We the People!

In these waning days before the 2012 Presidential Election, I cannot help but think that whatever happens, it has been so cathartic for so many white voters.  When, for example, was the last time white men could openly disparage a black man without being rightly called racists?    So let the insults fly!  I am hopeful that even with a Romney victory some of us will not return to business as usual.

Some of us will grab that power that in our powerlessness we have all too briefly touched, not as a privilege, not as the exclusive property of the propertied class, not as a favor granted by the ruling class, but as a right to keep and maintain with a strong and firmer hand.  We too can be confrontational.  We too can be obstructive.  We too can make the status quo uncomfortable.  While they labor to go backward with nostalgia for the good old days of white men and obedient wives, while they play make believe, their own ears deadened by their own cacophonous cries of how the founders were Christians and filled with Christian virtue, while they desecrate words like "freedom" and "equality" hiding in the caves of their own ignorance stubbornly imagining that the shadows on the wall are real and that the fire behind them is the sun; we will walk into the light, no matter how our eyes ache upon seeing the truth.  We will congregate and multiply.  We will suck out every last drop of learning that we can.  We will be sly foxes and gentle lambs.  We will live as true Christians (in the world but not of the world) even as the Evangelicals demand otherwise, claiming a spiritual monopoly, throwing obstacles in the way of would-be believers.  Let them construct their grand and shining temples.  They build upon the sand-- upon ignorance, upon intolerance, upon injustice, upon bigotry, and upon oppressive legalism.  Let then claim "We built this House!" while we know that unless the Lord builds it, their labor is in vain.  We will commit ourselves to drawing lines between the political and the spiritual even as Christ refused a kingdom on earth when tempted by Satan and when questioned by Pilate.

We will fight for basic human rights and the dignity of the living.  If the political landscape in the aftermath of this election becomes a democratic wasteland, we will begin to till the soil and plant the seeds, waiting for the oases to bloom.  We will promulgate as many Gileads as we must to serve as sanctuary for victims of what may become a reactionary and oppressive country.  We will not endorse laws that limit basic human freedom, that scour away human dignity as though it were a stain, that wreck with  enterprising license those few structures of democratic success that we had believed were sacred landmarks.  We will not go away!  For we are the people!  And our we will not shrink down in the face of their one percent
assemblies of ego.  We are far bigger than they had ever imagined.