Search Results for: I Saw An Angel Last Night

When I visited the Miller farm yesterday to bring some blueberry bushes, the children were excited about a holiday they said was today.

I didn’t realize what it was until I went to buy a cookie this morning and saw that the stand was closed. Today is Ascension Day, an important day in the Christian and Amish calendar.

Known as Ascension Thursday, the holiday commemorates the Christian belief of the bodily Ascension of Jesus Christ into heaven.

Today, the Miller family withdrew into their community, praying, singing, worshiping Jesus Christ, the central figure in their faith and lives. Moise himself is off at a church gathering.

As I’ve often written, I am not a Christian, but I have followed Jesus Christ and his teachings – and emulated them when I could as best I could – for much of my life. There is nothing in his values I can’t abide.

It didn’t occur to me until I had known Moise and his Amish family for some weeks that this was one of the bonds we shared. Like the Amish, my values are often hidden from the world.

And Jesus is everything to them.

Christ shapes and defines almost everything the Old Amish do.

It has been painful for me to see the denigration of Christ’s teaching by people who claim to be Christians but who are relentlessly greedy, politically ambitious, cruel, and uncaring.

The people who speak Christ’s name the loudest seem to be the meanest.

In a limited way, Moise and his family have accomplished something I have only sporadically accomplished. They scrupulously follow Christ’s teachings.

I’ve learned in recent weeks that many people focus on the superficial aspects of Amish life – the puppy mills, the clothes, the horses and carts, the beards and quilts.

The deep and potent religious convictions that have enabled the Amish to survive for hundreds of years as a separate community are mostly hidden from public view and are rarely discussed by the outside world.

Amish don’t talk about Jesus on Sunday’s they live with him every day, all day, seven days a week. They don’t whine or complain about their hard lives, ever.

We “English” is a cynical and whiny lot.

Rep. Liz Cheney panicked and emptied half of the House of Representatives yesterday just by threatening to tell the truth. They couldn’t bear to hear it; they fled.

Among the cowards who rushed out of the chamber, much like the Transylvanians who flee Dracula in the night, were many Evangelical Christians who evoke Jesus Christ constantly but lie enthusiastically whenever it suits them in the polls.

Moise and his family do not lie.

Even when it suits them, this is shocking to me; it affects me deeply. I was beginning to believe that everybody lies.  I guess that says something about our country in 2021. The truth is both dangerous and shocking.

But I am learning that it is possible to be a devout Christian and not be a hypocrite, coward, or liar. I’m certain there are many sincere Evangelical Christians. But many are robbing the Temple. We’d love to hear from the others.

I know the lessons the Amish are teaching their children. What, exactly are we teaching ours?

Amish spirituality is rooted in the teachings of Jesus, especially his Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7). Amish worshippers use Martin Luther’s German translation of the Bible (1534) as one reason they cling to old and traditional ways.

They often explain what they are doing in this way:” that’s how we have always done it.”

Only New Testament texts are read in a church.

Matthew’s three chapters on the  Sermon On The Mount receive by far the most attention in Amish services, reports Amish Scholar Donald B. Kraybill.

References to Jesus’s sermon amount to the closest thing to an Amish manifesto of faith and a guide to the Amish way.

One part of the Sermon (“Blessed Are The Meek”) emphasizes the importance of humility. That’s why Moise and his fellow Amish all dress alike; no one should stand out any more than anyone else. The Amish do not speak or laugh loudly. They do not argue or dominate conversations.

They don’t wear jewelry or listen to music or drive cars or defend themselves in lawsuits or speeches, or Op-ed pieces.

Christ’s call to be the “salt” and “light” in the world calls the Amish to practice their faith rather than seek converts or preach to non-Christians. They don’t want anything from us but to be left in peace and buy their donuts.

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus urged his followers to “judge not,” a further call for humility and self-reflection. The Amish do not judge or condemn other faiths, outsiders even people who have stolen from them or harmed them in violent ways.

At the end of his sermon, Jesus made it clear that his followers should live in a visibly and noticeably different way than other people because his followers should hold to a much higher standard of conduct.

This is the reason they dress and travel in ways that are noticeably different.

The standard Jesus set for Christians was simple – love and selflessness, help for the needy. This idea of selflessness became a core value of Christianity; it embodied Christ himself because his followers believed him to have died on the cross for the sins of others.

American politicians, by contrast,  and many religious leaders, will lie their socks off for donations or a primary win and an endorsement by the planet’s biggest liar and hypocrite, our former President. Wow, Christianity has come a long, sorry way.

The Amish have often gone to jail rather than fight in wars, testify against criminals, or force their children into a public school that denies major tenets of their faith. They don’t have to argue much, if at all. The scriptures are pretty clear.

I spent some time on the phone last week with an Amish scholar who has been following my writings about the Amish on my blog.

“It would be inconceivable for an Amish person to seek political office or go to Congress,” he said.” They wouldn’t be able to lie. They couldn’t survive.”

That was a chilling and eerie comment for me to hear this week. It is clearly the truth.

I’m sure Moise would never dream of running for political office, but of course, he never could. He really can’t lie. I wonder, sometimes, if even my closest and oldest friends sometimes lie, as I have. I never wonder about Mosie lying.

I think that’s yet another grim commentary on us, even though we judge ourselves to be superior to the Amish in many ways.

Christ preached on the mount about subjects as diverse as prayer, justice, care of the needy, religious law,  divorce, political dissent, challenging authority; he warned against judging other people in his sermon on the mount.

Amish faith requires members to obey the will of God and the teachings of Jesus. In this sense, their faith is much purer than most people who doubt or condemn them.

They live by the promise in Matthew 18:18-20 that whatever you decide on earth will bind you in heaven. God, they believe, is present whenever two or three people are gathered in God’s name.

Humility even shapes the Amish idea of salvation.

The Amish are decidedly non-emotional about their faith; there is no assurance of salvation. You don’t get in by confessing your sins.

The Amish speak of a “living hope,” an abiding belief that God, a fair and righteous judge, will grant eternal life to the faithful followers of Jesus.

They don’t ask or require the Evangelical language of having a “relationship with Jesus.”

For me, the heart of Amish spirituality – and the very thing that worries and troubles many “English,” especially feminists and feminist activists and progressives –  is the yielding of oneself to a higher authority.

Domination by men has been a horror to many women and many children; it is a red flag to millions of people.

When the Amish talk about church, they talk about “giving themselves up” to church in the same way children and wives are supposed to yield to their fathers and husbands.

It’s not the American way or my way, but it is central to the Amish Way.

Curiously, it may be the very thing that has permitted the Amish to survive and prosper for five centuries, an almost unheard of accomplishment for a small and often isolated community that spurns technology and corporate greed.

All over the world, certainly in the United States, democracies are struggling to cope with the complexity of modern times – technology, climate change, globalism, immigration, China, Russia, North Korea,  renegade dictatorships, violence, global economics, tribalism, and nativism.

