Voting for Obama

I got the most interesting letter in the mail today. It was from a woman whom I do not know; she included in the envelope a piece written about President Obama by Ed Lasky entitled, “The Amateur: Barack Obama in the White House.” The article was, of course, in reference to Ed Klein‘s new book by the same title.

The woman typed, “I doubt that you will read this, but really, you should. Then you will understand we have reasons NOT to vote for this man, then and now, and it has absolutely NOTHING to do with race.”

In her letter, she excoriated the president for his policies; “with all due respect,” she wrote, “poverty, education costs, affordable housing and unemployment have all been made WORSE by President Obama.” She wrote that President Obama and the Democrats “forced Obamacare on this nation against the will of the people”…and accused me and others of voting for the president only because he is black…and those of us who did that, she said, “are racist.”

She angrily says people have “acquiesced to the gay marriage issue because you don’t want to lose all of the “free” stuff you get from the Democrats! You are willing to let this President and the liberals throw away the foundation of societal structure we’ve known for thousands of years (sic) to get more free stuff???? I am outraged!” she wrote.

Well, now.

I think she’s right: things have gotten worse since the president took office, but not only because of his policies. I think “the Congress of no” has had a lot to do with where we are and are not. The economy was in free fall when Mr. Obama came into office, because of the policies of President Bush. President Obama had the unsavory task of trying to get the lumps out of the gravy, so to speak, and his job was made all the more difficult by a Congress which has refused to work with him.

For the life of me, I cannot understand why people say that President Obama has been against big business. It seems to me, with all the bailing out of banks “too big to fail” that the president made their lives pretty comfortable, so much so that they have gone back to operating pretty much in the way that helped get us into this mess. The President has done some spending that jacked up the deficit – to save and to protect people who were out of work with no income at all. They needed to survive and there were no jobs. One might not like that fact, but it was and is the truth.

The President has scurried to help the “new poor,” as the middle class, as we have always known it, has continually diminished. While bank executives have gotten huge bonuses, people who used to be comfortable are now scrambling to survive – hence, the “Occupy Wall Street” movement. The chasm between the “haves” and the “have-nots” has only widened – that, too, under Mr. Obama’s presidency.

The woman who wrote me criticized black people for always voting for Democrats. She notes that Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Great Society” has only managed to reduce poverty by 4 percent, after spending $16 trillion. That is quite definitely a sorry report …but has Ronald Reagan’s policy of “trickle down economics” helped the poor and “the least of these?” The spirit of the letter is that if we blacks would get our heads out of the sand and stop voting for Democrats, the country would be better off…but we are unable to see or understand that.

The truth is, people vote for the party they perceive to have their interests at heart. It does not appear, nor has it appeared to have been the case in a long time, that Republicans have the interest of black, brown and poor people…at heart. If you look at the recent Republican campaign for the GOP presidential nomination, none of the candidates seemed particularly interested in the plights of black, brown and poor people. Heck, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich basically said that black people want to be on welfare. Their presidencies, they promised, would create a world where black people had jobs. That would be nice – and it would be nice if the jobs were more than menial jobs, so those working could support their families, but alas, history has shown that Republicans have not appeared to be all that interested in creating an America with a more level playing field; Republicans have sort of blamed the victims of discrimination for their plight.

That’s like blaming a rape victim for being raped.

That’s not to say that there haven’t been some good things done by Republicans for black and brown people (not so much poor people…) The most obvious feather for the Republicans is Abraham Lincoln. President Eisenhower mandated that segregation in federal employment be ended,but come on, have Republicans really showed much heart or concern for any group other than white people? It wasn’t a Republican, but a Democrat, Harry Truman, who made the United States military desegregate. If the truth be told, both Republicans and Democrats alike have been pretty silent on the conditions that help keep black, brown and poor people in the status of second-class citizens. Neither a Republican nor a Democrat got legislation passed that outlawed lynching. Historically, in spite of laws mandating integration of schools, for example, or outlawing segregation of the military, people, Republican and Democrat, have found ways to get around the laws and keep things “as they have always been.”

It was probably Franklin Delano Roosevelt who started the love affair between African-Americans and the Democrats, with his New Deal. If that period of history is examined closely, we can see that it wasn’t all that “new” or a good “deal” for many blacks, but there were enough blacks helped that it gave the perception that Democrats care about them. All people, no matter color, ethnicity, sexual orientation or gender, want and need to feel like their government cares about them.

