I’m just not that political.
This is a little bit of a trigger phrase for me. I’m aware of it, and I have had to train myself not to bristle openly at the comment. I’ve heard some form of it all my life, especially at home in Memphis, TN, where this attitude can be praised as implying a choice to live ‘above the fray’ and not engage in games of power and influence. I suppose this is part of the momentum behind the denial outside of the South as well.
I don’t pay attention to politics.
The speaker is almost always someone for whom the mechanics of our common life -or politics- actually function well enough to go unnoticed. I’ve heard the like from many people in various walks of life. They are usually those the system intends to serve, even if some of the access were hard won. The system bent, but maintained.
For many Americans, the us and them that really matters, is a truly motivating factor, is the people versus the state. The othering and scapegoating of the government is commonly present in some form, and can be extreme. Gumit, gov’mint, the man -the suspicion of the state is deep and wide in this country.
That doesn’t have anything to do with me.
I get it. I really do. I was raised with a similar hermeneutic of suspicion, as Dr. Marion Grau would put it. My father was an old school dissident, and believed that the most patriotic act for a citizen was to push his home to be better, to protest injustices and defy bad laws. I grew up in the American South obviously, and somewhere in the air, even as a young white person, I knew government doctors fiddled around with non-white people. I don’t remember hearing the word Tuskegee for the first time, for example. It was just always a thing that had happened. Been done.
But I was dead serious about the definition of politics up there. Politics in any capacity is simply the mechanics of our common life. When it is going well for you, essentially functioning, the political system doesn’t need tweaking or your input. As I read our Constitutions, our shared Federal version and the statements of principle from our states and commonwealths, over and over again I see an aspiration to live in a just society based on balance and accountability, a government of and for the people.
Everything is fine, and I wish people would just get back to basics.
One of the many lamentations of peers and colleagues -I got called away in the middle of writing this sentence and honest to God I cannot recall which of the many relevant complaints I was going to reference. The persistent denial of how bad things are on the ground for so many people? Our general lack of basic civics knowledge? A seeming unawareness of the true passage of time, and how close ALL of American history really is?
I don’t think it was any of those, because what I was wanting to begin to say was that it is easy to be frustrated when people don’t see what is obvious to you. This is true generically. Few really like that realization that the person with whom you are speaking honestly has no idea what you mean by a thing. The temptation to demonize individuals for systemic harm isn’t just the easy or lazy choice. It’s a crucial task for the maintenance of any system, and when we fall into it ourselves, we are only keeping it all going.
It is quite true that my clergy peers lament both the lack of biblical literacy in people and the falling church attendance as a trend, different phenomena often linked. These two things, especially that people don’t know the stories, bring me great joy for the possibility they offer. I LOVE telling the stories, and I love revealing a different way of being church. I have great empathy for the fear and frustration, but again. I don’t think that’s what I meant what I started.
It was all great until you said that, until you mentioned…
I am an ordained minister of the Gospel, and as such have a charge to name and engage the powers, those within and those without. This can mean saying out loud that which others would prefer remain silent, and embracing seeming disparate alliances. Nothing can separate us from God, which in this context is our public witness, our love in action.
Part of what this means is that I have become a weaver, someone who connects ideas and people and contexts. Decades ago when i was getting my first graduate degree, a Master’s in City & Regional Planning, it occurred to me that planning itself was a translator discipline. Planning is inherently multi-disciplinary and draws from design and architecture, history and political science, anthropology and sociology, economic and finance. We had to learn the basic vocabularies of each of these disciplines in order to function comprehensively. Translators.
This week, I was in a zoom meeting with a diverse group attempting to define itself as a force in the faith-based climate justice world. They will be successful, and being a small part of it while it unfolds is amazing. But we came upon a common barrier in conversation, and I realized that with this group, I could just step in and offer what I know: a working definition of a concept that was seemingly unknown to many. In this case, it was code switching.
I have many problems with capitalism on both moral and practical grounds, and the same goes for communism. I have always been a socialist in my fiscal views and a republican yearning for full citizen participation in the political. But I very rarely use those words. They trigger people.
Part of what I have come to name is that we live in a socialist democracy that has been poisoned by capitalist greed. We can reclaim The Commons. We can employ a moral economy. We can distribute ownership and investment in equitable ways. That is the vision, and that is what we can build concretely when we agree to stop drinking the poison.
One of the primary reasons it is possible to say ANY of that which is above is that for the speaker, the system is working pretty well. What is never said here is that the system is generically a socialist one. Shared fire services. Shared libraries. Shared roads. Shared parks. Social security assurance and FDIC insurance. It’s all around us, and it should be.
The socialism of the public library and municipal fire departments lies beneath life as it goes but never reaches the surface as what it is. Parks are simply maintained, and roads go where they are supposed to go. Grandma’s check always comes.
But do they? Must they? And why? For whose benefit?How often do we give away what is collectively ours for the profit of the few
It is time for us to ask these questions, to have some of the harder conversations. We have much more choice and control than we take, especially those of us who are of the dominant paradigm.
We have all we need. We may build what is necessary.