When democracy is divided, it splinters into tribes and rebellious communities.

There is no single authority in most democracies that can make decisions, resolve conflicts, set an agenda. We can’t seem to resolve chronic poverty, gun violence, the ravages of trade agreements, a response to climate change, and the economic disparity that undermines democracy itself.

More and more people have turned to the Trump approach, which is to bypass democracy as unworkable or elitist and get their own agendas set without the difficulty of negotiation or majority rule. Democracy is slow, messy, and ugly.

Trumpism has no patience for it. The Amish do.

The problems in the Amish world are quickly and clearly resolved, not only because the men are completely in charge and must be obeyed, but because Biblical scripture is the final answer to every conflict in every situation – how they live, love, work, and marry.

Nothing goes unresolved for long. Leaders chosen by the community have tremendous power.

What an extraordinary irony to think that if Jesus came back again – scripture says he could – he would be most at home with the Amish. He supported the rights of women, but the Bible says clearly that men are in charge.

There is very little in the Amish world that would trouble or anger him. His famous sermon is read and followed daily.  He would be at home.

They follow his teachings to the letter.

Yet as he looked out at the”English” world – the one that often suggests the Amish culture is too much of patriarchy,  dominating, dog abusive,  sexist and coercive, he would almost certainly view it the same way that he, a political radical, viewed the money lenders in the Temple.

It wouldn’t go well for our leaders, religious leaders, elected representatives, or bloated and obscenely rich CEOs if Jesus returned.

Our culture, which is in the midst of a civil war between Christian nationalists and the rest of the world, stands for everything Jesus hated and preached against.

It’s difficult for me to get my head around it.

My friend Mosie is a  holy man in several ways – in his church, in his life. The Amish teachings of humility, peace, family, and community mirror my own beliefs about life as well as his.

I don’t want to have a dozen children, and my wife would throw me out of the house and beat me silly if I demanded obedience, but there is not much space between Mosie and me when all is said and done.

The Amish way of life is not an argument; it is not debated on cable news and political and legislative gatherings. There is one choice – get in or get out.

This, in theory, sounds like a dictatorship, yet somehow it isn’t.

There is no single cult or religious leader in the Amish Faith, no Trump or Popel or Mussolini.

The church is not centered away but is de-centralized in the homes and barns of its members, religious leadership in the hands of literally dozens of different communities, each one free to make day-to-day decisions about faith and religious justice.

The Amish idea completely rejects the Catholic idea of a Pope, the fascistic idea of a Great Leader, or the American ideal of a Trump. It is patriarchal yet oddly democratic at the same time. None of those people could ever rise to the top of the Amish world.

There is no just one way of being Amish but many. There is no question that the Amish faith is a patriarchy, just as the Bible ordered. Yet it is a soft one, say Amish historians and scholars.

There is room, writes author James A. Cates in Serpent In the Garden, a study of Amish sexuality, for individual thought, creativity, and expression inside the Amish moral order.

“Amish society does not exercise authoritarian control or relegate members to blind obedience,”  writes Cates, who grew up in the faith.

“There is leeway for unique choices,” he says. “There is the very fact that these are flexible boundaries that contributes to the conflicts and limit setting in which the church routinely engages.”

Yet, we stubbornly consider ourselves much more democratic than them.

These days,  I feel at odds with so much of the so-called “Christian” world around me, with the smug lives of the “English.” I guess I’m more at ease with Moise than us when all is said and done.

Our social scientists have always been obsessed with the connections and context between society and religion.

Every religion is set around a particular social system; the Amish faith is no different, except that theirs works and most don’t.

The themes of humility, obedience, patience, and acceptance fit easily into the structure of a small community that insists its members sacrifice their own well-being for the good of the community.

That is the complete opposite of the American experience, especially in recent years. We value the individual over the community, ideology over the community; the truth is blown off as easily as leaves in Autumn – consider the Liz Cheney outrage.

We value money, power, and domination, not humility and selfishness. We are a so-called Christian nation that is abandoning true Christianity.

We change the truth as easily as we change our underpants.

No wonder the Amish are greeted with suspicion and cynicism.

What is so interesting to me is that the spiritual ideas of the “English” are losing their credibility.

In contrast, the spiritual ideas of the Amish have never been stronger or followed more faithfully. There is definitely something there for us to learn.

I’m on it. Thanks for reading.

“The Amish are growing. Their population doubles about every twenty years. Counting adults and children, they number more than 325,000 souls. More than 85 percent of children raised in an Amish home will join the church and remain Amish throughout their lives.” – Donald B. Kraybill, Simply Amish.

I sometimes feel that I am living in a seething cauldron rather than a country, on the edge of exploding with grievance, left and right political correctness, argument, lies,  outrage, and hatred.

We constantly seek and find reasons to hate and judge one another.

A few weeks ago, I started writing regularly about the Amish families moving to my county, town, and neighborhood. I was thrilled to meet them, get to know them, talk to them, give them rides to the bus station, get good dog food for their dog, find the right books and recipes to give their children as welcome presents.

They have transformed our neighborhood and our community; for the first time, horse carriages are nearly as common as big and smelly trucks.

Their arrival seemed a miracle to me, and I was enthralled by their kindness, gentleness, sense of family, hard work, and community. They are astonishingly ingenious about how they live.

In a sense, I found the kind of friendship I was hoping for. They welcomed me and seemed to value me and understand me; I fell in love with the closest family.

I come and go at will, and there is often a horse carriage in our back yard. They lift me.  The Amish father next door has become a close and valued friend, as have his children and wife. We get one another.

At first, I was nearly overwhelmed by the praise and thanks I received from hundreds of my readers, grateful to read about the Amish and learn more about them.

But except for my reporting days,  I had no occasion to be as close to them as I am now or to get to know them as well as I am doing now.

I still get those messages, thanks, but a new strain has been added. A couple of days ago, I began getting different kinds of messages,  not pleasant or grateful:  a woman said after reading my columns about the Amish made her ill:  (Another wrote that my writing about their lives was “creepy” and invasive.)

A week ago, a woman claiming to be a feminist accused me of glorifying the persecution of women by suggesting the family I was seeing was happy. Amish women are enslaved, she said, not colorful. I was enabling their suffering.

“The way you romanticize a group of people who systematically enforce outdated gender norms and who have been extremely cruel to any children who have the misfortune to fall outside of heteronormative boundaries is sickening,” said Jessica.

That was a first. My too-flip response was to give her the link of a doctor who would, online and for only $19, get her some medicine for her stomach.

(I was further criticized for not knowing what the word “heteronormative” meant. I couldn’t find it on Google; I had misspelled it) People have written to me daily lately,  claiming that the Amish are notorious abusers of dogs, puppies, gays, and women.

Several people have suggested that I am romanticizing the Amish, as Jessica suggested. Another reader said my writing about the Amish was creepy.

