Me and My Vote - v

This has gone on far too long, but I've never really thought about it chronologically, so I hope you'll bear with me as the story unwinds. 

After graduation, I went home. The Vietnam War was raging, university campuses had been shut down all over the country, and while all of that dissent concerned me and continued to interest me, it didn't include me personally now. I was out. I was 4-F. I was not going to be drafted. 'Nam wouldn't have been an option even if I wanted it to be. 

I'd graduated. I had a college degree, was licensed to teach, but I hadn't looked for a job that spring because the matter of the draft made planning difficult--not impossible, but difficult. Furthermore, I was trained to teach in a Christian high school, but at that point in my life I had no desire whatsoever to teach in a Christian school.

I grew up in what remained of a tribe, an ethnic and religious family I didn't know existed until I showed up on the campus of one of its educational institutions. I was Dutch Reformed, or Dutch Calvinist. When I first arrived on the campus, I don't think I knew that. Regardless, in 1970, the officialdom of that tribe--the ruling council--was made up of sober conservatives (think the Dutch Masters on cigar boxes) who ruled the roost and had no time for long hair, beads, and Beetles, thought all of that counter-cultural stuff not only "animalistic" (as Professsor Magoo maintained), but "anti-normative," a tribal word that meant, roughly, conduct not only unbecoming and unwise, but a kind of violation of the laws of God.

A few contrary minds had begun to appear, a few faculty voices that began to question the stiff Republicanism the powers-that-be simply determined to be the true scriptural, biblical, and thus "Christian" way. Those voices began to question whether there wasn't more involved in political thinking at that point in our national saga than the ancient "divine right" theory, which argued that God himself had chosen Richard Nixon to be President, a fact which made dissent apostate. Needless to say, those profs were the ones to whom I lent my favor.

But I went home after graduation, alienated from the tribe, jobless, without even a smidgeon of sense about my future, no girlfriend--I'd got dear-John-ed even without courtesy of a letter. I went home because there was nowhere else to go. 

My political views were alien to my parents', who never really stepped out of line from the staunch conservatism that had long roots in the sandy lakeshore soil,  within its churches especially. My alienation occasionally led to quarreling, but no slammed doors. Even back then, I would have said I had good parents--they were, in my estimation, as blind as so many others to what was going on in the streets all around.

Almost immediately, I took a job with the crew putting in the new interstate between Milwaukee and Green Bay, I-43. I worked with the gang that put down sod on the string of overpasses between, say, Belgium and Sheboygan. It was the hardest work I'd ever done in my life. All day long we'd cut and roll sod balls from some river banks west of the lakeshore, truck them all back to the unpaved highway, then unload and lug them up the steep sides of overpasses and underpasses, nothing but soft dirt under our feet, straight up hill or down. Made good money, but sometimes I'd get home, after six, walk to the side of the house, get out the hose, sit in the grass, hose myself off, then stay there, just lie there, every last muscle in my body moaning. 

When we worked up toward Sheboygan, the boss told me I was welcome to stay with them as they moved farther and farther north, but I'd spent too many nights so tired I couldn't sleep, over-tired, if that makes sense. But, hey!--I was a teacher.

Someone, somewhere told me, I'm sure, about the Milwaukee Journal's classified ads, which included teacher openings across the state.  I'd done very well as a student teacher. Kids liked me--I didn't know they would, but they did. A couple days after my stint had begun, the cooperating teacher simply up and left for Montana, told me--and I assume his administration--that his brother was ill. The plain fact of the matter is, as impossible as this might sound, my cooperating teacher never once saw me in his classroom. 

When I went to him after the five-week stint and reminded him that he'd never been in my classroom, he smiled gingerly. He was--and I knew it--a master teacher my students both respected and loved. Shelp, his name was, and theater was his forte. "I know what kind of teacher you are," he told me when we talked, "because my students tell me." I got an A.  

Mid-July I applied for jobs and interviewed three places--one "up north" in Wisconsin--I don't remember the town. Another was St. John's Military Academy, in Delafield, an interesting place, but I didn't think it would be a good fit for either my politics or my tribal history. I wasn't offered the job, and that was just fine.

The third place that looked over my papers was a rural school in far southwest Wisconsin, a place called Blackhawk, in a tiny burg named South Wayne, pretty much straight east of Dubuque. I knew nothing about the place. I had never been anywhere near that corner of the state, but I knew small-town America and I assumed I could get along in rural Wisconsin. I was just four years out of my own small-town public high school. 

The superintendent did all the hiring, told me he liked my credentials--I could teach English, coach basketball, and do the high school drama.  I fit their needs. When he said that, I had no idea what he was saying would be absolutely impossible to accomplish by a first-year teacher. During my interview, I never met any other teacher or even the principal of the high school, but the two of us--his name was Batchelor, I remember--did just fine until late in the conversation. 

"Says here on one of your recommendations that you've shown yourself to be given to some radical views," he told me. 

I had no idea some prof had said that, but I wasn't totally surprised. Those recommendations were written for Christian school administrators, not supers at public schools. 

"Care to explain?" he said.

I told him I'd gone to a very religious school (he'd never heard of Dordt), a place that didn't like its students drinking beer. 

Now consider: I was interviewing for a job in a Wisconsin high school, where lots of students were from local dairies or family-run cheese factories. Beer drinking was as everyday as deer hunting. South Wayne had only one eatery--a local pub. If I needed to stay in town between coaching frosh basketball and practicing the play, I ate there. That the new teacher at the high school sat up at the bar and had a frozen pizza and a PBR was no big deal in South Wayne in 1970. Not only that, the district was less than an hour from Madison, where the university had been shut down by sometimes destructive anti-war protest. 

"What it means to tell you," I told him, "is that I've been known to drink beer and talk openly about it."

He didn't believe me.

"Seriously," I said. "I didn't always abide by the rules of the college, politically either."

I'm sure he would have had more doubts about an applicant who was a teetotal-er than he did about me. 

I got the job.

Sunday Morning Meds--Wrath

“Who knows the power of your anger? 

 For your wrath is as great as the fear that is due you.” Psalm 90:11

I’m going to go to make a generalization I’ve no right to. One of the good things about aging is that, through the years, we simply grow less angry—Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau, and Grumpy Old Men notwithstanding. Old bucks like me simply have less testosterone to work with, less dignity to protect, less turf to maintain—thus, fewer reasons to boil over.

When so many things recede the way they do as we get older, quarrelsomeness is a possibility—I’ll grant you that. Our aging means fewer people notice us—again, my perception. But that doesn’t make me mad, just bad-tempered. Being peevish isn’t necessarily being wrathful.

