Respect and the Trump Tattoo

Imagine your best friend: a regular guy with a wife, a few kids, and a steady job.  You've known him for years; you love him as a brother; you thank God everyday that he's in your life.  

But let's say he comes to you one day and says he's going to get a tattoo.  Not just any tattoo, but a large one on his face cheeks.  Yogi Bear dunking a basketball over Shaquille O'Neal.  He's wanted to do this for a long time, and he thinks it's a great idea.  

Of course, as a friend you try and talk him out of this crazy idea.  How can this look good?  Is this really how you want to present yourself?  Are you mentally ill?  But your friend is adamant.  He's gonna get this tattoo, and if it costs him your friendship, that's your problem.  He knows who he is, a Yogi-Bear-lovin' hoops fan.  Nobody can stop him.  

He gets the tattoo...and for awhile you still love your friend.  You have gone though enough stuff together that you won't give him up that easily.  But everytime you look at him you see this tattoo...and it really is the very worst thing you've seen, something you can't unsee.  It's not just the idea of a tattoo, but that he chose the worst tattoo artist in the county to get it.  The characters are all wrong, the placement is off-center, and there's not a soul out there who would think that this was done while somebody was sober.  He continually defends the tattoo, of course...if people don't like it, well they are just stupid.  They have been brainwashed by the anti-tattoo lobby.  Only he knows the real value of this art.  

Slowly but surely, over time, you stop hanging out with your friend.  You will always love him, but your respect for him has suffered immensely.  You longingly wait for the day where he comes to you and recognizes that the tattoo was a stupid idea, can you help him find a plastic surgeon to remove it?  But that day never comes.  And you continue to drift apart.  It's hard to respect somebody that delusional.  

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Over the past decade I have had a lot of people in my life who have their own tattoo: the imprinting of Donald Trump on their hearts.  No matter how terrible an idea it is, no matter how badly executed it has been done, they defend their devotion to him with their very being.  Even as you bring up his incompetence, his venality, his corruption, and even his immoral depravity, all things that are so obvious that anybody should be able to see them, it's never Trump's fault.  It's Obama's fault.  It's Democrats.  It's the mainstream media.  It's Hunter Biden's laptop.  It's Hilary's emails.  

Rather than admit the ridiculous nature of the Trump tattoo, they flaunt it and celebrate himwith their red hats, theirs cheap (and quickly dissolved) flags, their Facebook memes, their devotion to a MAGA echo chamber that always points fingers in another direction.  And so they learn to hate windmills, hard-working immigrants, random members of Congress that their lord and savior has decided are the enemy.  There's nothing real about most (if not all) of his grudges, but this doesn't matter...the Trump Tattoo tells them what to think.  

I will continue to love these people as I slowly and depressingly wait for them to wake up from whatever zombie virus they are under.  But I can't really keep respecting them.  When they speak, even as it's not about Trump, I look at them and all I can see is that terrible tattoo on their face.  

The Smart People Council

I am blessed in this life to have a loving wife and kids, and an assortment of good people around me at both church and in my other workplace whom I can trust and turn to in times of trouble for comfort and concern and even a bit of wisdom. 

What I am finding as I get older is that I don't have a lot of truly smart people in my life, people who have a knowledge base in their life that I can visit as comfortably as I google a question.  Years ago when I was in grad school a classmate said that the library needed a guy sitting somewhere in the library to whom you could go and ask any question and get an answer.  I know that it was tongue-in-cheek, of course, but that I idea has always stuck with me, that no matter how many good books I read, and no matter how many people have to give me homespun wisdom to get me through the difficult times, I also need people who are smart enough to consider an idea and tell me whether it is good or just full of crap.  

As I think about the many people who have come in and out of my life, there are some people who simply don't qualify.  

-Those who are Trumpites.  This goes without saying...not that some who might support Trump might not know some things, and their perspective might be one that I need to hear...but these glass-eyed Stepford wife Trumpites have lost my respect.  If they can't see how awful on the whole Trump has been, then they're really just dumb people who I can't trust.

-Nor do I want somebody who has become so woke that they have become insufferable.  Today we have to deal with lots of people who demand that I feel a certain way, that if I don't, and if I'm not as outraged about ____ as much as they are, then I must be a ___ist.  Sorry, I know how I feel, and don't have time with these folks.  