Many of these questions are valid, and I should, of course,  be acknowledging them at the very least.

But I am not sure how to feel: I wonder if any culture, movement, ideology, or political leader can survive the cauldron that our public lives have become. I dislike labeling, and any political correctness, left or right, which I consider the death of free thought, one of the greatest gifts we humans are given.

Several women who identified as feminists wrote that women in Amish homes were breeding slaves, worn out in mid-life by having children year after year, even when it was no longer healthy for them.

The most blatantly dismissive and dubious messages are, as always, from the animal rights people, who, I learned during the New York Carriage Horse controversies, have adopted lying and distorting the truth (some, but not all)  as their primary tool in their unrelenting campaign to remove most animals from the earth in the name of love.

The great shame is that animals desperately need an animal rights movement now, but it should be a movement that fights to keep them in our lives, not take them away. The Amish horses, like the New York Carriage Horses, are among the luckiest and best cared for horses on the planet.

Part of this is just America in 2021; we are in so many ways a country that has forgotten how to communicate decently with one another or accord each other respect.

We start by name-calling and end in outrage and contempt. We are taught from birth by our leaders to hate people who are different from us. I will never understand how people who believe in a cause think they can open a conversation with someone by calling them “sickening” because they disagree.

We seeth with judgment and resentment. From a distance, I imagine this wonderful country smoldering like coal in a cooling fire.

I need to say at the outset that the Amish are especially vulnerable to generalized attacks like this. They don’t give interviews, write op-ed pieces, hire lobbyists, sue for slander or defamation, market their lives, and they have very different values from Americans who consider themselves progressives.

They seem innocent to me, almost pure at times. They have no media or political ideology to poison them and shower them with news about the worst and most degrading side of life. They don’t give money to politicians or accept money from corporations or anyone else.

They are often accused of things that are epidemic in our country and much of the world. In the Orthodox Jewish culture I grew up in, gay sons and daughters were routinely expelled, as they were and are in Catholic and Evangelical homes in America. Gay people are exiled,  tortured, and killed in several third-world and African countries.

Once the pride of the free world, we pursue trans people with brutal laws and lies in our own country.

I’ve never heard of an Amish person killing anyone in violence. They follow Jesus in every way, especially his call for forgiveness and compassion for the vulnerable and the needy.

Women all over the earth treated are abused, raped, mutilated, and exploited.  It seems wrong to pin these labels on the Amish in so focused away.

I’m not a hater or a judge by nature; I don’t want to dislike everyone on the earth. People have a right to be different from me. Some things are just wrong and can’t be rationalized.

I am morally obliged to be tolerant of others insofar as I can. The Amish prove that we can live peacefully and harmoniously with people who are different if we are open to it and willing to work at it. That is a big deal.

I don’t believe the animal rights people. They lie and have no ethics about slandering people, and many are woefully ignorant about animals and the things they need.

As one who has been in numerous Amish homes and seen their dogs and horses, I can say I have never witnessed any animal abuse, even though the Amish see their animals as work tools, not cute pets.

The messages jolted me in several ways. One especially harsh post said I was enabling the Amish in that I only saw them through my own prism, not the prism of others with deep concerns about them.

I’m not sure what to make of the messages I’m getting, and even more painfully, not sure what to do about them.

I was vaguely familiar with the stories of how young gay men and women are driven from Amish families and communities if they choose to come out and live their lives openly. That is awfully cruel.

I witnessed the sacrifice of Amish women who have up to 13 children.

Last year, I read Saloma Furlong’s autobiography Why I Left The Amish in which she wrote about the sexual abuse she experienced growing up in an Amish home.

The total domination of Amish men in that culture makes Amish women have to abuse, writes Furlong because they have been taught since childhood to obey men.

I think that what the messages I have been receiving have done is awaken me and remind me to be careful about romanticizing a people; in the same way, the critics of the Amish ought to be careful about generalizing about them.

There are different kinds of Amish sub-cultures  – Old Amish, New Amish, Modern Amish – and wide differences in how they live. There is not just one kind of Amish any more than there is one kind of Jew or Catholic.

Because they can’t and won’t defend themselves, they make easy targets – they don’t know about PR or message spinning –  for the aggrieved and outraged.

But I can’t find any evidence of any Amish person beating or killing or torturing a gay person. That is the honor of mostly Christian white men, according to the FBI.

The animal rights people who e-mail me have no specifics, really, just bad memories and horror stories about puppy mills they say they have encountered. There is no way to survey that.

I have no doubt there are awful puppy mills; I also don’t believe it has anything to do with my neighbor, whose dog was given a permanent home after she got a foot caught in a farmer’s saw and sleeps in front of a toasty woodstove every night.

She is much loved and well cared for. The family asked me to find the best dog food for her, and they pay me back.

There is plenty of sexual abuse beyond Amish communities; it seems to appear in almost every community in the world. The Amish seem to be getting more than their fair share of suspicion and slandering. Or perhaps they are just getting the same treatment everyone else gets thanks to our divided country and our anti-social media.

You can romanticize as a writer in two ways: exaggerating the qualities of someone or ignoring accusations and concerns about them. I am guilty of the latter.

While I’m not able to gauge the accuracy or falsehoods surrounding these issues in detail, I am in a position to at least note that they exist and make my readers aware of them. That’s what I’m doing today and will do from time to time in the future.

But never with an eye to judgment. There are plenty of people lining up to do that.

I want to know more about them, that is my job too.

I am truly sickened by sexual abuse, sexism, and the persecution of gay and trans people. It exists everywhere, often in the most savage and brutal ways.

The Amish are not savage or brutal, even when they are misguided by my lights.

So here is where I am getting to: I am not persuaded to abandon my Amish friends or mistrust or revile them. They are not evil; they are good people of great faith working day and night to keep their culture and way of life intact in a world that is, in almost every way, going in another direction.

They stand for many good things, including pacifism, environmental awareness, forgiveness, simplicity, compassion, hard work, and independence.

People ask me frequently how to donate to the Amish.

There is no way to donate to the Amish because they don’t need or accept donations. Every Amish family returned their stimulus checks this year and last with letters to the government saying they don’t need money from outside; they take care of themselves.

They do not seek or accept charity from anyone.

The Amish women I know – I’ve spoken with a few about this – tell me they are proud to have so many children and contribute so directly to their faith, farms, homes,  husbands, and communities.

They say it makes them feel joyous, pious, and meaningful.

I doubt that these women trust me completely enough yet to be totally honest about their lives, but they do not seem unhappy or browbeaten or enslaved to me.

“My life is my choice,” one told me.”I am free to leave. God wants me right here.”

The Amish family stricture is not really new. It evokes the families of the early American migrations West.

Farm families had as many children as possible so that there was enough free labor to work a farm and so the farm could be maintained when the parents grew older.

The family farm’s survival depended on having a lot of children who were strong and healthy. That was always considered a noble ethos of the American experience.

The Amish way of life depends on large families to survive. The Amish culture is determined to survive and has been astonishingly resilient for hundreds of years.

I did some research today – there is a lot of serious writing about homosexuality and the Amish.

The Amish faith considers homosexuality as a sin and a serious one.

There is no debate or compromise within the community about it. This is a religious rather than political position; the Bible says it is evil, and they follow scripture closely.

Amish scholars like Donald Kraybill and James Cates say there is no chance that any Amish sect would allow open homosexuality in their midst.

I did find evidence that Amish communities offer counsel to gay people if they seek it – it is not mandated, and it does not offer “cures” – and gay men and women can choose to live alone and remain in the community as long as they agree to never live openly with their sexuality.

Single men and women are welcomed into Amish life, and it is believed that many church followers have chosen that path. They must not practice their sexuality in the open.

It is heartbreaking to read some of the messages these gay children post online when they leave the faith.

The best book on the subject (it’s on the way to the farm) is James Cates: Serpent In The Garden: Amish Sexuality In a Changing World.

A reader who followed the posts on my blog page sent me this excerpt from a review of Cate’s book.

“Cates is unflinching in his discussion of gay identity within the Amish. Gay Amish face a choice of leaving the church (and thus their families, churches, communities, and vocations) or sublimating their gay identities and presenting a heterosexual self. Because “personal identity is subsumed to the group,” and because the collective culture of the Amish is heteronormative, there is no openly gay Amish subgroup. He does not foresee a change in their stance toward LGBTQ people: “The Amish attempt to maintain their heteronormative standard is part of a larger, longstanding overarching effort to retain their way of life, regardless of the derision heaped upon them.”

For the record, and to spare my readers from academic abuse and contempt, “heteronormativity is the belief that heterosexuality is the default, preferred or normal mode of sexual orientation. It assumes the gender binary (i.e., that there are only two distinct, opposite genders and that sexual and marital relations are most fitting between people of the opposite sex.” – Wikipedia.

I spoke with two Amish men this afternoon, one older, one young. I asked them about gay people and the church. They tightened up but didn’t flinch.

Both said the subject is rarely discussed in their community, in church, or anywhere else. They affirmed their strong belief that homosexuality was a sin, but they also affirmed an equally strong tenet of the Amish faith that forbids judging other cultures and religions.

They would, they said, never condone violence or cruelty when it came to dealing with a person who was, in their words, “a homosexual.” That, they said, was not compatible with God or the Bible.

The Amish men said there was no discussion about changing their position on being gay and that it would never happen. It was, they said, a major sin.  People who wanted to be openly homosexual, they said, would be asked to leave the community.

Neither knew of anyone to whom that had happened.

I appreciate being prodded into acknowledging that Amish isn’t just about being plain and simple and industrious. These are things we need to talk about, not paper over. There are always things to hear that I don’t want to hear, and there are always things to hear that I don’t want or need to hear.

My life is not plain or simple.

As with all of us who live in America, every culture has its own underside, its own discreditors, and critics.

Speaking only for myself, I am much more trusting of Amish beliefs than those of extreme Orthodox Jews or the Roman Catholic Church, which has become a global oppressor of women and gay youths and men.

I’d feel a lot safer at an Amish church service than most religious buildings I’ve been in.

Women, I am told, often leave the Amish faith, and so do many young men. No one pursues them, tries to stop them, or tries to bring them back.

I find my new Amish friends to be admirable, loving, and industrious people. They care about God, family, and themselves in that order. They are taught humility, modesty, and empathy. They don’t lie, speak poorly of others, sue people or harm them.

They are taught that no one is better or more important than anyone else.

They are kind to me and thoughtful about me.

Their children seem happy, outgoing, socially skilled, and busy; they live in a world apart from machines and screens. I see in them the awful damage we are doing to our “English” children, who teachers say are forgetting how to talk to others.

We live in a world where Presidents lie brazenly, scores of people are shot and killed every day, members of Congress are suspected of sex trafficking, leaders are too often weak, dishonest, and greedy.

When we find people to respect, even admire, they are precious and should be left in peace to live their own lives.

The Amish ask nothing from us but to be permitted to live their lives by their own code. They are not angels; they are just people, deeply committed to a way of life.

I am not the policeman of all the world; there is much cruelty, avarice, and corruption out there. The Amish are human beings, and human beings are not perfect.

And I am not God, empowered with the right to judge them.

To live the life they live requires sacrifice, discipline, even unconscious cruelty. I want to see them clearly and reflect on them honestly, but I don’t choose to attack them or walk away. It is so easy to crap on other people – just hit “send.”

I am not a perfect human, and I don’t expect to meet one in this world. People who judge other people from afar or from behind computers might look at their own faces on the screens right in front of them before they judge too quickly.

I will continue to write about the Amish and their lifestyle. I’m not deeply religious, but it does sometimes feel that God dropped them into my neighborhood for a reason.

I’m sorry, but I don’t believe in condemning people who live differently than I do. I didn’t like it when Donald Trump did it; I don’t like it when anybody does it.

It was almost as if an evil wind, sent by some Merlin alchemist to conquer us, has been blowing over the country, leaving a fever in its wake these past four years.

Today, the wind seemed to blow the wind away, and with it, some of the fever.

Today I got a peek at that kindler and gentler nation, so many of us have been hoping for and waiting for.

I was shocked to find myself crying a half dozen times at the discovery that our precious democracy was far from ruined (and when Lady Gaga sang the National Anthem, and when the Marine Band first played Hail To The Chief).

If anything, the last four years have revived the promise, if not yet the reality, of America.

You could almost see hope rising like a mist over the ceremony and the country.

The inauguration was stirring at times and quietly defiant. There was no mistaking the way our frazzled democracy came roaring back from January 6.

Our Better Angels woke up; they were dancing on the capitol steps.

The message was clear. We are here; we are back, we will keep trying.

And another message was clear.

Donald Trump was the greatest failure and disgrace in Presidential history. I don’t care what the delusional members of the Republican Party say.

Truth wins. Reality wins. The center held.

We all have a choice. We can say how horrible it was, we almost lost our democracy. or we can say, how wonderful, we didn’t let that happen.

The traitors who stormed the capitol thinking they had God and justice behind them didn’t show their cowardly, twisted selves anywhere near Washington today, despite much bluster and many threats – not a single one.

Like their President, they failed in every possible way.

People who care – and most Americans – will never permit this to happen again.

I was very proud of my country today. We are only two weeks from January 6. Still, Joseph Biden’s inauguration – on those very same steps in that very same temple of democracy where the riots began – might as well have been in another world.

I had to keep reminding myself that this was the very same place where that awful riot happened. I also cried when  I saw Capitol Police Officer Eugene Goodman escorting Kamala Harris down the capitol steps.

We love our heroes in America, and it is a blessing to have found one amidst all those cowardly and vile politicians.

It’s only one day, and one can never foresee the future, but like so many people, I felt lighter today, more hopeful, and more grounded and relieved.

It’s all right. We survived.

I’m not sure what the alchemy was, but Trump has a genius for frightening and disturbing people. He sucked up all the air in every room he was in, and in much of the country.

We have to learn to breathe normally again.

The more I read, the more I keep coming back to the idea of addiction in the digital era as helping us understand what happened.

I was reading about how doctors treat cult survivors. Internet Addiction Disorder is now a recognized form of addiction and mental illness; it affects impulse control and judgment.

The first thing, say the doctors, is to call people who worship cults “survivors,” not patriots or victims or criminals. I’m learning to see Trump as a torturer in the new way that modern technology can be used to induce pain, victimization, and hatred, and yes, addiction.

Lots of people like Biden, but few people love him in the way Trump supporters worship him and believe his every lie. I imagine in a year or so, we may be talking about Trump Survivors.

Of course, lots of Trump supporters just liked his policies and gift for distraction; that doesn’t make them all addicts. The people rioting in the capitol had the air of addicts or cultists in a fever; they lost perspective and a sense of reality.

Often seen among those kinds of addicts are mind-control techniques that involve combinations of extreme abuse and “brainwashing.”  For example, “psychic driving” is defined by psychologist Ellen Lacter (who runs www.endritualabuse.org) as taped or electronic, or digital messages that are played non-stop daily for long periods of time.

Think of the tens of thousands of tweets Trump sent out, almost always more than once a day. People get addicted to soap operas on TV, why, not Trump’s angry and disturbing tweets?

There is some evidence that lies that are repeated day after day, many times a day, for weeks and months on end qualify as “psychic driving.” Thus the lie about the November election became a reality, an addiction all of its own.

When the rioters explained that they had to try to kill people and destroy property because “My President told me to,” they resemble those zombies in the movies whose brains are being controlled.

I voted for Biden, I would never dream of storming a government building and threatening people if he asked me too.

The nature of the addiction is a kind of trance, in which people doing great wrong to themselves and others believe they are doing great good.

I think of the rioters who took selfies and videos of themselves and put them up on social media for the FBI to find easily.

Values and morals can be inverted by “psychic driving,” perhaps the best explanation I’ve yet seen for what Trump did to the weakest and most vulnerable of his supporters.

The people who stormed the capitol with their MAGA hats and weapons talked like addicts, their manic focus and inability to reason or accept reality a symptom of so many serious addictions.

After four years of Trump, it was shocking yesterday to see the idea of America as a liberal democracy once more, dedicated to equality, social justice, environmental reform, new and good jobs,  and helping the poor stated as goals of a President in a new administration.

I’m not sure President Trump ever mentioned the poor, other than to call homeless people “disgusting” and bad for real estate sales. Does this administration have one single thing in common with the last one?

What a schizophrenic country we are.

How could a country that elected Donald Trump just four years ago elect Joseph Biden in 2020? It’s discordant and confusing. We are not only divided, but we are also baffled.

I was happy; I felt a little dizzy. Historians say these radically different strains have always been present in American life.

This is nothing new; it’s just that social media and digital technology have made it so much easier to lie and for people to accept lies rather than seek out the truth.

A beautiful and radically different vision from Trump’s was offered in Washington Wednesday, that mystical idea of a kinder, gentler nation.

I believe this is an attainable dream; this is the future I see and have seen all year to the doubt of many skeptics – a better, not perfect country.

We are coming to see that we have no right to call ourselves great, but it is still possible we may get there.  And very often, we do great good.

We seem to have a President who wants to get there. That is quite a change.

Biden’s tone was accepting and honest. Nothing about him suggested that everything was okay or that change would be easy.

It was like spirituality – sometimes the journey is more important than actually arriving. The truly spiritual people know we never really get there. Like our country, we need to keep trying.

We are not perfect, as the wonderful young poet Amanda Gorman said in the poem she read aloud at the end of the inauguration.

We are not perfect, she wrote. We are “unfinished.”

It almost felt like a fantasy.

After years of enduring Trump’s tweets, I turned on a cable news channel Tuesday evening to see the President-elect hosting a beautiful memorial service in Washington Tuesday night for the 400,000 Americans who died from the coronavirus.

I realized it was the very first time that I saw a high government official memorialize the pandemic dead; for much of the year, we seemed able to put them out of sight and mind, many of us, certainly the leaders of the government.

I can’t remember Trump even mentioning the virus dead, excepting in a glancing and superficial way.

The memorial ceremony was simple, beautiful, and appropriate. An African-American nurse from Chicago, a singer, sang Amazing Grace. It was beautiful. I cried hearing that as well.

The inauguration and the memorial was also a bit eerie.  Was this the same country whose leaders insisted that the virus was not serious and would go away?

The problem is that when Donald Trump and his supporters suggest making American great again, the truth is that in a diverse country like America, founded in compromise and forced to make deals with the Devil to survive, it’s impossible to be totally “great,” it can only be good in many ways and seeking to get better.

America has its own creation myth, it usually leaves out the unpleasant details – like slavery.

Being “great” means there are no problems you have to work on or solve.

It is a conceit that helps to blind the country from the problems it has always had until they explode, as they did in 2016 and 2020. Trump’s promise turned out to be just another lie.

I liked the tone of humility and self-awareness in President Biden’s speech; I never heard that from Trump or his supporters. If we think of America as great – which is what most of us were taught – then why should we work to face its problems and fix them?

Nobody lied at the Covid-19 memorial.

Nobody attacked anyone. There was nothing for a panel to fight about cable news; there were no implications beyond what we saw.

My stomach did not drop down into my belly; I was not upset, puzzled, or angry. I didn’t wonder what was really happening.

I wonder if we aren’t all trauma victims.

The memorial ceremony was normal and touching, just what we should be doing when 400,000 people die. Nobody bragged about what a good job they were doing; there was no need for fact-checking or rebuttal. Or cheap and false excuses.

Or clearly incompetent and unqualified people making stupid pronouncements.

There was no reason to be offended by Tuesday’s service; it was sensitive and real.

In fact, ever since Donald Trump’s favorite communications system, Twitter, was taken from him in the past couple of weeks, I haven’t received a single death threat or hate message when I mention or write about politics.

The very air seems to be less fraught and charged. It actually seems easier to breathe, can that be true?

The evil wind seemed to have blown itself away, at least for the moment. Having a lot of power in politics is very different from having none.

I cried at least a half dozen times watching the inauguration ceremony; it seemed affirming to me, stirring at times. Trump turned me into a patriot relatively late in life. I thank him for that.

The capitol’s leading Machiavelli and professional assassin, Mitch McConnell,  is now gunning for Donald Trump, not so much because it is the right thing to do, but because he has to cut the monster’s head off now while there are still some elements of the Republican Party intact and before Trump can recover from his disastrous finale.