Maybe I’m wrong.

Last night I was mad. Last night, I used language I shouldn’t have, even to my daughter, who didn’t have it coming, who had nothing to do with why I was boiling over. Last night—memorably, I might add—I was spitting fire.

This morning I could still throw flames; in fact, I just sent out an e-mail I probably shouldn’t have. But I’ve calmed down a bit now, a bit; and having that rare chunk of lava-rage at arm’s length this morning is helpful when reading this strange verse from Psalm 90. It’s helpful because normally it’s easy for me to get a little embarrassed by the OT’s occasionally draconian Jehovah. I find it hard to know him, maybe in part because, old as I am, I don’t know all that much anymore about rage. Wrath isn’t the deadly sin I register all that often.

But I did last night. And the provocation, basically, was injured pride—I was convinced that certain people didn’t respect me. But even that explanation is subterfuge, half truth. What blew my cork was that I didn’t get my way. We’d worked our duffs off, but the whole project shipwrecked because someone in authority thought maybe someone else might be hurt. Honestly, the whole story is not worth a story.

But my wrath is worth a story when I think about this line from the venerable 90th Psalm. Here’s what I’m thinking: maybe the OT God isn’t a far cry from who I am. If I read the whole Exodus narrative, it seems that what God wants more than anything is not to be an also-ran. In the panoply of gods available to the Israelites, he doesn’t want to be just another graven image.

“Who should I say this God is?” Moses—the writer here—asks of this God. “I am the always,” he says. End of story. And if he isn’t respected—when people create golden calves of whatever size and extremity—this God, Jehovah, spits and fumes and, often enough, people die. He’s like me that way. Sort of. I’m human. He’s not. And, nobody died last night.

Oddly enough, maybe I don’t think of God as human enough. If I were him and people didn’t really give me the dignity I’d deserved, I’d be mad—like I was last night. Maybe all that anger—it’s behind me now—maybe even all that blasted wrath is helpful. You think you got dissed?—just think of Him. And on a daily basis. Shoot, hourly. Starting right here—with me.

And that’s only half of it, this verse says. That’s not even the whole story. Your wrath is everything we can imagine, Lord—that’s what Moses says.

And a great deal more.

Me and My Vote - iv

With no more than a month left in my college education, the national draft lottery now behind all of us--February 17 was chosen 187th--and a selective service physical coming up soon, I woke up on one of the first days of May, 1970, to NPR news and listened as some commentator said that a young anti-war protestor, Sam Brown, who I knew was from Iowa, was sounding the call for college students from around the country to come to Washington D. C. for a huge protest. Four Kent State students had been shot dead, at least two of them nothing more or less than spectators. Seemed to me almost to be war, right there on campus.

It was a news items, not an advertisement, but something in me determined right then and there, that I had to go. I was a college student, I had openly declared myself to be anti-war, I'd let it be known I considered President Nixon's expansion of the war into Cambodia and Laos to be evil, and I was really tired of being so far out of the mainstream of dissent and protest. I'd even tried to drum up some support against the war.

I don't remember how I got hooked up with the two guys who also determined to go, but I believe we all worked on the student newspaper. One of them I really didn't know at all, the other a former roommate, was something of delightful eccentric but someone I knew shared my politics. We decided to take my ex-roommate's VW bug on a 20-hour trip out east, with stops in Chicago and somewhere in Pennsylvania, where the ex-roomie had friends, and then be there, in D. C., to join this massive protest arising in response to the murder of those four Kent State students.

The experience itself was not what I thought it might be. I wrote an article--a long one--in the college newspaper describing how alien it felt to be there, which was something of a surprise since I'd told myself that I'd feel very much more at home surrounded by war protestors than I had with all the war hawks on the Dordt campus. There was a ton of weed being smoked, lots of bell-bottoms, no end to the long hair, and, for the most part, no bras. Protestors skinny-dipped in the tidal pools, and everywhere, everywhere, there were people, a hundred thousand, I remember. I'd never been in a crowd of 100 thousand people, never have since. Somehow, to me, the whole thing seemed more of a party, a bacchanal, than a real, ardent protest. My Calvinism was showing.

I was, just then, the catcher on the Dordt College baseball team, and we weren't half-bad. My going to Washington meant my missing a double-header on Saturday; so before I left, I knew I'd have to tell the coach, a man I knew certainly did not share my politics. So I told him. He tried to talk me out of it, then realized it wasn't going to happen. He said he'd have to consider what my place on the team might be when I'd return, and I assured him that I understood that, and I was willing to accept any punishment he might give me. I suppose, in some ways, symbolically at least, that little meeting outside the library was the moment in my life when sports descended from the prominence they once maintained. 

After we returned, he told me I could rejoin the team. He said--I'd heard the story myself from my teammates before we'd talked--that he'd taken the question to my teammates, explained my deep desire to join this big national protest, told them I'd come to him and indicated my willingness to be off the team if that what he wanted. He then had them vote--up or down, for or against Schaap's reinstatement behind the plate. They voted up. Still makes me giggle. 

For more than fifty years I've smiled about that. The great war protest of my life cost me a double-header against a baseball team I can't name. But my teammates, most of whom, I'm sure, didn't share my politics, gave me the courage of my youthful and idealistic convictions.

Just two weeks later, some guy in uniform told me to pull my pants on because I was going home. I'd been in line for my military physical, but at that moment I was out of the draft, out of the service. My weird heart was a condition the Army didn't care to treat in Vietnam rice patties, and I didn't have to make a decision that kept me up nights back then, whether to take up arms in a war I opposed, or get myself safely over the border north, to Canada. 

I'd put off hunting for a teaching job because I had no idea what might come of my life after college graduation, the draft looming. Once the military was now solidly behind me, and after a Dordt College graduation ceremony, I was out, out of everything--out of baseball, out of college, out of employment.

The night before graduation a bunch of us went out to a dance club, as I remember, where we had a few drinks, nothing awful. Somehow--I don't remember how--we ended up in the women's dorm, where every last room, it seemed, even in the darkness, I couldn't help seeing sheets and pillow cases in a bundle outside the door. I never felt quite so alone. I had a diploma, but nothing more--no girlfriend, no job, no design for a future.

But I knew that what I'd experienced in that final semester of college life, not to mention by the way of the Presidency of Richard Nixon, Tricky Dick, I knew that I had chosen to take up arms with the Democrats.   

