God Bless America

The universe works in ways wondrous and mysterious.

For the past seven years, this country has been under a dark cloud. A cloud of authoritarianism. A cloud of treason. A cloud of traducing the very foundations of this democracy, this Republic.

Through an unbelievable concurrence of improbable events, a man completely unfit to be in public managed to win the highest office of the land. And he behaved as we all expected him to behave. Unhinged. Petty. Uninterested in the common good. Seeking only his own advancement, and the advancement of those who aided and abetted him. 

I've written about this aspect of Catholic theology many times. It is the idea of the "fortunate fall". The idea that Adam and Eve had to fall and bring sin and death into the world in order for the saving grace of Christ.

You can agree with that or not. (I, as an agnostic, keep my powder dry.) But the metaphor works for our times.

This country needed a reckoning. It needed a reckoning with what a portion of its people were becoming. Mired in conspiracy and animus. If Hillary Clinton had won in 2016, it would only have delayed this reckoning. Donald Trump would have been an agitator from the outside. He may well have won in 2020. And even if he didn't, at long last the scab had to be ripped off. The festering wound of white grievance politics had to be dealt with. And that's what we're seeing now.

And it's why Joe Biden is the perfect man for our times. White. Old. Avuncular. Underestimated. The meme that he's senile shatters when you look at what he's done. He's senile, but he snookered Kevin McCarthy. He's senile, but he's a devil who is persecuting Trump. He's senile, but he's the motive force behind Ukraine's resistance to Russia. 

This country was born in sin. It was born in enslaving African men and women. And it has never dealt with that sin. It was born in committing genocide against the native inhabitants, and it has never dealt with that sin. It was born in denying half the population political rights, and it has never dealt with that sin. There are many sins this country must acknowledge. And Trump is a factotum to deal with all these failings. He's a racist. He's a misogynist. He's a traitor. He is everything our flawed Founders feared. But our Founders made his rising inevitable. Someone like Trump would eventually have risen to power. It was better that it happened now, when the expectation of civil rights was firmly entrenched, than in 1820, when slavery and female oppression were the law of the land. We had the language to fight back. We had the tools to resist. But this needed to happen.

Many call Trump a stain on America. I don't. America was already stained. It was dirty. It was scuffed. And it needed to be cleansed. And Trump was and is the catalyst for that cleansing. The Trump years are the painful gestation and birth through which we must go. 

America is an idea. It is a firm idea, of liberty, of freedom. But the implementation of this idea has always lagged. It is a country which has expanded the circle to which this liberty and freedom apply. Remember that in its infancy, only white, male property owners could vote. It is ever evolving. And many want to stop that evolution, and reverse it. Trump is the epitome of that movement, to cast out entire groups of the American Commonwealth. His entire life has been one of working for exclusion.

But, I go to the title of this piece. God Bless America. Not because it's perfect. It will never be perfect. But because we, the majority, strive to perfect it. We strive to make it more fair, more just. We succeed. We fail. But we continue. We persevere. We don't stop. Because this is the work of our lives. To leave this place better than we found it. To ensure that our descendants have a home worthy of their humanity. The shadow is never banished. But we are the light which envelops and contains the shadow. 

The next few months will be crucial to our future. We dare not shirk. We dare not stumble. We dare not falter. Fate is not an impersonal force, but is in our hands. We shape fate. And we will win.

This is your weekend self-care. As always, dear friends, be ever kind and loving to yourselves and those around you.

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