McConnell is an institutionalist, well into his seventies. I imagine he would prefer his legacy be that he saved the Republican Party rather than helping to destroy it.

If McConnell fails, the Republican Party will fall apart, it will become an extremist fringe organization way too far off the charts for moderate and suburban and independent voters.

I’d say the odds of an impeachment conviction in the Senate have gone up.

Unless you count President Trump catching the coronavirus, there are few miracles in politics.

President Biden has a rugged job ahead of him. But the ceremony had a beautifully American kind of pageantry to it, not too little, not too much.

We can’t do it as the British do it, but our rituals and ceremonies evoke tradition and strength and the idea of people coming together, even if they don’t much like one another, or maybe because they don’t like each other.

The Republican Party’s leadership seems to have decided not to leap over the white nationalist edge just yet; they showed up in substantial numbers to help inaugurate the candidate, many of them still insist he stole the election.

Lady Gaga blew my socks off with her defiant and spirited interpretation of the National Anthem.  Her version seemed to be saying. “We are still here, and we are strong!”

The unprecedented security armada was sad and frightening, but it also showed that the Boogalo or Proud Boys and QAnon movements are never going to take over our government.

The capitol looked like the safest place on earth yesterday.

Get ready for movies and book deals stemming from the assault on the capitol and its defense.

That’s what happens to American extremists.

Christian crowd-sourcing sites are already sending thousands of dollars to the rioters for legal fees. This is America, a mad land in so many ways. Christianity is not always what Christ intended.

I could almost hear the millions of sighs of relief as Trump finally flew away and into the Florida sunset, threatening to come back. He’s unbalanced, but he’s not that stupid. He is not coming back, not for long.

The Poet Gorman, a 22-year-old with a speech impediment recommended to the inaugural committee by Dr. Jill Biden, overcame her speech problem with a beautifully delivered poem full of alliteration and internal rhyme.

Her poem evoked some amazing dialogue and rhythms from  “Hamilton,” a play she loved.

An aide told the New York Times that Trump was upset that Biden got bigger stars than he got for his inauguration. He’s going to have a rough few months.

From Gorman’s poem:

“In the end, ” wrote Susan Glasser in the New Yorker, “Trump was everything his haters feared—a chaos candidate, in the prescient words of one of his 2016 rivals, who became a chaos President.

An American demagogue, he embraced division and racial discord, railed against a “deep state” within his own government, praised autocrats and attacked allies, politicized the administration of justice, monetized the Presidency for himself and his children, and presided over a tumultuous, turnover-ridden Administration via impulsive tweets.

He leaves office, Gallup reported this week, with the lowest average approval ratings in presidential history.  

A liar on an unprecedented scale, Trump made more than thirty thousand false statements in the course of his Presidency, according to the Washington Post, culminating in perhaps the biggest lie of all: that he won an election that he decisively lost.”

It’s true; he really is gone, he got on a plane, demanded some a 21 gun salute, and sailed off into the Florida diaspora. I can hear the evil wind whistling through the palm trees.

I like to think of today as a rebirth for my country; I heard those first, very wonderful, baby cries that come just after birth.

Maybe this time.

Thank you for your continued optimism that our democracy will triumph and endure. I am always hopeful but fearful.  – Paul

I never supported Trump, but I don’t support the idea that everything will be ok now, either. It won’t be.   Jennifer

Expect a Global Emergency Broadcast Sunday or Monday. – Melinda

_____

In this post tonight, I answered all three messages, they all dealt with hope in different ways.

I was touched by them, and the range of them,  I told Jennifer I never once in my life woke up expecting everything to be OK. I always knew better.

That is not what life is about.

Optimism is the expectation that things-the weather, life, politics – will get better.

Hope is the trust that life will fulfill its promise to us and lead us to true freedom. We were never promised paradise.

Every great spiritual leader in history was a person of hope, this is why they all ultimately succeeded against overwhelming odds. The people who drag people downstairs and beat them have no hope, only rage.

I am proud that my blog draws such a wide range of opinions.

Lately, some people thank me for being hopeful; others are pessimistic; others are bleak about the future of our democracy, even hopeless.

Some have lost the ability to see light or promise.

The Trump defenders, who e-mailed me daily and faithfully all through the election, have disappeared, given up, gone to the ground, or retreating into secret chat rooms.

Most of them are not plotting to overtake the country, they are also struggling to keep hope alive.

Once again, I thank Donald Trump and his Cyber Goons And Trolls, they have shown me the alternative to democracy.

Some of them are claiming a great victory from the cruelty and fear they brought to the capitol, they have no idea just how badly they failed.

To do what they did last week speaks of cowardice and a sickness of the mind and soul. We will not see this much of them again for a long time, if ever.

Last week, they got lucky.

They will never be so lucky again.

Unlike many of the people e-mailing me, I believe most people are eager to get on with their lives and are ready to move on. They will get the chance.

They just want things to get better. It will get better.

Clearly, the people who make the most noise get the most attention, even if they say nothing true or real. Our President has proven that for four years.

But that is only one reality, not the whole reality. Be careful what you read and see, and how often you read and see it.

In my case, I believe Paul is correct. I have faith in democracy.

Our democracy is strong, much stronger, it turns out than Trump. He has been defeated and will always be defeated. He is the worst enemy he could ever possibly have.

Trump came, promising to make America great again. He leaves a country in crisis, himself in disgrace, his legacy in shambles, and shame.

I have faith in democracy for all of its many difficulties and weaknesses.

I guess one part of that is being Jewish. Nobody needs to tell me or my family that things aren’t always okay.

Jews understand, as many other peoples do,  that bad things can happen to good people and that dictators sometimes triumph and actually do the horrible things they say they will do.

Life is difficult, people have always looked to people who claim to be strong to save them.

My people know the damage lies can do and how easy it is to get ordinary people to do awful things. Hannah Arendt called it the banality of evil. We see it every day on the news. We saw it at the capitol on January 6.

People are always eager and willing to worship power, good or bad. Some people know good from evil and do good, most people do what they are told.

I see the bad, but I also see the good. It was necessary for me, and then became a faith.

The awful things humans do to one another does not make me cynical or hopeless about democracy.

America needs to work, the whole world needs America to work, our country is one of the great experiments in human history.

And I need America to work.

I have moved far from the understandably stern and ritualistic faith of Judaism in my life, edging oddly closer to the love and caring visions of Christ and the early Christian theologians, who dreamed of a kinder world.

These were the better angels of our world, even if so many of the people who call themselves Christians have betrayed Christ and his memory.

I will probably never quite land anywhere. But I do have faith in my country, the past few months and weeks have only enforced that.

I feel like I’ve lived through one of those Superhero movies where the monsters come pouring towards the gate, but never quite make it all the way through.

They were not strong enough in the end. They were beaten back. The world survives.

I have faith in our democracy. The other day, Joe Biden said he wanted a $1.9 trillion relief package, which includes a 15 dollars an hour minimum wage and billions of dollars in aid to states struggling to contain the pandemic.

