celebrating July 4th on the Eve of America’s Fall

It feels like one of the greatest ironies of all time that this country will celebrate its independence from English monarchical rule as its leaders continue their intent to replace this democracy with autocracy.

It is hard to accept what is going on. It feels like anarchy, as the president and his hand-picked cabinet and government officials blatantly disregard and ignore the “rule of law” in their pursuit of total control. The checks and balances system, put in place by the Founding Fathers, is either non-existent or non-operative, and too many Americans seem either oblivious or purposely ignorant of the implications of what is happening and how it will affect them and many generations to come.

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Where are the Americans, the people who actually do love this country and who are willing to put allegiance to it in front of a desire to be loyal to the man who is leading the effort to destroy it?

It is the height of hypocrisy to listen to the MAGA/GOP members talk about their love of country and that this is a country of laws, as they simultaneously ignore or have stated that they intend to ignore rulings of the courts that threaten their agenda. (https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/02/11/jd-vance-trump-executive-power-supreme-court-00203537) (https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/01/28/trump-tiktok-bailout-00200800).

In Project Esther, the document prepared by the Heritage Foundation, the writers continue to talk about law and order and how what they plan to do to fight antisemitism is nothing less than clear evidence that they love this country. “This is a nation of laws,” the document says, and while it defines antisemitism as that which is evident by people who protest in this country against the actions of the Israeli government and the resultant massacre of innocent Gazans, they are strangely quiet about the antisemitism that has been practiced historically in this country. The document makes no mention of the attacks on Jews that have included the bombing of their synagogues and the constant denigration of Jews by Americans who simultaneously reveal a love and respect for Adolf Hitler.

Long before the October 2024 attack on Jews in Israel by Hamas, American antisemitism was felt deeply by Jews in this country. (https://www.npr.org/2024/02/13/1230928104/large-majorities-americans-antisemitism-serious-problem-ajc), but Project Esther uses as the reason for its creation only to the October 7 attack.

Law and order do not exist in this country; “due process” has never existed for African Americans in this country but the lack of due process is now being felt by immigrants in this country as masked “ICE” agents have been given the freedom to kidnap people of color for no reason – off public streets, out of their homes, and off their jobs to deport them.

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/BwXdna3iA7o?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0

) (https://calmatters.org/justice/2025/07/la-immigration-raids-lawsuit/) What we are seeing feels like accounts of how Africans -some enslaved and some free- were kidnapped at gunpoint by civilians deputized to capture them. The “crime” of the yet enslaved Africans was fleeing plantations in their quest for freedom, but others committed no crime but were hunted and arrested as well. (https://www.tpusa.com/live/princeton-professor-compares-ice-agents-to-slave-catchers) (https://www.freep.com/story/opinion/2019/10/01/ice-immigration-agents-slave-catchers/3824310002/).

Immigrants, naturalized and undocumented, are living in fear, many staying home from work and school because they don’t want to be kidnapped, and yet the people in the highest levels of government are doing nothing. It feels like we are seeing the 21^st-century version of the heinous practices allowed by the Fugitive Slave Laws of the 19^thcentury.

Our freedoms are being challenged, including freedom of speech, assembly, the press, religion, and the right to petition the government. Those who say they love America are either quiet or are boisterously working to destroy the government, MAGA called “the deep state.” These people are angry and feel like they have been unheard and disrespected. With their president in the White House, they are seeking power with a vengeance, and it does not appear that they care who will suffer and perhaps die because of the policies that are being put into place.

As the House wrangles with a final version of the Trump “Big Beautiful Bill,” those lawmakers who admit that the bill is bad and will cause many people a lot of pain are caving. The country whose birth came about as a result of it defeating an autocratic government, led by a king, is working with all deliberate speed to make sure the man they elected will stay in power and continue the transformation of this country from democracy to an aristocracy, powered by oligarchs whose only goal is to make money off the backs of the people whose hard work produced the funds that propelled them to wealth.

The Fourth of July was never one where I consciously thought about how America became independent; when we gathered as a family on this holiday, we would often make mention that even though Black people had never enjoyed full American citizenship, we never gave up the fight. With the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights laws in the mid 60s, we felt we were a little closer.

