50-A Birthday Wish

I turn 50 this week.  Friends and family ask me what I want, and I don't really need anything...I have a great life, a wonderful family, and all that I really could ever want.  

And so what do I really want you to do for my birthday?  I'll keep this wish simple for any of you who read this:  PLEASE DO NOT VOTE FOR DONALD TRUMP.  There, that's it.  I understand that many of you will do so, regardless of what I say.  I'll try not to think less of you for doing such a thing, though it's hard...how can you justify voting for such a terrible person who has been such a terrible president?  I say this as a former Republican who has no desire to become a Democrat, and who is not at all excited about the possible Democratic landslide in November. But that doesn't worry me nearly as much as four more years of Trump.  Better a democratic socialist than a national socialist, I say.  

I have been intentional in recent years in not talking about politics (much) on Facebook.  I don't preach politics (not directly, though all proclamation of the Kingdom of God is inherently political).  I bite my tongue more often than not when I see such blatantly wrong things being said in support of Trumpism.  As a steward of the gospel of Christ, I know that it's so much important to keep relationships peaceful for the sake of the faith than it is to argue about something so stupid.  

But as we come closer to the 2020 election, now only 61 days away, I feel compelled to speak out against President Trump.  This will be the last time before the election I will speak directly on this, and so I need to be concise with my words: one could spend hours, even days, cataloguing the horrible things he has done as president.  But I think his failures can be narrowed down to three broad topics:

1)Corruption, both financial and electoral.  Remember when Trump was going to release his tax returns, like every other presidential candidate does so that we can ensure there are not any direct financial conflicts?  Whoops.  But it's not just about tax returns (which can be just as corrupted and hidden as anything else).  It's about the millions that he gets the government to pay to his properties so that he can golf more than he governs (even as he brags about returning his $400K salary back).  It's about the shady agreements he has made with foreign entities ("I love the Saudis"...they are some of his biggest renters).  It's about how much money his kids and his cronies are making off the family brand name, even as they are quasi-members of the administration. It's awfully hard to drain the swamp when he depends on that swamp to prop him up.  Then there's the way Trump has welcomed the undermining of our democracy by foreign entities, the way he is seeking to suppress voter turnout, and even the fact that he simply cares nothing for those who do not vote for him.  This is why he puts cities against rural areas, why he puts the elderly against the youth, why he puts red states versus blue states.  He knows that if he can just win the electoral college by the tiniest of margins, that's all he really needs to keep his grip on power.  It's unseemly and simply wrong...but that's not the end of the problem.  

2)Competence, or the lack thereof.  Donald Trump is simply bad at his job.  Trumpites will point to the stock market, but like everything else the market is easy to manipulate by the massive deficit spending he has continued to support since he came into office.  Because of many of his economic policies, the long-term economic future of this country is bleak.  He's not the only one at fault, of course...but the same person who wants to take credit for anything good also has to take blame for the bad as well.  And there's a lot of bad things in our country: racial unrest that he continues to stoke, the militarization of law enforcement that has led to many the ongoing protests, massive unemployment and wage disparity, and broken relationship with the closest of our allies while at the same time honoring dictators in Saudi Arabia, Russia, and North Korea.  And that doesn't even get us far into 2020, in which his one of his greatest failures is on display, the COVID-19 pandemic.  Is it Trump's fault that the virus got into the country?  No.  But how he has handled the federal government's response to this is beyond criminal.  Look at how we have responded compared to most other western democracies, where the pandemic is now mostly a nuisance rather than a clear and present danger.  Again, it's not all Trump's fault: hopefully we will have learned the lesson that shutdowns don't stop the pandemic; but his unwillingness to take it seriously for months and devote the resources of government to curbing it (his neo-federalism of telling the states to fend for themselves was based mostly on a.his laziness to attend to detail and b.his desire to stick it to the blue states) has been reprehensible.  For several years I thought that perhaps we would survive with somebody as incompetent as Trump in office, that the bureaucracy (or, as he and his supporters call it, the 'Deep State') developed by leaders from both parties over the years would be sufficient.  But I was wrong...it's amazing how quickly one awful leader can destroy an institution.  I get it...being a president is hard work.  Not many people can do it, I surely can't.  I have no idea whether or not Joe Biden will do well, and wish we had a better option.  But Donald Trump proven that he is not up to the task.  Yet I genuinely believe that his bad job as president is rooted in the deepest problem.  

