learning to face the horror of this day like the trees...

Only the most naive - or untested - among us honestly believed that the US Senate would convict President Trump of high crimes and misdemeanors. We may have quietly dreamed that a miracle of conscience would prevail. Or at the very least, that a few witnesses, including John Bolton, would be allowed to testify. But in the dark recesses of our hearts we understood what it meant for Republicans to hold a numerical majority in the Senate: justice would cynically be thwarted in order to give the current regime a pass. But something worse than cynicism has taken root in the Republican Party. The Reverend Dr. William Barber called it the frightening triumph of white Southern justice in the US Senate:

On Wednesday last week, before the House managers began their opening statement in the impeachment trial of Donald J Trump, the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, stood by his desk on the Senate floor and conferred at length with the White House counsel, Pat Cipollone. When the Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, noticed their excited gestures from across the aisle, he cupped a hand to his ear and made a show of trying to listen in. Members of the media who were confined to the press gallery took note and chuckled. The acquittal Trump has demanded of Senate Republicans was all but assured, and McConnell felt no need to pretend impartiality. But the corruption that is regularly laughed off in our age of political cynicism makes me shudder – not least as the son of civil rights activists who risked their lives to expand American democracy in the 20th century. The coordinated cover-up we are witnessing as 53 senators conspire to facilitate Trump’s obstruction of Congress is deeply troubling to anyone who knows the long history of southern courthouses where district attorneys openly coordinated with all-white juries and corrupt judges to cover up acts of racial terror. With patience and decorum, Mitch McConnell has brought southern justice to the US Senate.

(https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/31/impeachment-trial-our-democracy-is-fragile-black-americans)

In my later years I have tried to avoid hyperbole. I also want to give others the benefit of the doubt. That said, it is clear to me that Mitch McConnell has perfected the cruel art of bullying and bargaining with his members to insure that they stay in-line. Further, he does this so that he and his Republican colleagues can continue to ride the juggernaut of fear-mongering, race baiting, and slander they first began to craft during the Goldwater and Nixon campaigns and perfected during the Reagan/Bush years. This Southern Strategy tapped into white racial fears that dominated the American South for 100 years after Reconstruction and were rekindled during the civil rights era. Republican strategist, Kevin Philips, put it like this in a 1970 NY Times interview:

From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don't need any more than that... but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That's where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.

It is not an accident that in 1981 Ronald Reagan campaigned at the Neshoba County Fair just outside of Philadelphia, MS. In 1964, civil rights workers Goodman, Scherner and Channey were murdered there by the Klan for trying to register African-American voters. Fifteen years later, Reagan's handlers knew that by simply appearing at this fair - let alone saying that he supported states' rights - their candidate would communicate solidarity with the Klan's agenda. It was just one of a host of "dog whistle" tactics that Lee Atwater and others used to advance the cause of Reagan and then Bush-1. You may remember the threatening Willie Horton ads? (If not, Google them!) Atwater, thinking he was off-the-record in a 1981 interview that was eventually published by Southern Politics magazine in the 1990s, was unequivocal:

As to the whole Southern strategy that Harry Dent and others put together in 1968, opposition to the Voting Rights Act would have been a central part of keeping the South. Now [Reagan] doesn't have to do that. . You started out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger" — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about (now) are totally economic things... I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger, nigger."(Lamis, Alexander P. (1999). Southern Politics in the 1990s. Louisiana State University Press. pp. 7–8. ISBN 978-0-8071-2374-4)

To maintain power in 2020, the Trump base needs red meat and circus to keep it engaged. That's what the President's rallies accomplish: they whip true believers into a frothy rage and give the Liar-in-Chief a chance to strut his pathetic stuff. It is showbiz for the faithful and narcissistic pandering for the President. The rest of the Republican party, however, understands that they must turn out just enough swing voters in white, working class areas of the Rust Belt and the so-called Fly Over States to tip the Electoral College in their favor. The Republican Party of 2020 is a white nationalist institution. Small wonder we see McConnell persuading Lamar Alexander to waffle on his principles in order to: 1) keep Tennessee in play, and 2) give Susan Collins of Maine a pass to look righteous when it doesn't really count. Constitutional scholar, Heather Cox Richardson, joined Brother Barber in lamenting these vulgar Southern justice manipulations:

Few people thought the Republican-controlled Senate would convict the president, but I, anyway, thought they would acquit him after continu-ing to argue he was innocent. Instead, they have done something shocking. They have conceded that Trump did what he is accused of: he tried to smear his rival so he could win reelection in 2020, in a scheme that both apparently broke laws and also looks quite like what happened in 2016. But, they say, his actions do not constitute an impeachable offense...Trump, of course, has already said that the Constitution gives him “the right to do whatever I want,” and Senate Republicans have now agreed. As the president’s lawyers made claims for his expansive power during the Senate trial, House impeachment manager Adam Schiff warned that we are witnessing “a descent into constitutional madness.” When will Trump ask another leader for a favor? What will he withhold or offer in return? What will he do to cheat in 2020? How will he undercut his opponent? To which countries will he turn for help to win reelection? It is not in his make up to be chastened; rather, he will be emboldened. Trade deals, treaties, the use of our soldiers, cyber-warfare from Russia or Saudi Arabia… it is now all on the table. 