Me and My Vote - iii

I didn't intend for this to be so long, but it's now running on its own fumes. I wanted merely to explain how it is to live here in one of the darkest, red-est counties in the country, a place where I vote consistently Democratic. I'm working on a memoir to have available should my great-grandchildren, somewhere down the line, ever want to find out more about that odd ancestor. 

Honestly, I wish I knew much more about my own great-grandparents, what they dreamed of, what they thought. A couple of years ago, I determined to create something almost quilt-like--a collection of arranged stories, blog posts, cuttings from novels, meditations, and essays of mine that, when gathered, would explain something to those as yet-to-be progeny, should they care to know, how it was this ancient of theirs lived, what he thought and why. 

If you're sticking with it, thanks. I'll try to corral the monster sooner rather than later. Meanwhile, there's more to say.

___________________________ 

The little man who taught what we called "Ref Doc" (Reformed Doctrine) was a vet who'd been a chaplain in Europe during the war, among the forces who suddenly and unintentionally walked into a concentration camp and witnessed, first-hand, the greatest horror of the 20th century. I didn't know that about him at the time; I wish I had. I'm quite sure I wouldn't have made fun of him, as college students so regularly do, and we did. 

In my own defense, he earned some derision because he seemed so clearly out of his element and absent from his time. He was a little Magoo-type, who had trouble keeping track of himself and the blessed portable public address system he lugged every day to class, a mike and a speaker that generally squawked horribly or didn't work at all. 

I don't remember much at all about Ref Doc class, but I will never forget Magoo got going on a subject he called "sphere sovereignty," a feature of the kind of Dutch Calvinism that the college considered its very own theological foundation. While I can't begin to remember exactly what he said, I have never forgotten the direction, something to this effect: every "office" --which is to say every station in life, every calling or vocation--exists in its own special separate sphere of influence. 

I wasn't listening too closely. I sat next to a gorgeous dark-haired beauty who occasionally spent class time writing her boyfriend in 'Nam, a guy, oddly enough, I would eventually get to know as a PTSD-scarred roommate, who'd spent a year in lousy jungle war and was in no shape to start life anew in an uptight and upright Dutch community. Strangely enough, that dark-haired beauty and I celebrated our 50th anniversary just last summer. 

That future none of us could have imagined in 1968. What sphere sovereignty meant to argue, Magoo said, is that if you sell hardware or teach French or work as an engineer, you shouldn't somehow abridge the calling of our dominie, your preacher, because sphere sovereignty argues that within your sphere you're sovereign, as long as you stay in your station.

Then came his version of the application thereof. Preachers have no place on the streets. It was 1968. The country was coming apart. All over the nation, colleges were closing up rather than face students who called general strikes and stopped going to class all over. There was violence, too, more than a little. 

I knew exactly where he was going--and that's why I payed attention. Preachers who take to the streets to encourage lawlessness and protest have abandoned their calling which is, of course, to lead sinners to the Lord. That's what this old, wonderful anachronism was arguing and that's exactly where he went. He never mentioned Martin Luther King, but he didn't have to. He and I both knew who he was blasting. 

I spoke up. It was in all likelihood the only comment I made in that class the whole semester, and he was taken aback when I adamantly disagreed. He was so stoutly engaged by the virtue of his own argument that it likely never dawned upon him that this kid--what was his name again?--spouted off on the misrule of the day in a nation coming apart at the seams. 

To my mind, then and now, the man was woefully out of touch. He was dead wrong. He hadn't seen a black couple, right in front of him, get turned away from a room at a flophouse on Daytona Beach because of their race; hadn't been at a beach dance when LBJ announced he wouldn't be running again for President; hadn't watched drunken red necks on the Gulf coast celebrate the death of Martin Luther King. 

It was still 1968, the year Nixon blew Hubert Humphrey away in a Presidential election as great of a landslide as Goldwater had suffered in 1964. I wasn't old enough to vote, but after Chicago's Democratic Convention that year--I watched it happen on TV--I knew very well I would have been a loser.

Even more, I came to feel as if I was missing something, something of vital importance to a world my college education did its best to make me shun. Something was askew, in the country, in my education, and in me.  

For better or for worse, when I watched the Chicago Convention, I knew I wasn't on the side of the National Guard. I was on the side of the hippies.

Strawberry fields forever. 

Me and my vote - ii

How ruby-red was the Siouxland world in which I was living back then? Red red, bloody red red. If any of my profs were Democrats, they certainly wouldn't have dared to say it aloud because Demos were known to be soft on communism. Dems wanted to turn America into a welfare state; they were determined to mute "liberty" with social programs that would take America down the road to Marxist communist. 

It might have been understood that our heading south to Florida that spring break would be to canvas for some mission project or, at best, witness for Jesus to all those sex-mad kids on Florida beaches. In fact, right there in the First Sioux Center bank, one of the guys, withdrawing cash for the trip, lied to the teller, told her, straight-faced, that's what we were going to do, pass out tracts on the beach. All the way to Sioux City we laughed about that.

We were going to be witnessing all right, but, in me at least, what we would be witnessing altered whatever was still there of my dad's old ways. One night, on Daytona Beach, when we were just a few faces in a mob of spring breakers, some guy interrupted the music and announced a news flash breaking right then. "LBJ is out," he screamed into the mike. "LBJ won't run." The place screamed with joy. I was in another world.

LBJ was a Democrat, thus Dad would have despised him. But, even though I never asked him about it, I'm sure that night he shook his head at the news because he would have been--for sure--absolutely and fundamentally, against this country's pulling out of Vietnam. We were fighting godless communism over there, not on a whim but instead because if we didn't fight in those rice paddies, soon enough the war would come New York, then Chicago, then Milwaukee, and then it would be right there on the lakeshore, coming up Superior Avenue to take the home Dad built after the war.

We left South Florida and followed the Gulf coast into the panhandle and then across into bayou country, on our way to New Orleans, hardly a place for Calvinist kids, which is why we went. We drove all night--a '63 Chev, black, with a good radio that blasted the news that night--big news. Martin Luther King was shot dead in Memphis, shot while he was speaking from the balcony floor of a motel. In bayou country,we went through towns where red lights screamed out trouble, all the while radio stations kept track of which inner cities were burning up.

We stopped, early, for some breakfast, and in a scene I wrote just a decade or so after, ate pancakes cooked up by a black cook we saw through a window behind the counter, while a half-dozen rednecks, lots of trouble, partied with their own whiskey and played songs with lyrics like none I'd ever heard before., virulently racist songs.

I can't speak for anyone of the other guys who went on that trip to sunny Florida, but when I came back Iowa, I was someone other than the someone I had been, even though I didn't know it yet.