3)A complete lack of moral character.  For years many of my conservative Christian friends would bemoan the lack of moral character in our presidents...wasn't this the entire case against Bill Clinton?  "We need a godly man in the White House!"  And now, we are left with "God can do great things through a flawed individual."  I've even heard Trump compared to Cyrus, the anointed king from Isaiah 44:28-45:1.  Well, I am glad to see that people see him as a pagan, but in fact they've got the wrong comparison.  A better one might be Belshazzar (Daniel 5), who partied while the empire was crumbling.  Others go so far as to compare Trump to King David, who after all was a murderer and an adulterer.  But the question remains: who does God use in a surprising way?  Continually we find people whose hearts are open to being changed by God, who are penitent of their sins, and who honor God in a genuine way.  None of these  describes Trump, who only uses God as a prop and thinks himself above sin.  Trump is his own god.  As a parent there is nothing about Donald Trump's character that I can commend to my children.  Fathers, would you trust him with your daughers?  Would you trust him to manage your money?  Would you trust him to speak at your church for five minutes without blasphemy being uttered?  Like it or not, political leaders are role models...and if the president continually lies, is unfaithful to their spouse, and is more interested in ratings than he is in righteousness, then I don't feel that he's fit to be president.  

If you have made it this far, thank you, and I promise that I won't do this again before the election.  But it truly breaks my heart to see what Donald Trump has done to this country.  If you have supported Trump in the past, please re-consider as your birthday gift to me.  Trump continually uses the unrest in our country now to say, 'See, this is what a Biden presidency looks like.'  But the neverending unrest and divisiveness is what 3 1/2 years of a Trump presidency have been in reality, and it will only get worse if he is re-elected.  Please, vote this man out.  Thank you.  

Have government and private enterprise traded places?

Agenda item #1 for my Smart People Council to consider: have the roles of government and private enterprise been reversed?  

As we come out of this COVID-19 pandemic, it's been interesting to see how much effort businesses have been undertaking to tell us what they are doing about employee and consumer safety.  Go on to almost any business website (often necessary because in-store purchasing is not always an option), and they'll have a very important announcement telling us what they are doing.  But it's not just about the pandemic...it's about everything now.  Sports leagues continually tell us about what they are doing about racial justice; restaurants for some time have been trying to speak about how they are good neighbors and working hard to reduce their environmental footprint; and many large companies in recent years talk about how they are 'partnering' with good charities like Habitat for Humanity or soup kitchens.  It's almost as if they recognize that they aren't there just to make money, but do good beyond the bottom line.  

On the other hand, consider how our POTUS has tried to downplay the necessity of government to get involved during the pandemic.  It wasn't his responsibility to be a shipping clerk with masks.  It's not the federal government's responsibility to get generators and track the virus (those are state problems!).  And it's not on his watch that hundreds of thousands have died or government has been very slow to do something about these problems...sure, you can blame Obama (3 1/2 years gone), but then any good news about the economy (which is non-existent now) is all because of him.  

It used to be thought that the role of government was to ensure the greater good for all people; it used to be thought that the role of business and private enterprise was to make money.  Now, it seems, everything has changed.  Businesses are taking on (or at least claiming to) many of those roles that were the domain of the public sector, while governments (or at least this government) are stepping back and saying that such things are not their problem.  Doesn't this seem completely mixed up?  

I'm guessing that the obvious answer is that our Trumpite nutjob federal leadership is mostly to blame for this.  For all his minions' belief that he is out there fighting the 'Deep State', he's just really lazy and can't be bothered to do the job of administering the nation.  Too much twittering and golfing needs to get done.  But I do think that private enterprise has in some ways recognized that it is better to do good, and that perhaps is the long-term plan to be more viable in the eyes of a picky consumer public.  Is their desire truly altruistic?  Certainly not.  But even if their motives are not fully pure, at least they are trying to do something, more so than we can say for the federal government, which at its highest levels has turned into a Trump Support group in recent years.  