I will vote for Mr. Obama not because he is black but because I have more faith that he cares about me, an African-American woman, and my children, and all black, brown and poor people than I have that faith about Mr. Romney. I do not think Mr. Romney is a bad man. He is obviously a brilliant and talented businessman. But at the end of the day, there are more than successful white businessmen who make up America. There are 46 million poor people. There are women and Hispanics and Muslims and black people…who need to be considered and cared for. There are people who cannot pay their rent or mortgages and do not want welfare or food stamps, but want a viable job with a working wage. There are people who need the government to step up for all of the people, not just some of the people, as has been the case with both Republican and Democratic presidents.

This is not about race. This is about human dignity.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson said that civil unrest has always erupted when people have felt humiliated. It’s not been poverty or even racism that has made tempers explode; it has been the perception that they has a people have been humiliated one time too many. Blacks, he said, have adjusted to being terrorized in this country…but even those who have adjusted, just to get by, have a breaking point.

I am voting for President Obama because I don’t want people to get to a breaking point. The lady who wrote me, ironically, worries about “riots in the streets” like there’s been in Greece. We are worried about the same thing, but for different reasons.

I am not sure President Obama or Mitt Romney can quell the unrest that is simmering in this country, but for me, I’ll put my money on the president.

A candid observation …

The President and his Evolution

Much has been made of President Obama’s “evolution” as concerns his belief that same-sex marriages ought to be allowed.

What is the big deal? All of us have evolved when it comes to this issue.

We grew up, even same-gender loving people, in a society where homosexuality was nearly universally decried as the most horrible thing in the world. We grew up where in a time where families either kept the reality of a homosexual child a secret, or where families disowned their own children when their homosexuality was revealed.

We grew up during a time where some of our parents were homosexual but didn’t dare mention or admit it.

Ours was a time where homosexual individuals kept their sexuality a secret, many marrying and having children, not daring to “come out.” People in the highest places were rumored to be gay, but nobody dared admit it publicly.

We grew up in a time where it was not unusual to hear homosexuals referred to as “fags” or worse. Bullying of gay people was accepted and generally ignored. Ours was a time when even the youngest children, who realized they were gay, chose to live lives of quiet desperation rather than lose friends and family.

And we grew up in a time when religion participated in the cover-up.

The quiet and steady persistence of gay individuals, pushing for their right to exist as full-fledged Americans, with all of the liberties and rights accorded to American citizens, has brought us to this day. The LGBT community, in spite of being deeply hurt and discriminated against, pushed against the Goliath called homophobia, and brought an awareness to our society that our society had long run from. And as they have pushed, Americans have “evolved” in their thinking.

There was a time when the killing of gay people was not really a big thing, and the suicides of gays was not much talked about. There was only moderate outrage over the murder of Matthew Shepard. It was OK to discriminate against gays in employment; openly gay children were kept out of camps, out of school activities …and nobody said a thing. Many churches have been unflinching in their hatred of gays (though they will not say it’s hatred), reminding gay individuals that they, according to the Bible, are an “abomination” to God.

Some people participated fully in the horrific treatment of gays, and others were silent. They were “evolving.” They were considering not only their own beliefs, but how their lives would be impacted if they stepped up and said something to the effect that such treatment of fellow human being was, well, just wrong.

And now, those who have “evolved” – and that would be all of us – are speaking up and speaking out.

President Obama, I believe, did the right thing by stating his support of gay marriage. He did not say he was making if a federal policy; he is leaving the decision of whether or not a state will allow gay marriage up to the states – but he was absolutely right in what he did. He is a public servant, not a pastor. He is bound to live by and follow the U.S. Constitution and our other illustrious documents, which say that “all men are created equal.” Those words have been at the base of getting rights for African-Americans, women, and other groups who have been discriminated against by government. Government is supposed to be “of the people, by the people and for the people,” and the president did exactly as he should have as the highest ranking and most powerful public servant in this country, and the most powerful man in the world.

In our history, too many presidents have been mum on issues of discrimination – racial, sexual and otherwise. They have been politicians par excellence, and have put the desire for votes above and ahead of their duty to make life more equitable and bearable for all Americans.

This president has stepped up. What he did was morally right. What he said does not, will not and should not change one’s theology; theological beliefs come from a different source, as well they should. But what he said has made a group of people who have too long been discriminated against feel their validity and value as Americans is finally being recognized.

This is “change.” Some can believe in it, and some cannot, but that’s the nature of change.

A candid observation.

Wikipedia: LGBT is an initialism that collectively refers to the “lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender” community. →

Debulk the Congress?

I wonder what America would be like if it were “debulked” of its political system, or, more specifically, of its Congress?