I had been writing a bit for the college newspaper back then, sharing a column with another guy--I've forgotten the title. That column became an opportunity to be truthful about what was going on in me, what changes I'd witnessed in the larger world and to shape my own still-forming identity. When things I'd say in a column didn't sit well with the administrative powers-that-be, or the student body, I'd hear about it. The truth is, I grew to like blowback. What I learned in the college semesters that followed was not that the pen was mightier than the sword, but that the pen could well be formidable, and not just air rifle either. What I wrote got reactions, wasn't just blowin' in the wind. 

No one reason will ever explain how it is that Mom and Dad's boy, the baby of the family, became a writer--or a Democrat. But 1968 in my life, as well as the life of the nation, was without a doubt, a classroom, an institution really, all its own.

Me and My Vote - i

In November of 1964, I was firmly under wing of my dad's politics. I don't remember Mom talking much politics. I don't know that she had a view of the senior senator from Arizona, but she was conservative Republican in the same way she was Christian Reformed. It was somewhere aboard her DNA. I know my dad appreciated the most famous line from that summer's Republican convention--how did that go again? "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice." Dad liked Goldwater. I liked Goldwater. While Dad didn't attend John Birch Society meetings, he was certainly of that stamp.

I don't remember feeling the sting of the 1964 Presidential wipeout, and the membership card up above makes clear that remained at least somewhat thoughtfully Republican. Still, what's evident from the note sitting here on my scanner is that I never sent it in. 

That may have been laziness, because I can't help but think that I was as conservative as the day is long back then, as conservative as Dad. The only restraint he felt, I know, was the restraint he saw and experienced in a good friend from right across the alley, a soft-spoken man, greatly respected, who went, at the time, rather full-bore over the edge, even Birch Society (I went along once). The neighbor became a recruiter. That he was more than a breaker overboard didn't suit my dad. Some governor in his political system told him going whole hog was over the top--and he didn't. I'd love to ask him why. My guess is he was more of a conservative than a political conservative-- an everything-in-moderation conservative. 

That was mid-Sixties. It's apparent from the unsubmitted form up top that I was "political," something I inherited from Dad, who would eat breakfast with me at the little bar built between the kitchen and the dining room, while the Today show, with Dave Garraway (and sometimes his pet monkey) would entertain. The Today Show, back then, was no extravaganza, but it spent a good deal of time with "the news." Thusly, I inherited my dad's addictions: we were both news junkies. 

I don't have a Republican party receipt for 1966 (the one I have is 1965), my high school senior year, but I might have. I went out to northwest Iowa to school because a friend of mine said he thought I could play basketball right away at Dordt College. I wasn't thinking about politics, nor was I thinking much about the Vietnam War, which was raging in 1966. Somewhere--I haven't been able to find it--I have a three-page high school essay bedecked with a title: "Why Are We in Vietnam?" an anti-commie diatribe for the war effort by way of arguments that were likely Republican bullet points, if in fact there were bullet points back then. 

I think I stayed a Republican for a while. At Dordt College I certainly wouldn't have had profs who argued against the war, nor any Democrats. In fact, that I had no profs that dared lift a finger against Nixon, and that they didn't, became, after a fashion, the reason I came to shift allegiances. I felt isolated, so far out of the mainstream of American society that I couldn't help thinking there had to be another whole worldview, a way of understanding ourselves in this world, that looked at those body bags lifted from army transports in a way that I didn't understand, but thousands of kids my age--"what was I missing?"-- certainly and passionately did. 

Somewhere into my sophomore year--I can remember where I was on the sidewalk outside of the classroom building--I started thinking about something other than athletics, and I think it was Emerson and Thoreau--American Romantics--who somehow inspired me with all their idealism. Imagine that--it wasn't some leftie prof; it was hard core American literary figures. American Lit was the class I was on my way to attending that day, when, right there on the sidewalk, I had a some kind of epiphany, nothing as spacious as Emerson transparent eyeball, but the kind of sudden inspiration that I vividly remember. I suddenly saw myself as an adult, in an adult world: I would be a teacher, and teach literature. 

Right there on the sidewalk, I decided that was what I'd do with my life. Sports wasn't doing it anymore--I'd been a gym rat for most of my life, carried an addiction that didn't wear off quickly, even though my participation in athletics did at about that time.

Something happened to me that year--an abominable academic year--that changed me and changed my life. But then such things happened that year to lots of folks, events that changed everybody's lives--it was 1968. After that moment on the sidewalk, I was no started to question my dad's politics. Somewhere there, I was no longer a Young Republican.  

It's come to this

Yesterday Senator Ron Johnson said his Democratic opponent, Mandela Barnes, believes there's something called "institutional racism," which means, you know, that he thinks all of you are racists (he's speaking to a crowd almost entirely white). He says it seems clear, therefore, that his Black opponent hates you, so why would you vote for someone who hates you?

That's Wisconsin's Senator Johnson last night on the stump. He's running against Mandela Barnes, who has been the state's Attorney General. Mandela Barnes, who is African-American, says Senator Ron Johnson is the worst Wisconsin senator since Joseph McCarthy. 

Campaign rhetoric gets ugly in every election, but some say this year it's more toxic than it's ever been. The country is in terrible shape right now because civility has simply left the building. People won't be good to each other, but if they do they can't make cold, hard cash by way of screaming headlines, and they get screaming headlines only when they scream outrageous things. Research has long ago proved the tweets that get the most clicks are the stingers; thus, social media plays a role in this decline as does the 45th President of the United States, Donald Trump, whose made a career out of belittling opposition with lies and derogatory nicknames. Even his fans agree; but they love him for it. The man still claims, 65 courtrooms later, that he won the 2020 election by "millions of votes in a landslide." Thus, so do millions of diehards, the vast majority of them white.

It's "the big lie."

In The Flag and the Cross, Phillip S. Gorsky and Samuel L. Perry argue right from the get-go that "white Christian nationalism is the greatest threat to the witness of the church in the United States today." It's a book no one in a MAGA cap will ever touch, nor would any January 6-er, despite their carrying a Christian flag in one hand and the stars-and-stripes in the other.  The book is chock-full of CRT. That's right. Gorsky and Perry are exactly what militant Trumpy parents don't want their kids to read and certainly wouldn't themselves. 

Why? Listen. 

“There is a satanic portal above the White House, you can see day and night. It exists. It is real. And it must be closed. And it will be closed by prayer." That's Roger Stone, of all people, a Trump sidekick for decades, who's speaking at a ReAwaken rally, an affair that looks like a old-fashioned revival. For years, Roger Stone hasn't told the truth about anything.