In my soul, I believe today to be an ugly and troubling one on a host of fronts: Brexit is now in full-tilt boogie mode, Australia is on fire - again, the so-called Trump Middle East Peace Plan is a total disaster for both Israel and Palestine, the border wall is falling over in Mexico, and a new immigrant ban is being raised-up as more red meat just before the State of the Union address. In so many ways, the triumph today of Southern racial justice adds insult to injury for all who seek to honor truth, democracy, civil rights and simple human decency. In this morning's NY Times, David Brooks put it like this:

Men and women are primarily motivated by self-interest. No other partial truth has done as much damage as this one. If you base your political and social systems on the idea that the autonomous self-interested individual is the basic unit of society, then you will wind up with an individualistic culture that widens the maneuvering room between people but shreds the relationships and community between people.Populists on the right and the left look at this current reality and they come to a swift conclusion: The game is rigged! Liberalism is a con! Then they come to a different conclusion. The essential logic of society is not actually individuals seeking their self-interest. It’s groups struggling for power. Society is an arena where certain groups crush other groups... On the Trumpian right it’s the coastal cultural elite trying to crush and delegitimize the white Christian patriots of the heartland. On the cultural left it’s the whole Michel Foucault legacy. Language is a tool the oppressor class uses to permanently marginalize the oppressed. On the economic left it’s the Bernie Sanders class war. The greedy capitalist class rigs the system and immiserates the working class.

So what do we do? Slink away and lick our wounds? Give in to the cynical racist populism of the status quo and find ways to make it work for our side? Focus only on inner spiritual peace? Get ripped? Binge watch "The Sopranos" one more time?  Let me suggest an alternative - well, maybe two. The first involves some honest perspective. Ezra Klein, founder of Vox.com, reminds us in his new book, Why We're Polarized, that:

The era that we often hold up as the golden age of American democracy was far less democratic, far less liberal, far less decent, than today. Trump’s most intemperate outbursts, his most offensive musings, pale before opinions that were mainstream in recent history. And the institutions of American politics today are a vast improvement on the regimes that ruled well within living memory. If we can do a bit better tomorrow, we will be doing much, much better than we have ever done before.

So let us call-out the Republican white nationalism that carried the day in the Senate this evening. Let us own it and never forget it. And then let us set our hearts and minds on what really counts: building community. David Brooks continues:

Human beings didn’t evolve into the world’s dominant species because we are more autonomous. We didn’t do it because we’re more vicious in tooth and claw. We thrived as a species because we are better at cooperation. We evolved complex social networks in our brains to make us better at bonding, teaching and collaborating. We don’t cooperate only to get things we want individually. Often, we collaborate to build shared environments we can enjoy together. Often, we pick a challenge just so we can have the joy of collaborating. Relationships are ends to themselves. Thus, the best future for American politics is not based on individual competition or group war. It’s based on this narrative: We are an incredibly diverse society that got good at collaboration because we had to. The best future politics puts collaborative pluralism, weaving, at the center.

Perspective and some deep breathing is alternative number one. The second has to do with watching, listening and honoring the rhythm of nature as a mentor in this struggle for community. The poet-singer-activist, Carrie Newcomer, put it like this in a poem she calls, "Making Sense," that resonates with everything I know to be sacred as the right next step.

Finding what makes sense
In senseless times
Takes grounding
Sometimes quite literally
In the two inches of humus
Faithful recreating itself
Every hundred years.
It takes steadying oneself
Upon shale and clay and solid rock
Swearing allegiance to an ageless aquifer
Betting on all the still hidden springs.

You can believe in a tree,
With its broad-leafed perspective,
Dedicated to breathing in, and then out,
Reaching down, and then up,
Drinking in a goodness above and below
It’s splayed and mossy feet.
You can trust a tree’s careful
and drawn out way
of speaking.
One thoughtful sentence, covering the span of many seasons.

A tree doesn’t hurry, it doesn’t lie,
It knows how to stand true to itself
Unselfconscious of its beauty and scars,
And all the physical signs of where and when
It needed to bend,
Rather than break.
A tree stands solitary and yet in deepest communion,
For in the gathering of the many,
There is comfort and courage,
Perseverance and protection,
From the storms that howl down from predictable
Or unexplainable directions.

In a senseless time
Hold close to what never stopped
Making sense.
Like love
Like trees
Like how a seed becomes a branch
And compost becomes seedlings again.
Like the scent at the very top of an infant’s head
Because there is nothing more right than that. Nothing.
It is all still happening
Even now.
Even now. 

Most of us white, bourgeois intellectuals aren't very good at waiting. Or learning from Mother Nature. Or collaborating. Or taking our cues from those who have been beaten down so long it all looks like up to them. But if EVER there was a time to get out of our own way and relearn how to rebuild our community from the ground up, it is now. I hate today - and I paradoxically give thanks to God for it so that we might strengthen our tender hearts from the inside out and "hold close what has never stopped making sense: like love, like trees" and all the rest. Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayer.