America: Despite Regress and Abuse, the Spirit Renewed

You may avoid the news and why not? For it’s my job to tell you that Job survives. Despite the rise of the anti-Christ, I have faith and hope in the Human spirit aqui en Taos. See below but first:

Note that the Rise of Trumpism indicates that excessive Capitalism appeals to the deadliest sin, greed, the omnipresent stimulant of viral growth and earthly doom. For human beings (see the Carolinas’Florence) have fouled the nest that once gave them birth and nourishment. Now a unified approach by Republican operatives, in support of the rich, includes stacking the courts, the congress, and the federal agencies with powerful figures who aim to reverse human rights for all and roll back the promise of the New Deal, a legacy so prevalent in our frescoes and our heritage in Taos.

In their predatory attacks on children, the GOP, see NRA support for serial killers, God as Guns and Money, is equaled only by the practiced predators of the Catholic Church, now a spiritual mask or cover-up for “procurers.” In a faithless act, each day, ICE kidnaps and imprisons poor children at the expense of taxpayers who pay private prison firms to detain the innocent. For powerful and perverse Christians support Trumpism and contradict Jesus, who said, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these.”

Today in America where women and minorities but especially children are damned and effectively marginalized as the “cost of doing business,” we must remember that never have so many of the living been sacrificed for the unborn. Never have so many innocent souls “gone on to a better place” thanks to magical believers. Never have so many dark-skinned people been incarcerated in prisons for the sake of white supremacists.

“What have you got, I ask, “against the living? the flora and fauna, the vegetation and the animals, the children and the innocent?” Ask yourself what rough beast slouches toward Washington D.C. today, Kavanaugh who winked and nodded at “enhanced interrogation” under a previous president? An attempted rape at 17, whether literal or symbolic, was merely a try-out to justify “torture” as an adult under the aegis of endless war. Read the record and weep.

Remember when the Lord made a bet with the Devil about the faith of his servant Job. Interestingly Job withstood the punishment, the affliction of disease and reign of earthly terrors, and the Lord (like Pascal) won his wager even as Job suffered. But why should the children suffer for the sins of their fathers and mothers who pray to the anti-Christ?

The capital commodification and perverse privatization of brotherly “love” or exercise an upside down version of “do unto your neighbor as you would have him do unto you” defies the historic and Natural Good of transcendent ideals that govern the survival of both civil and religious society, underscored by an appeal to the angels of our natures. We must remember that MLK said justice rolls down like pure trickling water, bringing hope and faith despite the reality of the faithless white men, supported by white supremacists sitting on the Senate Judicial Committee.

But here’s my real point. In my English 110 class at UNM in Taos, my 26 first-year students ranging in age from teens to fifty-somethings, all tell tales in their memoirs or personal narratives of survival and how, despite the systemic social abuse that falls out on children, or how parents neglect their progeny, diverted by social conflicts, misguided professionals, and general ills like drugs or magical thinking destroy families, lives, and cultures: and despite all this, these kids have seized on hope and love in their renewal of the human spirit.

No, it’s not because of formal religious training, or a better education, or stable “family values” or “good families” but because of their own existential “bootstrap” decisions. They came of age, some at 5, some at 15, some at 50, and, having seen the worst and been deceived by the best, they decided to seize the day and live. For in the telling of the tale they give ocular proof and affirm the human spirit. And that gives me hope in the next generation.

I want to remind you, Mr. Trump that Mr. Mueller is coming for you. And, if nothing else, I believe the Sacred Mountain, a far far more powerful presence is watching out for my students because they are watching out, too. As Montaigne said in another context, “That is my physics, that is my metaphysics.”