Stone is one voice, but there are others, including a preacher named Mark Burns who, at another Reawaken meeting in Ohio said that God would “raise up armies” to help conservatives “shut down” Democratic-run America. The Republicans constantly play the God-card, turning any opposition voices into utterances from the big black soul of Satan. It's that easy--"I'm righteous; you're evil. Next question?" 

Such propositions get notice from American evangelicals, who know their numbers are in decline. What "Replacement Theory" (touted by most Fox News hosts) argues is that blacks and browns from hither and yon are going to replace you and me (if you're a white man like me). Soon, white people will not be a majority in America--that's plain demographic fact. What the MAGA world knows is that white folks have lost power and strength and reach, lost all of that to an enemy of the God white people worship. Who is that enemy?--Democrats, the Libs, who, you know, are really socialist communists, like me.

What Gorsky and Perry offer is that our national petulance has been a long-time in the making: "The Capitol insurrection was like the eruption of a volcano. The pressure had been building for decades. The election simply sent that pressure shooting toward the surface, where it erupted into violence on January 6."

Of course, if you think what happened on January 6th was nothing at all, if January 6 didn't amount to a hill of beans ("Look at the Black Lives Matter riots in 2019!), then the history of this new "Christian Nationalism" is of little relevance. 

What Gorsky and Perry argue in this researched study is that the rudimentary character of right-wing Christian nationalism has been around since the days of the founding fathers, since before that--really, since Plymouth Rock. 

White Christian nationalism’s “deep story” goes something like this: America was founded as a Christian nation by (white) men who were “traditional” Christians, who based the nation’s founding documents on “Christian principles.” The United States is blessed by God, which is why it has been so successful; and the nation has a special role to play in God’s plan for humanity. But these blessings are threatened by cultural degradation from “un-American” influences both inside and outside our borders.

The study concludes, as many of us on the left do, that democracy itself is at stake this week. You either believe in democracy, a rule by the people, or you don't--you'd rather lots of undesirables wouldn't, even couldn't vote. You either believe that in democracy everyone has a voice, or you don't. 

The truth?--way back when, my Wisconsinite father (a wonderful, loving Christian man, a community leader, an elder in the church, President of the Christian school board) liked Wisconsin's Senator Joseph McCarthy. He did. In the 1960s, Dad thought Martin Luther King was a "social agitator" who wanted to turn the culture on its head, to scramble all the most cherished American values. If King wasn't an outright communist, he most certainly pal-ed around with people who were. That's what my dad thought.

What Gorsky and Perry offer is a broad appraisal that establishes MAGA passion is not new, even if its greater today, more dangerous than it's ever been. 

How dangerous? Seems to me that Trump has redefined some of our most honored words--what does it mean to be "evangelical" today? or Christian? What does it mean to be a patriot? 

Vote tomorrow, if you haven't already, and when you do, don't vote for anyone anywhere close to Donald Trump.  

Sunday Morning Meds--A Pilgrimage

Today my wife and I will go to a wedding rehearsal. Two kids I met just yesterday will exchange vows, and I’m conducting the ceremony. I’m not ordained. The couple’s uncle is a judge; he’ll make the bond legal. They wanted someone to “do the wedding.” I’ve never “done a wedding,” but this is family, not close family, but family.

I admire their idealism, what seems even their estimable foolhardiness in simply tying the knot. Getting married is a good thing, the right thing to do, even if their second cousin (me) is likely to fumble through the proceedings. In Protestant tradition marriage is not a sacrament; but, Lord knows, it’s a big deal.

But I’m of the age when their sweet resolve to plunge into a legal and (somewhat) binding contract, seems, well, dreamy in an adolescent way. The whole thing seems scary. They are so young and they are, really, so dumb. They’ve been dating seven years, which has the sound of something biblical. But face it: they don’t know squat.

In their mid-80s, my parents suddenly turned into scrappers, even though I don’t remember their ever being particularly cross with each other before, at least in my presence. They got in each others’ hair something awful. Sometimes funny; mostly sad. In the end, do we really go it alone, like the medieval play Everyman promises? Do even our closest relationships skip out? I suppose so.

What I know is this. Last night my wife and I skipped an end-of year gala and stayed home by ourselves, in part because we’re becoming less social, but also because in our 35-year marriage, right now nothing seems more blessed than being alone, just the two of us. Playing hooky on a gala was low-stakes. Couch potatoes get bad press.

I could try to explain all of that to this young couple—I’ve got to give a homily; I could tell them how we stayed home and simply enjoyed each other. I could try, but their being 22 means they wouldn’t begin to understand.

They’ve got their own pilgrimage ahead, just as we did, and my parents before us. All the diagrams, the how-tos, all the counseling sessions we can offer will mean little to them because they’ll have to create their own map as they go, just as we did.

Every cow-eyed young couple carries our hopes with them when they recite their vows; because our hope, like theirs, is for nothing but the very first word of Psalm 85: 5—to be blessed.

I cannot imagine life without faith. Faith was the soul of our solitary night together, even though we didn’t recite Bible verses. The two of us have spent hours and hours in prayer in the last two years, hours of pleading that sometimes seem fruitless. But we’ll keep praying because faith isn’t something one wears like a tux; and we are blessed—as the psalmist says—by putting our faith in God. I know that’s true. Our pilgrimage, begun so long ago, continues.

I hope somewhere down the line we don’t start to carp at each other; but then, my mother would roll her eyes if I brought up the subject. “What do you know, really, about pilgrimage, young as you are?” she’d say. And she’d probably be right.

What she’d tell me, unequivocally, is that her sixty years of marriage was a great ride, a pilgrimage, begun and lived in faith. She’d say, I’m sure, she was blessed.

______________________ 

Those two kids have now been married for 15 years, us for 50. All of this, I think, still works :).

Ripon's Little White Schoolhouse

 

Okay, okay, that inscription might be a hair vainglorious, but you can't blame the citizens of Ripon, Wisconsin for staking a claim, because they're right, partly anyway. Their precious Little White School House wasn't the only birthplace of the Republican party. For the record, two other places make similar claims--one just across the lake in Jackson, Michigan, another in faraway Maine. No Facebook Live feeds existed at the time, so while those three inaugurals went on hundreds of miles apart, what glued them together was a bloody grievance that had them all up in arms.

Just then, in 1854, a stem-winding congressman who never met a debate he didn't like, Stephen Douglas, of Illinois, presented a bill that drew out a plan for the U. S. of A.--much smaller at the time--to deal with the burning issue of slavery. In legislation that ranks near the top ten worst ever to make it out of Congress, the Kansas-Nebraska Act punched its way into law and history. 