Once the current POTUS is gone, hopefully in just a few months, I'm wondering if business will get back to normal, and look at profits again.  Perhaps...but I do think that things have shifted, and businesses perhaps are more representative of the needs of society now than a duly-elected government.  What does this say about democracy and where it is going?  Is this a libertarian dream?  

I really don't know...but hopefully smarter people than me can figure this out.  

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. 

What Do We Remember?

Today is the 18th anniversary of 9/11, and so as one might expect Facebook is full of all the 'Never Forget' memes and the 'I remember where I was..." stories.  All of us old enough to remember this terrible day have our own stories, of course...but when I keep hearing people say how they will remember, I wonder what it is we are supposed to remember?  For some, it's the story of Muslim Radicalism.  For others it's the story of American Strength.  For still others it's the story of how we began an Endless War On Terrorism.

But I wonder if maybe we aren't remembering the wrong things.  As a Christian who reads his Bible, I am often struck by how much of the Biblical metanarrative is wrapped up in God trying to get our attention.  He has blessed his people, who slowly but surely turn away from him when they prosper, and so God seeks to call people back to him.  And in order to do this, he sometimes has to punish us to remind us where our true loyalties rest. 

I don't know if 9/11 was God trying to rebuke America.  But I do know that our response was anything but Godly.  Sure, a few people started thinking about faith in the weeks to follow, but this was quickly followed by a call to spend money that they didn't have to keep the economy running, a suspicion of people of color with strange names, and eventually speculative wars that continue to do this day and seem to have no resolution.  America's faith in itself grew over the next year, but in the 18 years since can we say that we are truly a more Godly nation?  I seriously doubt it.  Our dependence upon stuff, our self-pride and arrogance as a nation has exploded, and to this point it's culminated in electing a President who's a complete and utter numskull that daily gives more aid and comfort to the enemy than anything the terrorists could ever have done. 

When will we wake up?  I hope that today will be a humbling experience for us as a nation; I would even hope that we would ask the hard question of 'why do some cultures hate us so much' without most people stupidly answering 'Because they hate freedom!'  But I know that neither of these things will happen.  I will choose to remember 9/11 by trying to do what is right and good...maybe I'm delusional and self-righteous in thinking this, but Kingdom of God people always are to remember where our first loyalty rests. 

Marketing Fail! or a Failure in Marketing?

So my birthday is coming up in a few weeks, and today in my mailbox I got this little flyar from a shoe store.  I'm in one of those rewards programs and so occasionally (like on my birthday) they send coupons saying that I can get $5 off or something like that.  Fine.

But look at this picture for a moment, sent as one side of an advertisement for shoes, sent to a straight man.  Is this picture supposed to make me rejoice?  Will it give me a thrill that my relationships will be as exciting as this?  Do I dream everyday of about having 'my day to sparkle'?  Did (national seller of shoes here) actually commission this picture of two middle-age lunatics thinking that their ecstasy at buying a pair of shoes would translate to me?

Yes, it's marketing.  They want me to come and buy shoes.  But this reminds me that for all the analytics and algorithims that now go in to marketing, this company failed miserably when it came to knowing their audience, ME.  We complain all the time that companies are selling our private personal data (that we have given them willingly, BTW) and that no longer can we make choices on our own.  Surely, we think, this is the end of the world.

But as long as actual marketing campaigns are run by people stupid enough to think that this picture will appeal to a straight middle-aged white male, maybe we shouldn't be so worried that we are losing our souls.  Because this picture almost makes me NOT want to buy from this company, just as the guy selling cars from the local Ford dealer who screams into the camera makes me NOT want to buy Fords.

Of course, I do like a new pair of kicks.  And I do like money off...that should have been their message.  As it is, I've got to hold onto this picture of these orgasmic morons until I finally get around to getting my new shoes.