I smiled when I read about it.  Democracy at work, it is just like making sausage.

Some people loved his proposals; some hated it; soon, the bargaining, trading, and posturing will begin. The thing about democracy, when it works, is that everybody gets a piece of what they want, nobody gets everything they want.

Isn’t that a powerful lesson for life?

(I’d be amazed if this Senate passed the minimum wage proposal. Freedom in a capitalist society wrote Lenin, always remains about the same as it was in ancient Greek republics: Freedom for slave owners.”)

It should be a surprise to no one in our country that billionaires, politicians, and lobbyists hate socialism, it might mean giving money to the poor and the hard-working people.

It’s just too expensive for them. Robbing the people is how they get rich, the oldest story in the world is the rich screwing the poor.

Why, then,  do I have faith in democracy? Because it is the best system I know, not a perfect system.  Like spirituality itself, it is about where we want to go and who we want to be, even if we are not yet there.

America is democracy at its best and worst. Right now we are seeing the worst. And some of the best.

In America, countless people over time have carved good lives for themselves, and there is, surely, a great deal of freedom for some of the people, not yet all of the people.

We keep trying to get it right, and sometimes we succeed, which is more than we can say for most places on the earth. We keep failing and struggling because it is hard.

Because it is hard, it is worthwhile and meaningful.

The struggle of Blacks and women and gay people and poor people for equal rights are among the most stirring stories in human history. Freedom is a cherished thing; it is worth fighting for.

We are still a country where Stacey Abrams can rise up as one and spend a decade transforming one of the most bigoted and repressive places in America.

For me, life without struggle is empty. The struggle is how I learn and grow. The struggle is how I figure out how to be strong and to work long and hard for a spiritual life that will ground and sustain me.

The death of democracy is not likely to be from an insurrection or mob violence. It will come – and nearly came – from a slow extinction, from apathy, ignorance, and lack of honor, and the loss of spiritual or real nourishment.

The economy cannot be the only thing that stirs us. There has to be something more.

We are missing the glue of religion in our lives, and need something to replace it.

I’m not blind, I saw the horrific attack on our capitol. I saw the outraged and very deep response. Our democracy is very much alive. It will take time. It won’t be easy.

Everything will never be 100 percent okay.

But apart from the ugliness and lies and hatred, I’ve seen the most extraordinary awakening, inspired by the most hateful of Presidents. Right now, we are so very much alive and so deeply aware of what democracy means.

Our democracy might yet die, but not now, not yet. Some people think me too hopeful, but there is a lot of reason for hope. I am not prone to cheery outlooks and baseless good cheer.

I follow the data, I follow the news.

Our real crisis is not the insurrection of Stupid White Boys playing patriot, but information. Democracies are built on information; when there is honest information, there is enlightenment and common purpose.

When there is debate, there are solutions.

When information is corrupted, when there is no sharing of information, and power or accountability, then there is abuse, corruption, outrage, and subjugation.

It can be done; it can still be done.

Democracy, said H.L. Mencken, is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.  That is happening. Democracy is a mess, and it is hard; it’s never easy, said, Robert Kennedy.

When we take it for granted, we get in trouble, when we leave democracy in the hands of dishonest and ignorant people, we risk everything. Propaganda is to a democracy what violence is to a dictatorship.

Democracy, I am learning, is not about elections; it is about how we live our daily lives, how committed we are to the truth, how much we care about one another and the world we live in.

The true patriot, said Paine, smiles in trouble, gathers strength from distress and grows brave by reflection. That is my inspiration now.

I answered Paul, Jennifer, and Melina.

I thanked Paul for spotting what drives me. Thanks, Paul, I do have faith in democracy. I see millions and millions of people and a real Army of  great power rising up to protect it and defend it.

I see the millions of people rising up to destroy it. I would have to be blind not to see it. But that fires me up, it doesn’t make me despair.

As Thomas Paine said, the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.

Is anything precious in life easy?

I see the danger, Melinda, believe me, but what I expect on Sunday morning is for the struggle to be continuing, loudly, angrily, and for the most part, peacefully.

I will be here, you will be here, Maria and the animals, and my life will be here. No, there will not be a Global Emergency Broadcast, if there is any such thing. And there are many people in the world with greater problems than ours.

That is what hope is, that is what faith is, and without both, there is not much of a life at all.

As for Jennifer’s message, I wrote her also and told her that I have never once in my life supported the idea that everything is ok, not when I was 10, not when I was 50,  not now.

I am not aware of any God in any faith who promised that everything is going to be okay all the time.

He or she would be a fraud.

Everything is never all okay. That is what it means to be a human.

That is what it means to love democracy. That is what it means to fight for freedom and decency. That is what it means to be a patriot.

My wish for you and everybody else is that you accept the reality of life and adjust your expectations, or you will never be happy or fulfilled.

 

 

As tragic and terrifying as it was, there was at least one remarkable and largely unremarked upon thing about the attack on our capitol last week. Trumpism and Testosterone, the signs of our time, hit their high watermark.

The Stupid White Boys followed their leader to Insurrection Mountain and lost the biggest battle they will ever fight. I would never want to take them lightly, but I am even more reluctant to give them more credit than they deserve.

I am ashamed to admit it.

I want to cry every time I see their photos, but I also can’t help but laugh. Like their Master/Leader, they manage to mess up every single thing they do because, like him, they have no real idea of what they are doing or where it might lead.

At times, it seemed like the attackers were just plain stupid in the way of so many Stupid White Boys I saw all around me when I was a kid. I remember Mr. Grover in middle school shouting at a bunch of bullies in the schoolyard: “the problem with you boys is that you think with your penises, not your brains!

Truer words.

Watching the news that troubling day, I remember thinking they were so happy to have broken into the capitol, and perhaps so shocked, they forget what they were supposed to do there and left.

There are certain traits Stupid White Boys exhibit unfailingly, whether they are bullying the weak, shouting racist slurs at people of color, raging about having to wear masks, bumbling a plot to kidnap a governor, pooping on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives, taking selfies of themselves without quite knowing that they are committing a crime.

Here are the most common traits of Stupid White Boys, judge for yourself if they fit some of what happened at the U.S. Capitol on January 6.

I saw many things watching the coverage of the assault; one of them was a real-time documentary about Testosterone and what it can do to the weak-minded.

1. Stupid White Boys always find a Smart But Mean White Boy to follow. He usually thinks for them, picks his targets, brings up their testosterone, bullies them. Trump is our first Testosterone President. The Stupid White Boys will do anything for him, even the things that are almost sure to get them into trouble.

Getting into trouble is the highest calling for a Stupid White Boy (there are probably stupid Black Boys too, but I never met any dumb enough to bust into the capitol and take photos of themselves peeing on the floor to offer up to the FBI on the Internet. At least their wear masks.)