But whatever ground we made is being chopped up, and not just for African Americans but for a whole group of people who wealthy white men believe do not deserve full American citizenship.

So, forgive me if I am confused about what the fireworks that are about to be launched over the next couple of days really mean. American bigotry, hatred, and ignorance are exhausting, but that portion of Americanism is here to stay and will continue to wrest the concepts of “liberty and justice” away from people as it always has. We are celebrating freedom and liberty on the eve of America’s fall.

A candid observation.

God help us all.

Struggling with the Language of Newness

The ultimate power of prophetic ministry is that the words spoken by the prophets do not never disappear. Their words have so much truth that they cannot be erased or forgotten. People may choose to ignore them for any number of reasons, but the words they speak stick regardless of the social times in which we find ourselves.

           The late Dr. Walter Brueggemann, in his book The Prophetic Imagination, wrote, “It is the aim of every totalitarian effort to stop the language of newness, and we are now learning that where such language stops, we find our humanness diminished.”

           He wrote those words in 1978, but they struck me as something to think about as we work to identify the ingredients in the kettle of theological soup that is challenging us now. We are seeing in real time what it looks like as the people in power work to “stop the language of newness” that has been evolving over the past 50 years due to landmark legislation, but the seeds of which were planted hundreds of years ago as the country decided to build a government on a cracked foundation.

           The founders were not interested in “language of newness.” Yes, they wrote magnificent documents, filled with words that stirred the souls of those who heard them. But behind those words were mindsets that wanted people to understand they had a “place” in society, and that the “liberty and freedom” that was written about did not and would never apply to them.

           As enslaved Africans heard those words, their souls jumped. Though they were treated abysmally, not allowed to grieve the loss of their homes and their families, their spirits, fed by the language of newness that they heard, propelled them forward. For them, the language of newness did not stop, and therefore, their humanness was never diminished.

           But it is a fact that what we are seeing now is at least partially happening because there was too much newness, too much power and release from traditional beliefs and practices that allowed wealthy white men a measure of comfort that they never intended others to share. Their wealth was created by those whom they oppressed, and they needed for that to remain intact.

The spirits of people, however, yearn to be free. People yearn to be able to use their intellect and their creativity, and thus will not “stay put” because they cannot. Totalitarian efforts always cause chaos, but they can never, and have never, killed the human need to be free, fed during periodic spurts of time where they hear and ingest the language of newness.

           We sit now in a maelstrom of anger and insecurity that has haunted the wealthy and powerful for years. The language of newness that has kept the oppressed on a battlefield has offended them. The oppressed have not cowered as they have been encouraged or forced to do. They (we) have been knocked down but have forever gotten back up. The language of newness that we have heard from those who speak to us on God’s behalf is a spiritual nutrient that has attached itself to our very beings and cannot, once ingested, be taken away.

           The people in power do not understand this phenomenon. They are creating a new “language of newness,” but because their language seeks to diminish, and not increase the dignity, worth, and appreciation for all humanity, it will fail. People will be free, regardless of the pushback they receive and endure. Their language of newness comes from them and depends on their survival to endure, while the language of newness that Brueggemann speaks of is fed to us by the very breath of God.

           The challenge before us is not to give too much credence to what the oppressors are saying, though being fully aware of what they are saying. Knowing what they are saying will direct our prayers, and calm our spirits – and make us available to the presence of our God, the God about whom we learned in Sunday School and from our parents, the God who told us to love our neighbors, the God who has walked and talked with us “through many dangers, toils and snares.”

The oppressors of today claim that God is behind and in support of what they are doing. They want us to absorb that language. What they might call the language of newness, we must recognize as a language of deception. We need to understand what they are saying and why, but we cannot align with them. We know that all people matter. Black and brown people, women, immigrants, the elderly, the poor, children, the differently abled, non-cis gender persons – all matter. God loves all of us. That is the language of newness we have been receiving for the last 50 years (and before that). We have to remember that though oppressors have tried to keep us enslaved to an ideology created by hatred and bigotry, we have learned, through the years, to reject their efforts. Their language of newness is not ours.

