The Peripatetic Preacher and the Presidential Process

In spite of all those alliterative “p’s,” of the title, I really do have something serious to say today about the ongoing, seemingly interminable, presidential election season. Let me be clear: the upcoming November, 2020 election is the most important election in my lifetime, both for our nation and for the planet’s future. This is no exaggeration at all. In my 73 years I have witnessed several important presidential elections. The 1960 context between John Kennedy and Richard Nixon was a significant contest, but few remember that of the two it was Nixon who was the more liberal candidate socially, and Kennedy who was author of the Bay of Pigs Cuban fiasco, a result of his hegemonic foreign policy. I readily grant that when Nixon did become president in what I then considered the most consequential election in 1968, defeating another socially liberal candidate, Hubert Humphrey, he became a truly dangerous man, even lying quite appallingly, along with Henry Kissenger, about the prospects for peace in Vietnam, in order to win his 1972 reelection.

I am a died-in-the-wool Democrat, so I was in agony when Ronald Reagan won two terms, and proceeded to balloon the deficit and to move the country to the right. And I was equally horrified when George Bush also won two terms and plunged us into the Middle East, based on completely faulty intelligence, a monstrous error that we live with still 20 years later. I was thrilled when Barack Obama won two terms, though I must say his promise did not fully live up to what in fact occurred in the US during those 8 years, not merely because of his own shortcomings, but also because of a severely divided legislative branch of government that impeded many of his proposed decisions.

So then we came to 2016, an election that has had perhaps the most severe consequences of any in my life. Donald Trump, a man completely unprepared to be president of a local Rotary Club, let alone president of the USA, has delivered chaotic government unparalleled in our history. His unrelenting lying, his grotesque abuse of those he deems enemies, including the free press and legislators on the other side of the aisle, his continual conviction that he is the smartest person in any room, his unwillingness to pay any attention to those who actually know things, his denigration of science, his rejection of facts that get in the way of his “hunches,” his smarmy attentions to various authoritarian world figures, such as Kim Jung Un, with whom he said he “fell in love,” Vladimir Putin, whose word he accepted about interference in the 2016 election over our own intelligence services, Duterte of the Philippines, Orban of Hungary, and on and on, prove every single day that his presidency has been an unmitigated disaster both for America and for the planet.

My chief concerns for the upcoming 2020 election boil down to two: the soul of America and the future of the cosmos. Both are certainly at stake come November. My concerns are based not only on the fact that I want a Democrat to occupy the White House in Jan, 2021. I am fully aware of the shortcomings of the apparent choices we Democrats now have: the 78-year-old Bernie Sanders and the 77-year-old Joe Biden. The former is consistent, but unrelenting in his demands for radical revolution in government and in the ways financial and physical resources are allocated by that government. The latter favors a more incremental approach to these issues, and favors something more like the status quo. Compromise seems absent from Sanders’ DNA, a reality that prefigures possible gridlock in the gears of government, while Biden’s many years in the system promises perhaps a “more of the same” reality, though we clearly face multiple problems that may require many more hard and radical decisions. Still, both men agree that the ways things are currently being done in the Trump White House must cease on the first day they ascend to the Oval Office.

But with four more years of Trump, we know what we will get: increasing assaults on the environment, based not on science but on the demands of the fossil fuel industry, more lying, more braggadocio, more venomous commentary against those who will not bow the knee to this would-be king, more self-serving rhetoric based on the hunches of a very limited and uncurious brain, and a whole lot more golf! Our society, our way of life, our American hopes and dreams, our planet’s very life, cannot stand four more years of this monumental egomaniac!

As I said above, this rant is not merely centered on a Republican vs. Democratic political debate; America as I have known it and the planet that I have loved hang in the balance. Because I am a man who loves the Bible, and who has spent over 50 years of my life scouring its pages for help and hope for my ways of living, I turn now to a psalm that carries much weight for me as I reflect on the 2020 election upcoming. It is Ps. 72, a coronation psalm, surely sung at more than one king’s coronation assembly. Its opening four lines are more than instructive for us in 2020; they are crucial as we find our ways into the voting booths come November.

“God, give your justice to the king, your righteousness to the king’s son.

May he judge your people with righteousness, and your poor with justice.

May the mountains bear shalom for the people, along with the hills, clothed in righteousness.

May he judge the people’s poor, provide deliverance for the needy, and crush the oppressor.

I know, of course, that the ancient Israelite government was unlike our own with a king at the top. Though Trump would be a king-like president, if his own claims mean anything, I have no desire to anoint him as one. Still, the psalm’s call for the king remains valuable as a guide for any current president. The key words of the psalm are “justice” and “righteousness,” those words that rang from the lips of the Hebrew prophets from the very founding of the nation. That fact that the nation again and again fell far short of this call made its repetition and reminder all the more important. Amos, Isaiah, Micah, Hosea, Jeremiah, Ezekiel announced numerous times that all nations are to be judged on the basis of whether or not they adhered to the demands of justice and righteousness, most especially as they were applied to the causes of the poor, the needy, the foreigner, and the widow, in short, to those who found themselves on the margins of society.

When the psalm asks that God give to the new king “God’s justice,” it means that the king should act in the ways that God acts, namely, to create an egalitarian community in which all classes of people maintain, and are supported by their government to maintain, their basic human rights; as the American declaration has it, the rights of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” In this, Trump has failed miserably. All manner of classes of Americans, and those who strive to become Americans, have been denied these rights again and again at our borders, in our cities and homes. Those who express their lives in ways that are different from the “norm” have been persecuted and neglected by laws and decrees that shun them and relegate them to second and third class citizenship. Those members of the LGBTQIA community have been vilified and ostracized in multiple ways; those with disabilities have been mocked by this president and thus made to be seen as less than fully human. Women have been abused, attacked, been made objects of scorn, playthings of men who “can do whatever they want with them,” as this president famously claimed on a terrible tape recording before his election. In multiple ways, Donald Trump has failed to bring justice to the people.

When the psalmist asks for God’s righteousness to be played out in the actions of the king, the psalmist implies that the king must always be about the business of representing God’s saving action, directed to the shalom (the well-being, the prosperity, the unity) of the people. This refers to every area of the life of the people, to a just and proper social order, both in legal actions and in the order of worship. In short, justice and righteousness are the glue that cements the community together, the absence of which tears a community apart. Donald Trump has in ways too numerous to count torn the American community apart with his clear and constant refusal to attend to the whole of the people, to concern himself primarily with the privileged and the wealthy, to close his ears to the cries of the poor, the needy, the immigrant. Thus, he has forfeited his right to a second term as president according to the mandates of the Bible and to the demands of a society that seeks justice for all its people.

And it is crucial to extend this call for justice and righteousness into the realm of the whole planet. Trump’s infuriating and continuous lack of attention to the reality of climate change, to the scientists who for decades have warned us about the warming of the planet due to our reliance on the burning of fossil fuels, to the evidence all around, from melting glaciers, to shrinking polar ice caps, to increasingly wild weather events, to the extinction of species of life, to rising and acidifying seas, and on and on. Only the most jaded and foolish of human beings would ignore the mounting evidence of his own eyes, but so has Donald Trump done since he took office over three years ago. We simply cannot stand or endure four more years of this ignorant and limited man as leader of our nation and of the free world.

So, whoever becomes the standard bearer of the Democratic Party, I urge you to vote for that candidate. Donald Trump must be sent back to his gold-plated New York or Miami bathtubs to live out his days in isolated and heedless splendor. We have had enough of such a man as president of our United States.

(Images from Wikimedia Commons)