-People who I deal day-in, day-out with.  This seems strange, because surely there are a lot of smart people around me.  But I've learned that up-close personal conflict is not one of my strong suits.  I do get unreasonably upset talking to people who are simply wrong.  I need to control my emotions better, but for now these people don't qualify, not because of them, but because I don't want to break relationship with people close to me.  

That leaves a rather small group of people that I see very rarely...people I went to school with, or whom I have crossed paths with and walked with for a period of my life. Thinking through people with help from my Facebook friends list, I found less than a dozen people who would likely qualify.  These are smart, moderate, sensible people who seem to have some level of success in their life.  Unfortunately, they are a mostly homogeneous group...they come from a similar church tradition as me (even if some have left), they come from similar family and socioeconomic and racial backgrounds, and they likely are all more built up in my head than they actually are.  They're too much like me, perhaps, to really expand my thinking.  

I think about contacting a few of these old friends over Facebook or calling them, and asking them to be my Smart People Council.  But they are busy with families and jobs and lives of their own, and perhaps they would have more pressing subjects that they need to find clarity on to the point that they don't have time to debate my insignificant issue.  I need to make more friends where I am, to listen better to the people around me, and perhaps not think that I'm smarter than the nincompoops I look down upon.  Maybe the first lesson my SPC would do is disband, to tell me as their leader to get a better life, I don't know.  But still I imagine, someday when I am world dictator, these people will get my summons. 

Self-Imposed Isolation

I occasionally recuse myself from the socialness of Facebook, sometimes for months at a time.  Part of it's that I just get tired of the same three posts (be outraged by this!  look at how cute this is!  ME ME ME!), but part of it is that I just don't feel all that connected anymore to some people with whom I am supposed to be 'friends'.  Not actually seeing some of these people in the flesh for over thirty years will do this to you, I guess.

So this weekend not far from where my parents live there is a big Church of Christ event (actually on their website everything is church of Christ, and if you are part of this fellowship you know why, but that's for another post).  We are going to be at my parents' house this weekend because they are getting ready to move and we want to say our goodbyes to the house I grew up in, check out the new house, and basically try to be helpful however we can.  We have legitimate reasons for me to say that I'm too busy to attend the church event this weekend, but the reality is that I'm just not that interested.  It's not that I think the speakers are bad, or the topics are bad (though there does seem to be a bit of the 'the one true church is us' within it), but I just feel numb to much of it these days.  I've never been one to go just for the networking angle of it, and considering how far out of the normal circle I am now, I can count on one hand the number of people I would probably actually know.

And it's not just this.  When I read the Christian Chronicle (our 'Church of Christ newspaper'), I don't feel the connection with other churches like I used to.  I don't really have a desire to go back to some of our college lectureships, and many of the books written by our people or the issues I have thought long and hard about just don't appeal to me anymore.  Now, the local church here?  Absolutely...I am passionate about our little group here.  The Word of God in Scripture?  Daily I want to know more, and Scripture is never-ending in what it does to me.  The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit?  I want to know Christ, be filled with the Spirit, and be in covenant fellowship with the Father.  And the church universal, with its variety and even sometimes its mistakes?  More and more I feel drawn to it.  I love its history and its traditions and for all its faults I know that God's kingdom is doing great things both here and around the world.

But there is a part of me that feels like I am going the way of some of my dear friends who grew up in Churches of Christ.  They left for non-denominational churches, Christian churches, and other similarly Bible-centered churches.  They didn't leave Christ, but somewhere along the way they decided that the foolishness and the same three issues were no longer palatable to them anymore.  I don't think I could ever leave at this point...for all our problems, this is my home and my heritage, and I love this little local church and all of God's people here.  But the periphery?  Not so much.

Adulthood and maturity is in part about expanding options and also narrowing down options.  Years ago I gave up college football because I developed an interest in soccer.  I rarely watch pro sports on TV these days, as I'm more interested in what my kids are doing.  Maybe it's the same thing with the church universe around me...I just don't have time for some of these things anymore.  Those things are not bad things, but life changes.  Shouldn't I be more excited about what the future holds than what the past binds me to?  I'm not casting aside everything...but I am being more selective about what I hold onto.  And I think this is a good thing.