The Civil War didn’t start because of one pitiful act of Congress but keep that thought in mind because the Kansas-Nebraska Act ruled that what was then called the Territory of Nebraska (which included significant chunks of Nebraska, Kansas, Colorado) would be slave or would be free depending on what the its residents determined it would be. Sounds like democracy, right? Maybe so, but soon enough it turned into Civil War.

Pro-slavery Missourians poured into the territory, as did a cloud of abolitionists from way out east. White men and women on both sides of the question, slave or free, had strong feelings. Let's gin that up some--men and women out there in Bleeding Kansas had more than strong feelings; they shot killed each other. It's that wickedly simple. 

But now we're a thousand miles from Ripon, Wisconsin. That night, in the middle of a March blizzard and teeth-chattering temps, a few Ripon locals got together to talk about a brand-new political party because most of them, Whigs at the time, couldn't abide being Jacksonian Democrats, nor could they stand being bound to an unholy alliance with Southern Whig slaveholders. So right there, in "the Little White Schoolhouse," Ripon, Wisconsin, a few outraged locals, abolitionists all, determined the time had come to split, to save the Republic--hence, a brand-new Republican party. 

Oh, my, they were hated. Among slave-holding Democrats the self-righteous abolitionists were despised. When the Rev. John Todd came up the Missouri on a steamer, on his way to an abolitionist church in Tabor, Iowa, he got into trouble long before he got to town. In a heated discussion about slavery, when one of the thugs detected an abolitionist, they wanted a scalp. "Shoot him," someone yelled. "Kill him." One idiot told him if it was his choice, he’d straight-up trade the pastor for a mongrel dog and shoot the dog. That man, Todd said in a memoir, was "a minister of the gospel from Missouri."

If you think politics today seems lethal, you’re not wrong; but what fomented godawful outrage in little Ripon, Wisconsin, was nothing to shake a stick at. That anger, all that divisiveness resulted, so history claims, in the brutal horrors of the American Civil War.

The only way in and out of Ripon, Wisconsin are two-lane roads, so if you want to take in the place and its marvelous story, you’ll likely have to go out of your way to find by “the Little White Schoolhouse.”

Right now, they’re moving it. For years the Little White Schoolhouse stood a block east of downtown, where you could drive right by, standing amid ancient oaks and maples and not see it at all. It's moving to greater prominence out west of town, where “the birthplace of the Republican Party,” will be more visible, more of a feature of a small prairie town in central Wisconsin, this hothouse of radical and—get this!--liberal Republican politics.

In the days of Trump, make of that what you will. 

Morning Thanks--Grandpas

We spent a day with our grandson last Saturday, a kind of end-of-childhood thing, I guess, although I'm not the one to take a guess at that. He's in seventh grade--that's middle school, not elementary. He wasn't exactly assigned to us for the day, but it was made clear that it would be nice of us to volunteer to take him--the rest of the family would be out and about. We did. 

He said a trip to Sioux Falls, to the Washington Pavillion would be fun, so his obliging grandparents picked him up and headed west, sort of oblivious to why he'd want to go where he did. He did mention a museum and an art gallery, and we'd been to the art gallery before; but I didn't honestly think he'd want to study paintings--and he didn't. 

It was the museum he was after, a hand-on sort of place for kids. He loved the space stuff--that was the real attraction. 

We took in Falls Park, too, a gorgeous place, but the Big Sioux is so low these days that the falls aren't much more than a trickle. I'm overstating, but not by much. Besides, Trickle Park just doesn't make it.

We've never been a cabin-on-the-lake family, and, I've never done many grandpa-things with my grandkids, aside from baiting hooks and unhooking sunnies when we lived on the river. I suppose I've loved my grandkids in a Schaap-grandfatherly way, which is more "at a distance" than "up-close-and-personal." When I look back on it today, for better or for worse, I'd say I've raised them in the way I was by my grandfathers.

Both of them were gone before I was ten. I sort of knew them, but have learned much more about them through the years, long after they died. I inherited much from both of them. From Grandpa Schaap, who was far more beloved as a story-teller than the preacher he was, I learned something about standing up in front of crowds I suppose, plus an earnestness about faith I've spent most of my life denying when it's been perfectly obvious that I can't nor ever will.

I have Grandpa Dirkse's familial brand of earnestness too, in spades, a piety that seems to be impossible for me to kick or lick, even though most of what comes out of these fingertips in early mornings sometimes seems a mission to shake it. Grandpa Dirkse's earnestness is the quintessential Calvinist variety, visible, hearable, in what this particular post is doing--questioning, seriously, whether or not "I've done enough," in this case, as a grandpa, a sort of woe-is-me thing that doesn't dance well. Grandpa Dirkse was heavy on guilt, personal guilt. Mine is nowhere near so unconcealed. (I know that's prideful.)

Besides, it was Grandpa Schaap who used to say--my dad told me--that you could judge what kind of father you were by the character of your grandchildren. 

The fact is, I have no pictures of me with either of my grandfathers--none, zero. Neither of them were summer cabin people either. Even though Grandpa Schaap lived with us, I don't remember ever sitting on either of my grandfathers' laps, listening to stories, or even getting a hug, which is not to say that either of them were frigid or even cold. 

Don't get me wrong--I'm not complaining. Indirectly, they've been an incredible influence on me. Even without their ever telling me how to live while we were up at the cabin, they both undoubtedly had a hand in my life, even if they didn't put worms on my hooks. When I think about it, I wouldn't trade the goods they left me with in either case. And I hope that Grandpa Schaap is gratified when he reads this--Grandpa Dirkse too.

I guess there's hope for this grandpa, even for this true blue-blood Calvinist variety. This morning, I'm thankful for both of them. I really am. 

And my grandson. We had a wonderful day in Sioux Falls.

Small Wonders--Bison/bison/bison

The bison on the Woodbury County Courthouse

It's not his fault he's cracked. That's just time and maybe the fickle prairie seasons all around, maybe a flaw in construction. He deserves more than he got from the Woodbury County Courthouse. I mean, that place is a work of art, and there he is, aboard a national treasure, a National Historic Landmark with a splittin' headache. So many features of the Courthouse are worth celebrating that this fella' gets lost--he's out in the alley. You want to see him?--look hard. What I'm saying is the buffalo, the American bison, deserves better, deserves more.

Consider these bullet points:

        >>>Our pork and beef have no equal, but the continent's biggest fur-bearing mammals get by on grass, herbs, twigs, and shrubs, and still tip the scales at a ton. Not only are American bison vegetarians, they can buck winters cold enough to shrivel icicles.