           May we ask God for the strength to continue to reject their language of the newness they want, and to instead lean on the power we receive from the momentum of memory that reminds us that God has our backs and has always had our backs. We will get through this, relying on the language of newness that will come from this experience that will remind us that, at the end of the day, it is God who is in control, and not a group of people who have made God their tool to justify their behavior.

           God will be with us “at break of day.” That is a truth we cannot forget, especially now.

           Amen and amen.

January 6

January 6

Four years ago at this hour, supporters of Donald Trump, convinced by him that Joe Biden stole the election he lost, were storming the Capitol.

people standing and holding flags during daytime — Photo by Colin Lloyd on Unsplash

I can still see the images of people carrying American flags and wearing MAGA hats, running over the grounds of the Capitol, breaking through barriers and storming the steps, using all kinds of tools to break windows and force doors open, cheering and shouting like they were at a wrestling match.

I was sickened then, and I am sickened now, just thinking about it.

I’m also angry.

Nobody likes to lose. Every single person who runs for any office and loses feels it. I have heard candidates talk in retrospect about how they descended into a deep depression after a loss. I’m sure Donald Trump was depressed, but what he did with his anger and his depression is unconscionable.

He encouraged people to travel to Washington and to be ready to march to the White House. It was well-planned, and he was successful in getting people from all over the nation to do his bidding. He called them patriots. I called them thugs and traitors, and my categorization has not changed and will not.

They stormed the Capitol, beating police officers and breaking into the offices of lawmakers. They spread feces on the walls, and put their feet on the desks of lawmakers they didn’t like – and threatened to hang Vice President Pence. (https://dean.house.gov/2022/1/jan-6-capitol-insurrection-a-year-later-congress-members-reveal-details-of-their-escape)

One woman, Ashli Babbit, was shot by law enforcement as she was breaking a window (https://www.nbcnews.com/video/capitol-shooting-that-led-to-ashli-babbitt-s-death-captured-on-video-99180613572) and she is now hailed as a patriot and a hero by MAGA. She is neither.

The defeated president was in on it, and he sat for hours, watching the destruction on television before finally calling it off. He was hopeful that the violence would turn the tide on the election results, and he sat in front of a television, watching. He knew what the violence was about, and he waited with bated breath, hoping for his desired result for the outcome. “Will be wild,” he said in a tweet. (https://www.npr.org/2022/07/13/1111341161/how-trumps-will-be-wild-tweet-drew-rioters-to-the-capitol-on-jan-6)

He said then and he says now that it was a “day of love.” Hardly. It was a day that will “go down in infamy,” as destructive in its purpose as the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

I remember trembling with anger when I read that the administrator of the General Services Administration refused to sign a letter that authorized President Biden to have access to funds he would need to govern. Her name was Emily Murphy, and she refused to do her job. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-gsa-letter-biden-transition/2020/11/08/07093acc-21e9-11eb-8672-c281c7a2c96e_story.html)

There is so much that happened on January 6 and for the four years after Trump’s defeat that it is hard to remember it all and process it. But today, Vice President Kamala Harris is presiding over the election of Donald Trump, as Vice President Pence attempted to do four years ago, and the result is that a convicted felon will be president and will be working to put people in prison merely for being his political opponent.

It is sickening.

And equally sickening is the gathering of weak, wealthy white men, ready to ruin the lives of millions of Americans as they throw around their money and privilege. They will be working to take America “back” to a time they believed was better, when white men were in control and everyone else had to suck it up and do what they were told.

This is a bad day for America. I hope there are enough Americans who love having freedom and will fight with every bit of their energy. America is the laughingstock of the world, That, Mr. Trump, is the reality we are in right now. That is what you’ve done. God help us all.

A candid observation.

White Supremacy: America’s Incurable Virus

I learned early that having a virus was much more deadly than having a bacterial infection. The latter could be treated with antibiotics. On the other hand, There was no miracle drug for viral diseases. Viruses had to “work their way” out of our bodies.

I remember reading stories in Readers Digest about the predicaments of young children, many of them babies, falling ill and succumbing to viruses and I learned to fear them. Being sick was one thing; being sick but having no medicinal cure or treatment was quite another.

