment of the following.
Click to viewHappy holidays!