#RevThread #111b
Our Esther
1/ In such a time as this, I want to honor Dr. Ford. What has happened to her is simply not right. She came forward to protect our country and she was trashed by Republican bullies and dropped by the media and is now just kicked aside.
Our Esther
1/ In such a time as this, I want to honor Dr. Ford. What has happened to her is simply not right. She came forward to protect our country and she was trashed by Republican bullies and dropped by the media and is now just kicked aside.
2/ Dr. Christine Blasey Ford became another of the Trumpsters’ scapegoats.
3/ To me, someone who comes forward with good motive to attest carefully and truthfully about a danger to the nation is a patriot.
4/ Dr. Ford is our Esther. So I re-read Esther. It’s a story of misogyny run amok, of women as toys, of a fickle autocrat in his glorious tower with his harem and his eunuchs, of scheming courtiers competing in their flattery...
5/.. Against all that power there is a quiet young woman, an orphan, a nobody, who is befriended by and taken into the home of a kind Rabbi. Mordecai’s family raises her...
6/..Meanwhile, when the king so insults his wife of the moment that she refuses his drunken command to parade herself before his courtiers, the king gives her the heave-ho. The search for the trophy wife begins.
7/ The king then holds a beauty contest--a Miss Universe pageant if you like--in which the king is the judge. Esther wins. She becomes Queen Esther.
8/ The king’s main advisor is a fierce, alt-right kind of guy, an anti-semite the king considers "very fine people".The king, needing a boost, decides to unify the land by doing a holocaust, scapegoating the “others,” the Jews, who are ruining the land.
9/ Esther has kept silent about herself as a Jewish person. Whether as orphan or as queen she has been discounted as a human being and survived by doing what she has been told by men of power...
10/.. But now all her people are being endangered through the reckless act of a stupid king and the evil intent of his chief of staff.
11/ If she says she’s a Jew, she could be not only discarded, like the previous Queen, but killed like all the Jews.
12/ Esther carefully sets a time when she can give a feast for the king and his aide, and at the right time, she speaks to the king. She describes Haman the counsellor’s misdeeds and then asks, “How can I bear to see the calamity that is coming to my people?”
13/ In the Bible, when Haman’s evil is disclosed and the Jew’s plight is presented, the king repents, saves the Jews, respects his new queen, and promotes the Rabbi to be his chief of staff. These events become the basis of the Jewish holiday of Purim.
14/ In Trumplandia, in such a time as this, when the woman who courageously tries to protect the people speaks, Republicans cast her aside;
15/...the debauched worship of White Male Superiority is upheld; and the reckless head of state keeps exulting in the apparently limitless power his worship of Mammon gives him.
16/ And it’s not just current Republican leadership that roared its approval of destroying a brave woman. It’s the Republican public who love the misogyny.
17/ Trump and his nominee may have won this round. Still, I note that the book is called Esther, that thousands of years later Esther’s name is given to baby girls as a sign of integrity, hope, and courage.
18/ So then what can we learn from our Esther, from Christine? What has she showed us?
19/ We too can have integrity. When we tell the truth about ourselves, we always inspire. We can simultaneously be very afraid and still speak slowly, carefully, and accurately. Even as we face hostility, we can try to help the process of justice without returning hostility.
20/ Thank you, Christine. As more time passes, the rest of the horrors of Trumplandia will emerge, and your character and your testimony will shine out even more brightly against the dark backdrop of this appalling administration.