When my mother was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, I remember watching in horror as she suffered. Her cancer was treated with radiation and chemotherapy, and yet she remained sick and got worse. In the end, the disease won. Cancer consumed and killed her – and I remember thinking that cancer must be a virus because medicines could not kill it. At that time, it seemed that there was nothing effective enough to kill the seed or abnormality that caused it, and it refused to “work its way out” of affected bodies. To me, it was like a cold, only far worse. The difference is that the virus that causes head and chest colds can be forced out by consuming liquids and resting.

But there is no liquid, no tonic, that this country can consume that will push this hatred and bigotry out of the American political and sociological ecosystem Our country has a sociocultural belief system that behaves like a virus, carved out of the need to find justification for the treatment of Black people in this country. While that belief system was always in place, it seems to have gotten worse for white evangelicals twice: once after the end of the Civil War and during Reconstruction, and once again after the US Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v Board of Education that determined that “separate but equal” was unconstitutional.

Necessary for white people in this country to feel comfortable was for non-white people and women to “know their place.” White people determined themselves to be dominant. Black people, Native Americans, and women fell into lower categories. As long as these people did not rise against white authority or challenge white men in power, things were said to be going well.

But when, after slavery and during Reconstruction Black men were given the right to vote and did so, tipping the scales of power toward a more equitable society, those who had been in power began to wretch with fear and anger, and they rebelled. They intensified efforts to keep Black people under their control, creating Black Codes and Jim Crow laws, designed to put and keep things “back” to where they were “supposed” to be. That included taking away their right to vote.

I have not researched how prevalent was the fear of miscegenation when Black people were enslaved and white men raped Black women at will and were never held accountable. But what did happen was the “race mixing” they feared would happen between Black and white children as they railed against the 1954 US Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v Board of Education that “separate but equal” was unconstitutional.

Though the race mixing had already been put in motion by the actions of white men free to rape whomever they wanted, now, with Black and white children attending the same school, the issue of “race mixing” gained a seat in the front row of the American drama of race relations. The government was going against the will of God, who, some said, was the “original segregationist,” using selected scriptures from the Hebrew Bible including the story of Ham and the story of the Tower of Babel, among others. The government was breaking divine law in pushing for racial equality and an end to segregation anywhere, but especially in public schools. So enraged with the ruling were the people of the South that they intensified their fight against racial equality using their conception of God and their interpretation of the Bible as proof. In 1954, Rev. Carey Daniel of Dallas, TX preached a sermon entitled, “God, the Original Segregationist.”(https://crdl.usg.edu/record/usm_hmp_mus-m393-0031) Daniel and others posited that God intended for all races to live separately, which was why the Bible said that God created separate continents and scattered the people who were in the Tower of Babel. Had God intended the races to live together, God would have created the world’s geography in such a way that supported full equality of all. The government, they said, was encouraging people to go against God’s will.

What they did not mention in their diatribes was that it was they who had apparently gone against the will of God, as they were the ones who explored and “discovered” lands that non-white people already inhabited, took residents of those lands out of their country, and brought them to the Americas. The miscegenation they so feared had been begun by them.

This virus of white supremacy has so badly infected this country that it has spread, like the virus that caused COVID-19, around the world. The United States has created its own strain of white supremacy that it has taught to everyone in the world who, in turn, recognizes and uses it as a point of attack, and pounces on at every opportunity to weaken the country that has boasted that it is better than others.

Our enemies are quite familiar with our peculiar virus and have no qualms about attacking us at times when the virus rises up.

We are an infected country. The question is, “How do we address it? How do we get rid of the virus that is still swirling around in our national digestive system? We cannot pass laws that will get rid of it, nor is there a quick sociological fix. The virus has settled into the American DNA and is multiplying.

Will the virus work its way out of our national constitutional framework? Or will it finally dehydrate us as a nation and cause us to become so weak that we will be ripe for the enemies that want to overtake us?

A candid observation …

Who Will Pick the Strawberries?

Mass Deportation Will Affect the American Economy – or Will It?

During the General Election campaign of 2024, a person who appeared to be an immigrant asked the now president-elect who would do the work in the fields if he were elected, given his plan to implement mass deportations.

The president-elect did not answer the question directly, but it is clear that if or when the deportations take place, the American economy will take a big hit. According to Mike Madrid, a Latino GOP political consultant and a co-founder of the Lincoln Project, the planned deportations would have a devastating effect on the American economy.