I just picked up the term, “debulk,” while reading a review of a book, Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer, by Susan Gubar. The review, written by Elsa Dixler and which appeared in The New York Times Book Review this week, describes debulking as “evisceration or vivisection or disembowelment, but performed on a live human being.” Gubar, a feminist scholar who describes her bout with ovarian cancer in the reviewed book, underwent surgery to be “debulked” after her cancer was discovered. This surgery involves trying to get out as much of the cancerous tissue by taking as much of it out as possible, as well as affected organs. The operation, said the article, is thought to extend the life of the cancer patient, but does not cure the disease.

I thought of the term as I listened to a news report about the senate race in Indiana, where veteran Republican Senator Dick Lugar is being challenged by a Tea Party opponent, Richard Mourdock, who is apparently going after Lugar mostly for his ability and record to have “reached across the aisle” to reach compromise in his role as a legislator of this country. Lugar is the nation’s longest-serving Republican senator.

There seems that the lack of desire to compromise is at the core of this nation’s political gut, and it spreads, or has spread, an ugly spirit throughout the nation. If I understand the lessons of my elementary, middle and high school civics classes, the three branches of government were put into place so as to prevent the monopoly of any political party or individual in terms of policy or ideology, thereby assuring a more fair government for “we the people,” as opposed to for “we, some of the people.” Compromise helps that ideal to be realized, right?

The desire for compromise, however, has been viciously opposed. Reluctance to compromise has been at our core for a while but it has gotten so much worse since 2008, and the vitriol which has accompanied it has seemingly metastasized in mammoth proportions. Our nation’s Congress has argued and quibbled over the most basic things, at the expense of the country,and the refusal to compromise and look for common ground has created a rancid atmosphere of political disease which really threatens the very life of this nation.

This diseased body politic is completely impotent to deal with our nation’s issues. All that it has done for the past four years is stirred the pots of its own dysfunction, despite rhetoric that it is concerned with “the American people.” Which American people would that be? The 42 million who live in poverty? The women whose health care needs are being threatened by disastrous policies? The students whose student loan debt is keeping them in perpetual debt?

What if the nation were debulked of its Congress? What if all three branches of government were excised, as it were, and a whole new set of legislators and jurists were put into place, along with a new executive branch? Maybe what has happened is that the Congress has been diseased by members having been in place for too long. Doctors say that much cancer comes from bad diets and lack of exercise. Maybe the Congress became cancerous a while ago, because of inaction and resultant complacency. Maybe the Congress needs to be debulked, and the government needs some political chemotherapy, to rid the nation of any residual ideology which results in such impassivity and rancor.

Like the treatment for ovarian cancer, the debulking will not cure the disease…but it may prolong the life of these United States.

A candid observation…

Girl Talk: After Divorce

It hit me that we girls don’t talk a lot about something that happens when we go through divorce: people we used to be friends with stop talking to us.

I have been divorced for many years, but I can still remember when, after the divorce was final, how the friends I thought I had stopped inviting me to their houses, to their parties and picnics. Friends with whom both my husband and I had shared really precious times sort of, it seemed, erased me from their lives.

It wasn’t only friends, either. It was people like the guy who had been keeping our furnace and air conditioner in shape for years. All of a sudden, when I’d call him, he wasn’t available. No matter how many times I called, he never called back.

Needless to say, some of the people in the church regarded me as a sinful woman. I was a pastor, after all. How in the world could I be trusted to preach to my people, and even more be trusted to give marital and pre-marital counseling, when obviously, I was lacking in character and in knowing how to keep a man?

I couldn’t figure it out. Some friends who were divorced stop speaking, but more, it was friends, my lady friends, who were NOT divorced whose silence and distance puzzled me. Was it because I was now viewed as a threat? Were they afraid that my failure as a wife was somehow contagious, and that they would get “the illness” if they remained close? I only ask because years after the divorce, some of those friends, all of whom are now divorced themselves, have been gingerly moving back toward me, making contact.

Seriously?

As I have listened to women over the years go through divorce, I realize that it isn’t just me; too many women have the same story, but it would be great if we women wouldn’t back away from each other at such an awful time. It’s precisely at times like that, when your life is falling apart and the ground on which you’ve always stood falls from under your feet – no, more accurately, crumbles as you stand there, that you need your sister friends most.

I ached as I read the story of how the late Elizabeth Edwards, betrayed by her husband, was so crushed by his affair that she yelled at him in public and bared her chest, which showed the scars of breast cancer. How horrible for her to feel that depth of pain! I found myself wondering if her pain was exacerbated by friends who simply disappeared as she and her husband went through their pain, oh so publicly.

I don’t know what it is about us that makes us shy away from each other in critical moments, any more than I understand why we so often stab each other in the heart and/or back when it comes to getting a mate, but I can say that, during divorce, the friend who is real is the friend who sticks with you through it all.

