My Worst Nightmare

A friend commented on yesterday’s blog,  The Growing Tinge of the Sinister: “What really bothers me—something I cannot understand—is why some of the Trump supporters I know, learned, respectable citizens of our community, do not speak out against this.”  I am as “bothered” as my friend and feel the same frustration and bewilderment.  How can respectable citizens, religious (Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, etc.) and educated members of our communities be silent, or not care, or not be disturbed by the President of the United States saying the things the current holder of that office says?  Where is the outrage?  Where are those “family values” religious folk of a few years ago?  What about the moral majority?  Where are the churches and the temples and the synagogues?  Where are the “Bible-pounding” preachers of righteousness?  What happened to the so-called “Jesus People” who supposedly loved everyone? Where are the prophets of justice?  Peter, Paul and Mary sang some years ago, “Where have all the flowers gone?” and today I’m wondering the same thing.  

My mentor, D. Elton Trueblood, wrote:  “The worst nightmare is not the disappearance of Christianity (the teachings of Jesus), but its continued existence on a low level.”   Are we now living “the worst nightmare” of a democracy?  Is the American Dream, like the the Christian faith, existing at its lowest level?  Both were meant to be so much more! 

When the Second Amendment becomes more important than the First Amendment our democracy is already existing at one of its lowest levels ever.  When the media, the press, is called “the enemy of the people,” or “fake news,” and the president says he has “a running war with the media” and calls reporters “among the most dishonest human beings on earth,” and praises a Republican Representative to Congress for body slamming a reporter, he is undermining the First Amendment he vowed to protect.

The writers of the Constitution announced that all men (people) were created equal, but it took the 14th, 15th, and 19th Amendments to make that dream reality.  But when the president refers to an African-American as having a “low-IQ,” and to a woman as “crude, obnoxious, and dumb,” and to those who kneel in protest during the national anthem as “S.O.B’s,” it is clear to me that our democracy is now existing at its lowest level.  Why others can’t see this, I do not know.  Perhaps it is because we have entered into the “worst nightmare” when the respectable, learned, religious citizens cease to care, remain silent, and in some cases actually subscribe to this “lower level” in spite of their respectability, religiosity, and education.

Where have all the flowers gone?