Thread by @jeffblack945

#RevThread # 2021/1
Lurking

1/There’s a pond between our home and the cemetery. Just now it’s white, four inches of new snow sitting atop the ice. I don’t let our big collie get on the pond,...

2/.. because just below the ice is a current, and because if he broke through, I couldn’t get him out. Plus, there are good sized snapping turtles, otters, and other critters all about. Stuff lurks.

3/ There’s lots of coverage of our politics at the moment, as Trump thrashes about and Repubs struggle with senate seats in Georgia…. yada, yada. But there’s an undercurrent -- powerful, dangerous, permanent.

4/ We have our surface beauty, much like the snow-covered pines that surround our pond. It’s the Declaration and the Constitution’s Preamble...

5/... and the fine structure of the three branches of governance. I love the beauty of it and feel close to God walking around it. I cherish the most the declaration that we are all equally created by God.

6/ The current is not an ideal nor even a written document. It’s always there. It’s an emotional energy. And it always affects what we see on the surface:

7/That current is the dominance of wealthy male WASPs. We have always had a collective unconscious assumption that carries us and can drown us. Here it is: power, prestige, privilege and prosperity belong first to wealthy white guys.

8/ Trumpism teaches us that in America, to this day, if you are brash enough, appear rich enough, are clearly white enough, and domineering enough, you can get away with anything.

9/ I commend to you the book “Unsettling Truths”, written by a Korean immigrant and a Native American, chronicling the wreckage -- indeed the genocide -- that the racist doctrines of Discovery and Manifest Destiny visited on the indigenous peoples,...

10/... while we Whites were simultaneously doing slavery, then Jim Crow, then the New Jim Crow to African Americans.

11/ We are now well into our fifth century of this delusional dominance. Trump is our generation’s avatar of this long national delusion.

12/ Driven in equal parts by greed and the will to power over others, Trump and his 70 million voters have shown themselves quite ready to destroy the beauty of the structure in order to preserve what lurks below.

13/Theologically, my hunch is that God has allowed Trump’s rise & fall so we can see how far from our ideal we still are; & so that we would, as the prophet Isaiah put it, “turn from our wicked way,” & cherish all our brothers & sisters, who equally reflect the image of God.