A candid observation …

O God, Where Art Thou?

If, as Ross Douthat says in his new book, Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics, “at the deepest level, every human culture is religious,” then what in the world is wrong with this world?

Religion supposedly gives us as individuals, the guide for living moral and right lives; almost every religion teaches that love is central to all things good. Religion teaches us, supposedly, that we as human beings created by an Other greater than ourselves, are mandated to treat each other as worthy of love and respect. Most of them teach that we are to forgive each other, we are to love even our enemies, we are to know that because we believe in God, however any given religion refers to that entity, that we are held to a higher standard.

And yet, the world is messed up, filled with way too many humans who are self-serving, and not service-oriented. In spite of the mandate to love each other, we use and manipulate each other and take advantage of each other whenever we can.

Dr. Martin Luther King mentioned, over 40 years ago, that the presence of materialism, militarism and racism were problems in American society which were eating away at the moral fiber of this nation, but it often seems like the moral fiber was skewed from the beginning.

Because capitalism and the free market system presupposes that some people will “have” and others will not have, there has been built-in, not only in American culture but in dominant cultures throughout history. Religious people throughout the Bible lived under economic and social oppression – from Egyptian oppression, to Assyrian, then Babylonian, Persian and finally Roman. In spite of a “living God,” people have dismissed the precepts and requirements of God continually.

So, it should not be surprising, what’s going on today. The history of the world is one of division and conquest; militarism in order to support imperialism; capitalism trumping over anything that might be called socialism, or an economic system which in theory makes sure less economic oppression is possible. There has been racism historically; America has her own unique racism, but in the Bible, the Greeks and the Hebrews didn’t get along; in early American history, the Italians and the Irish didn’t get along. Nations, including Germany and Bosnia and Africa has been a part of human history.

And my questions are two: ” Why?” and “God, where are you?”

I don’t think I have a fairy-tale expectation of God, but I am rather surprised that this God who made everything and everyone has not been able to do something drastic to make people act more civilly toward each other. I am surprised that God has allowed such horrible interactions between people He created. Dietrich Bonhoeffer is said to have said, “God put us on earth so we could learn to live without God.” Whatever for?

I have watched and listened with quiet horror and dismay the goings on surrounding the Trayvon Martin case. I have been irritated by the lack of people understanding the desire of another people to simply want justice for a child gunned down. I have listened to snide comments by people who most likely believe in God…and yet, there has been no “religious tolerance” or even an inkling of the type of love demanded of us by God.

Douthat says that in America, religion has been “steadily marginalized.” It seems that for many, the “rightful place” of religion is at a conservative core which has a fairly arrogant and exclusive of who is American and who is rightly religious. It would seem that few conservatives understand that for many non-white Americans, religion has been marginalized from the beginning. So many non-whites have been cast aside by “the religious” of this country, with the words of the Bible being used to justify such treatment.

The words of scripture have been used to justify everything from sexism to racism to militarism to materialism, to homophobia. God has allowed a sizeable portion of people He created to be marginalized in his name.

The answer to my query, “God, where are you?” would be succinctly and perhaps tritely answered in a nice, short sentence. “God is not absent; God is within us.” Seriously? Well, then, have we all tucked God away? Have we put God in a safe room, to keep him/her quiet until a moment of personal need or crisis?

Obery Hendricks, in his book The Politics of Jesus, argues that the Jesus of the Christians mandates that we “treat the needs of people as holy,” but we clearly do not do that. We don’t as individuals, we don’t as a nation, and the world doesn’t in general.

Christopher Hitchens, an avowed atheist, says that “religion poisons everything.” If that is true, then why is it? Could it be that in spite of claiming to be religious, that we religious types are really quite secular with religious leanings when needed? Could it be that it is because we really do not take God seriously, but know enough to use God when it suits our purposes?

I hold onto God, with every fiber of my being, because…because I need to. I hold onto God because I truly do believe in God’s creative genius. The world and all that is in it fascinates me, and though I attribute the accomplishments of science, I honor more the creative God who made the minds that made such accomplishments possible.

But I am disappointed with God as well, because I so dislike the state of this world full of religious people. There is enough food that nobody need be hungry; there are enough abandoned homes that banks could invest in so that nobody need be homeless. I am not pushing socialism; I am pushing mere humanity, a sufficient amount of which the world seems to lack. I cannot believe that God is pleased …and yet God does nothing.

I am not going to abandon God, though I feel like I turn from religion in a heartbeat sometimes. At the end of the day, God is the best answer, in my mind, for a world in which we as humans treat the needs of each other as holy, as Hendricks says, though historically, we have just never done it.

A candid observation …