The American Immigration Council estimates that the cost to the economy could be over $315 billion, and that figure is thought to be very conservative. (https://www.fresnobee.com/news/politics-government/article294848924.html)

person in gray hoodie holding green and brown carton — Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

But it is hard to believe that the creators of Project 2025 have not already figured in the toll on the economy if immigrants are seized and either deported or thrown into detention camps.

Those who have salivated for this crackdown on the presence of immigrants in this country have certainly looked back and studied how after slavery was outlawed. Following the Emancipation Proclamation, the powers that be found a new way to use African and African American bodies to continue to do the work that created this economy, not as enslaved persons, but as criminals, whose sentence was to work in agriculture, companies, and corporations and not get paid.

Slavery was prohibited except in instances where Black people had committed a crime, according to the 13^th Amendment. The work, then, was to get people arrested – making them criminals – and then enslaving them legally. People of African descent were arrested and jailed for things like vagrancy, breaking curfew, walking on the wrong side of the street, and not having a job.

There is no reason to believe that the Project 2025 authors and supporters of the policy it has proposed have not already figured out how to use immigrant labor while simultaneously keeping them detained, denying them rights even if they are American citizens, and doing it all by taking away their independence and keeping them dependent on the government for food, water, and shelter, which in effect would become their “pay.”

Just as Black people were re-enslaved following the Emancipation Proclamation, immigrant labor will be used to continue to use immigrant labor, using new techniques, thereby quieting the segment of the population that wants those who are here to be deported, but who would welcome their labor under government control.

In 2023, 18 percent of the economy was built by the labor of an estimated 31 million immigrants. There is no way this country is going to stop using their labor; they will, or perhaps have already figured out how to continue to use their labor. (https://www.cfr.org/in-brief/how-does-immigration-affect-us-economy#:~:text=A%20total%20of%20thirty%2Done,percent%20of%20the%20civilian%20workforce.)

Some, perhaps most Americans are not aware of Convict Leasing (which is what was being practiced after the Emancipation Proclamation), a system that resulted in freed Blacks working for a corporation or business for the rest of their lives with no pay or benefits, and dying before their “sentences” were completed. That’s because the justice system found ways to raise their fines and therefore extend their sentences for doing the work that nobody else wanted to do, and not get paid. Many died while in the jaws of a racist but greedy government that needed free Black labor to grow the American economy. Some former slave owners were paid up to $300 for every Black person they freed. The re-enslavement of black people was a money-making operation for everyone except Black people.

It was called, according to the book by Douglas Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name, and it lasted for eight decades.

Immigrants do much of the work that makes life comfortable for Americans, including picking strawberries and lettuce and other fruits and vegetables we never doubt we will see in grocery stores. They paint houses and repair roofs for companies and receive a pittance of what those jobs are worth. They do much and have done much to build this economy, and there is no way the companies, families, and businesses that use them are going to let them go.

Those who are not deported but are relegated to detention camps will be the new captives, perhaps not giving as much a boost to the Prison Industrial Complex as did the criminalization of Blacks, but certainly contributing to a new system of oppression that will allow the development of a new economic project that will keep this economy alive at the expense of hard-working people, who have never been appreciated.

Some think that talking about the effects of mass deportation is hyperbole, and do not believe that America would resort to such callous treatment of human beings, but they reveal a lack of knowledge of American history. This political system built camps and detained over 100,000 Japanese following World War II. Jesuits were permitted by the Roman Catholic Church and this country to build boarding schools for Native American children, separating them from their families because, they said, they wanted to “civilize” the children – i.e., make them more like their oppressors. They were treated horribly at these schools as they were prohibited from learning about their culture and being beaten for many things, including speaking in their native tongue.

Right now, the American government is considering the purchase of 4100 acres in Texas to build a detention center for immigrants.( https://www.texastribune.org/2024/11/19/texas-border-starr-county-ranch-trump-deportation/)

Who will pick the strawberries? We need not worry. This government has a track record of figuring out how to get what it wants from the labor of people it does not consider or want to be considered to be Americans.

It is part of the American political tradition, a step back to “make America great again.”