        >>>We should be calling them “the American Bison,” but they’re known as "buffalo." Why? Several worthy answers exist; but just avoid the mess and call them what you’d like. Scientifically, identified by genus/species/sub-species, they're "bison/bison/bison." Isn’t that cute? “Bison/bison/bison.

        >>>Even though the guys weigh as much as a defensive line, they're not turtles but tailbacks: 35 miles per hour! And their trachea are furnace ducts. They’re not just sprinters, they’re cross-country stars.

        >>>Their vision is sub-par, but their eyes are positioned a mile apart on their massive heads to operate like a thousand-dollar wide-angle lens. They don't see better, but they see more than you and me.

        >>>Jesuit missionaries, 150 years ago, understood the spiritual relationship Native America had with the buffalo and didn't like it because the hunt was way more important to them than the mass. They started to believe the Lakota worshipped the buffalo. About that, they weren’t far off.

        >>>The bloodbath of the 1870s killed millions, reducing a herd of 30 million or more to fewer than a thousand. When Teddy Roosevelt, who’d hunted bison himself, got wind of their near-extinction, he created a committee of men with big bucks, dedicated to bison preservation. How about that? --it took well-heeled city boys to come all the way out here and save them.

        >>>Trainloads of shooters used to come out here to shoot buffalo from open windows of railroad cars. A man named Buffalo Jones, the first superintendent at Yellowstone, claimed he'd killed thousands and, he said, “lived to regret it.” Teddy Roosevelt gave him the Yellowstone job, which, back then was little more than maintaining 30+ million head.

        >>>When Prince Maximilian came up the Missouri in 1830, he found whole herds drowned, 1800 or more. All of that put up a smell so putrid, he wrote in his diary, that he couldn’t handle supper.

        >>>That famous “Buffalo nickel” was created by James Earl Fraser, who used a bison named Black Diamond, who was, when he created the image, locked up in some New York zoo, all of which explains why real buffalo people claim the beast on our nickels looks so forlorn, head bowed in abject sorrow.

What I'm saying is, as beautiful as the courthouse is, our buffalo deserves better. When Lewis and Clark came up the Missouri, they took a sidetrack to an odd little hill north of Vermillion, climbed to the top--it was beastly hot--and got a big look at a big world. Out there--not far from here--they spotted something they'd never seen before, something that took their breath away, their first huge herd of buffalo.

Next time you’re near the courthouse, cut through the east alley and pay your respects. They used to own the place, after all. He could use a lift.

Beloit

There were littler ones, babies even, hard as that is to consider. It looks to me as if the lineup in this proud old photo is  just the school age kids. There's a little guy in white in the front row, but the rest, even from a distance, look like middle schoolers with some high schoolers thrown in. At its height, 175 kids called the Norwegian Lutheran Children's Home, in Beloit, Iowa, their home, their only home.

The 50th Anniversary booklet of the Beloit Children's Home includes a shot that's hard to look at, but have a look. There were little ones too. In a way, I suppose, all the kids were little ones.

Never heard of Beloit, Iowa? You're not alone. Once it was a booming little burg on the banks of Big Sioux River, just a couple miles from Canton, SD. Once upon a time there was an academy here too, but that place--a kind of high school/seminary--eventually moved up river to Canton when a more spacious building could be had. A Norwegian immigrant kid named Rolvaag went to school there and went on to write a tale of the region's story, Giants in the Earth. Maybe you've read it.

Then again, once upon a time, that very school, then called Augustana Academy, moved once more down the road and up the river to Sioux Falls, where it became Augustana College, and is now Augustana University. Started right there in Beloit, a town that mostly isn't there anymore. Population? --maybe fifty, in a storm, probably less if the Big Sioux is flooding.

The Children's Home is long gone. About the only reminder is a big square, three-storied farm house that once upon a time was the orphanage school. Yet a few years ago, a cupola stood in the front yard, a remnant, I believe, the peak above the admin building. Gone now.

There's a water tower out back that dates from the old days, and maybe a couple of sheds that hearken to a long-ago and otherwise unrecognizable past. Just about 75 years have passed since the place was the home for orphans from the region. It closed its doors in 1945.

In fact, whether or not it was an orphanage, per se, could be debated. In all likelihood, most of the kids weren't orphans at all. 

"Mother was sick most of her life. She had Tuberculosis," one of the kids wrote long, long ago. "We moved a lot trying to find a dry climate for her. The last place we lived was near Mason City. Mother became so bad she was bedridden." 

The girl's story is probably much the same as the stories of most others, and there's more: "I'll never forget the last time we saw her, so sick; she hugged us all. We were taken to Beloit and later she died. We were, I remember, a sad and lonely four kids for some time." Deaths like her mother's were not uncommon back then, but neither was the loss she remembers well too: "Dad came to see us maybe three times. . ."

Orphans weren't so much orphans as they were neglected, even forsaken children, left to bear a life's sadness, kids simply forgotten.

A mile or so north and east, the Beloit cemetery features a stately marker that notes the deaths of some of the kids who never left Beloit, who died of one malady or another.

The history of residential schools like Beloit Children's Home take a beating today because few kids of the era could be as easily exploited as unwanted, unloved kids. The horrors of that abuse means any reference to a place like Beloit's Children's Home makes people cringe. 

But some of those locals who walked the ground were saints, determined to give castaways whatever volume of love they could offer, in this world and the next. 

And it still exists. Even though what's there on the grounds of the Beloit Children's Home is not recognizable of what once was, there still is, today, a Beloit Children's Home; but it's changed its name and address. Look it up. Today, Beloit Children's Home is in Ames, Iowa, where a descendent institution tries to help really tough kids who need to find a way to make life a go.

That old, long gone Home just off  the banks of the Big Sioux, with the aid of two or three other children's homes in the state, was the beginnings of an outfit called Lutheran Social Services.  You may have heard of it. They do really good work.

You have to get a ways away from things to find the town, but if someday you choose to take note of what's left of Beloit, Iowa, it's okay to smile. Just remember that more than a century ago, those local folks who helped out, who showed kids how to wash dishes and milk cows during the operation of a huge orphanage that's now, even in memories, just about completely gone, those people believed just as firmly in a guiding principle Lutheran Social Services still extols-- "Practicing Compassion Will Change the World.

Consider this: Augustana University and Lutheran Social Services both started right here--not bad for what's almost a ghost town. Both institutions were born in Beloit, Iowa. 

Go ahead and smile. Beloit was also--there's no denying it--a place for dreams. 

For Reformation Day, 2022

 

They were, all of them, heroes of my childhood. I'm not sure that I thought so when I was in sixth grade, but I knew that there were those in the little Christian school I attended who most certainly wanted me to think they were--each and everyone of them, real bona fide heroes. Not just Hank Aaron or Vince Lombardi either. These men were heroes of faith. There was no higher echelon or greater order.

Zwingli was a firebrand, but then they all were. Zwingli might well have fit in better with today's Christian nationalists because he believed that God almighty needed to be at the helm of both church and state. He wasn't as driven by the importance of the sacrament (the Lord's Supper) as Luther, who largely dismissed Zwingli, didn't even think of him as a believer, despite the fact that their respective theologies were, in the currents of the day, kissin' cousins.

Huss was a hero even to Martin Luther, who claimed that when he'd uncovered, then read Huss's sermons, he was "overwhelmed with astonishment." Huss was Czech, a preacher in Prague, when he began taking on the Holy Catholic Church, and, for doing just that, he was burned at the stake way back in the 15th century. Seriously, the man was hero to my grade-school heroes.

Melanchthon, like Luther, was German, a buddy, in broad terms. Melanchthon also cast his lots with the "justification by faith" folks, which put him too at odds with the Roman Catholic Church, who made it perfectly clear to rich and poor alike in Europe that they were the means of salvation--the church, that is. Melanchthon died of a cold that wouldn't go away, nothing as dramatic as Huss the Czech. 

Luther was Luther. The world I live in is still deeply influenced--his name is everywhere, his churches riding the rolling plains in every direction. He was a man who saw immense spiritual visions, but could be earthy as a blacksmith. He wasn't afraid of banging heads with authorities, but he hung on to the consecration of the sacrament more tenaciously than the others, who tangled with his views on exactly what happened when to the bread-and-wine were dished up in the mass. Him hammering up his objections at Wittenberg is the most iconic image of the Reformation.

And Calvin--well, it's my middle name, my heritage. I knew I was a Calvinist before I knew I was a Protestant, but I didn't know that others--people who weren't even religious--would recognize me as such too. When I was in grad schools, I'd often introduce myself by my middle name, at which time students and profs would arch their eyebrows as if they suddenly recognized some not-to-be mentioned weirdness.

That's when I read Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion, which I picked up (both volumes) because I wanted understand why others reacted the way they did when the name arose, as it does frequently in early American literature, well into the 19th century. 

In grad school I learned there is a heritage to Calvinism that has very little to do with tulips and peppermints and no bikes on Sunday. In graduate school, I realized for the first time that my heritage was bigger than I ever thought it was. In graduate school, I learned that the whole Reformation was bigger than I'd ever imagined, that rich German lords threw in their lot with Luther, not because they were such dedicated believers but because they were darn anxious to begin to carve up the immense power of the church. Not until I was in graduate school did I realize that the Reformation wasn't just about Christian doctrine, it was also very much about freedom. 

I understand why Halloween took over October 31st. The Reformers really can't compete with American extravaganza. We had kids once long ago, and we have two darling granddaughters who I doubt will ever know much at all about the Reformation. They'll do just fine. Two other grandchildren are in college, a Christian college. I don't imagine either of them will think much, today, about the Reformation, and they too will do just fine.

But in me there's still a kid from that little Christian school, someone with a middle name that makes some people grimace. In me is someone who can't ever forget that Halloween is also Reformation Day. So, thanks for listening. 

Sunday Morning Meds--"from whence"

 

“I lift up my eyes to the hills—where does my help come from?” 

Psalm 121:1

I wasn’t sure where my daughter’s question came from, and I was busy thinking of something else at the time. That’s why I didn’t give her a very good answer, not a fatherly answer anyway.

“When you were my age,” she said, sort of laughing, “did you ever think that the world was just going to come to an end?”

My daughter is 30. When I was that age, my wife and I had her. But right then I couldn’t remember ever thinking the world was in imminent danger of coming to an end. I smiled and said no, rolled my eyes, and turned back to the computer screen.

Later, I couldn’t sleep.

I was a kid, but I remember learning to crawl under my school desk should nuclear holocaust come to small-town Wisconsin. I grew up in the Cold War, when either the Soviets or some unthinking President was capable of pushing the wrong button or the right one wrongly.

I remember walking on a football field during the Cuban missile crisis and having a profound talk with a kid about whether or not we’d ever have a season. We both knew football was a metaphor; we were talking about the end of the world.

I remember the comet Kohouteck and Y2K. I remember a number of primitive eschatologies—Hal Lindsey’s Late Great Planet Earth, for instance—that ordered our days by manipulating ancient calendars suggested in the minor prophets. End-times theology is big business today, everybody and their dog wanting not to be Left Behind.

I believe my daughter’s generation lives in more fear than mine did because I was reared with more freedom than her kids will ever see. When I was ten, my friends and I took our bikes down to Lake Michigan and lost ourselves and our inhibitions in endless woods. Today that land is private property; but today, no parent would allow her ten-year-old kid that kind of freedom.

The parade of perspective students will start any day now at the college where I teach, and with them come loving, helicopter parents, moms and dads who ask more questions about college than their children do. I never visited the college where I enrolled. My parents drove me there—500 miles—then left. That was it.

As I write, a congressional election looms. The war in Iraq isn’t going well. Even the President wishes we were no longer there, I’m sure. But in order to keep his party in office, he and other Republicans are making sure the American people know that the Democrats, should they win, will cut and run; when they do, the Islamic extremists will terrorize us, even here in a woebegone corner of the rural Midwest. Fear sells.

So this is a better answer than my eye-rolling, Andrea: yes, I’ve felt that way. We all have. We’ve all been afraid. Even the psalmist.

While the psalms tell us bountifully about God, they’re even better at telling us about ourselves. You’re not alone—in more ways than one.

________________________ 

This meditation, like the others that appear here on Sunday mornings, is a replay, a thought of mine twenty years ago. I could edit it for these days because fear is as prevalent today as it was when my daughter asked the question. Even though the specific fears--of violence, Covid, loss of culture, hatred, nationhood, even faith--rise from different sources, the fear she may have felt is just as real, as is the psalmist's false flag, because that's the intent, I believe, of the line that begins a wonderful psalm--121: No, our help doesn't come from the hills, it comes from the Creator God who's made the promises we all need to remember to ward off the shivers that rise so plentifully from the base camps of our lives: "My help comes from the Lord, who made the heavens and the earth."

The Lord will keep you from all harm—

    he will watch over your life;

8 

the Lord will watch over your coming and going

    both now and forevermore.