2.Stupid White Boys Never Do Their Homework, which is for girls and sissy white boys who follow the rules. It was fascinating for me to realize that the Stupid White Boys, Trump Division, had no idea that Trump had been defeated and would not be President next week.

They really don’t know.

They seemed to expect that as heroic patriots (I don’t recall Jefferson half-naked and wearing Viking horns or crapping on the convention floor and wiping it on the walls)

They believed that all the police officers and most of the country would rush to join their Revolution and help them hang Vice President Pence and Nancy Pelosi.

Even in the Digital Age, not too many felons take selfies to mail to social media sites and post on their websites.

I read one story about how the FBI are just browsing the Internet and mopping up the Stupid White Boys like fishermen scooping up schools of lobsters in their nets.

There are countless videos of them trespassing, threatening and attacking the police, defecating and urinating on the hallowed halls, preening in vandalized offices, hauling out podiums, laptops, and statues. If you look at the costumes, as I did,  you might wonder if there is a Drag Queen subdivision of the Stupid Boys; they love to dress up.

Do real terrorists like to dress up?

“It doesn’t feel like real terrorists,” one FBI agent was quoted as saying in the New York Times. “They don’t leave all those videos and selfies for us to find.”

3.Which brings us to another trait of the Stupid White Boys – Moms. When they get into trouble, they always run home to their moms, where the police always go to pick them up: no shootouts, no flights across state lines, no Bonnie and Clyde standoffs.

Three of the capitol attackers were photographed with their mothers, who came with them to the riot, and once or twice, came inside to see the fun.

As awful as it was, it wasn’t like real terrorists because real terrorists don’t show up in funny uniforms and prance in drag and parade around for their friends to photograph. And they don’t invite mom.

The idea is to bring down the government, not find an agent.

Real terrorists don’t go online for weeks promising to attack and hurt people and offering details of how and when.

They show up and hurt people. I had this sickening feeling that real terrorists would have slaughtered half the congress if the Capitol Police were the only thing in their way that day.

It would be a mistake to trivialize what the Stupid White Boys did, but it would also be a mistake to build them up and give them more credit than they deserve.  Like Trump himself, they fail at almost everything they do.

They deserve all the punishment they get, and more, yet there was this odd sensation that for most of them, killing people wasn’t really the point or the goal.

The most curious thing about the assault was there was no goal, no sane end game, not one thing to show for it other than scaring the wits out of half the country and killing a police officer.

The election was over; Trump was leaving. The Stupid White Boys are about the only people left in America who don’t know that. “We are here to save our President,” one rioter screamed aloud.

Really? How did that work out for him, I wonder?

Perhaps the real point was getting to dress up and save some penises around. It is difficult to fathom how many people could fail to see how hopeless their journey to Washington was. And many of them may never quite get it. Stupid White Boys sometimes grow up to be Stupid White Men. One might even get to be President one day.

It’s a great job. You can run your mouth, lie, and cheat. And there will always be Stupid White Boys to fight for you.

You don’t have to think about what you are doing, you don’t have to research what you doing, and you absolutely never consider the consequences of what you are doing.

The Big Smart White Boy tells you to move, and you move. The Smart White Boy tells you that he is getting screwed, and you rush to fight for him. Stupid White Boys have been doing this for all of recorded human civilization; it has something, I think, to do with adrenaline and testosterone.

I can’t imagine a mob of women crashing into the U.S. capitol like that and trashing the place. I can’t really say why.

The women I know fight in different ways, and increasingly, smarter ones. There were plenty of women in the capitol last week – one was shot to death by police – but the sense from all of the imagery was that this was a Donald Trump Production all the way – dramatic, irresponsible, a Pagan male ritual almost, unthinking, false at its core.

Through social media, Trump has built himself an army of zombie-obedient Stupid White Boys who love guns, costumes, big trucks, big flags, big boats, big banners. You don’t have to be Freud to figure it out.

Trump is the Big Penis, and all the other penises follow like minnows in a pond.

Taken together, the photos show us a bizarre conglomeration of strange beards, lots of camo and ammo, bare chests, and the imagery of seething – it would be sensual it wasn’t so foolish –  so much masculinity.

Plenty of these images were terrifying.

So many of them were theater, so many of them were inane, And none of them accomplished what they promised to do on all their tough websites  – stop the election, overturn it, or capture and intimidate Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi. ( I have not seen persuasive evidence that they planned to kill them.)

If Trump is no Hitler, the Stupid White Boys are no Hitler Youth.

Like him, they are full of big talk and they don’t seem to know how to accomplish much of anything other than to make people crazy and scared.

The FBI asked Zip Tie Guy why he was carrying Zip Ties around the capitol. He said he found them on the floor. Even if he was lying, he just doesn’t cut it as a real terrorist, who wouldn’t bother to make up such a silly story.

In a way, the capitol attack was the high watermark of Trumpist masculinity.  Trumpism has always been about men, about fighting off the women’s movement, waving those Confederate flags, keeping people from “shithole” countries out of America, keeping America Christian and white. And male.

It hasn’t worked. It can’t work. It won’t work.

One of the most fearful rioters – QAnon Shaman a.k.a. Jake Angeli, announced in his first court appearance that he could not eat jail food because it wasn’t all organic.

I don’t recall Pablo Escobar or the 911 terrorists demanding organic food.

Brandon Fellows, the Stupid White Boy who arrived wearing a knit hat resembling a knight’s helmet and fake beard, and who was allegedly photograph smoking a joint in a Democratic Senator’s office, told Bloomberg News: “I didn’t hurt anyone, I didn’t break anything, I did trespass though, I guess.’

Duh. And that’s against the law, Brandon. And you could go to jail.

No wonder we can’t reason with them, and increasingly, don’t want to try?

Brandon added proudly that his Bumble dating profile, now updated with pictures of himself at the Capitol, was “blowing up.” Ah, now we get it. The jail time will be worth it.

“The capitol riot was the apotheosis of  Trumpism,” write Monica Hesse in The Washington Post this week. “There was just enough boobish amateurism and eye-rolling absurdity on the surface to give cover to those tempted to dismiss a deadly serious attack on the American system as some version of “boys will be boys.”

But still, do truly dangerous terrorists commit crimes and go home to Mom and Dad and wait politely for the FBI to come and get them? No secret hideouts, fake passports, elaborate escape plans?

Their real weapons are websites and Twitter and Facebook and Amazon and crackpot hate forums.

It is easy to be tough online, and cheer at rallies, it’s so much harder when the guns and consequences are real, as many of them are learning this week.

As a result of their ignorance and gullibility, they have lost touch with reality, a fatal flaw for real Badasses.

The week’s latest hysteria has these boobs attacking every State House in the country. This is yet another thing Osama Bin Laden did not do – put his plans online.

A week from the inauguration there are already 20,000 soldiers and cops in Washington ringing the inauguration and many thousands more out rounding up the Stupid White Boys, home to brag about their trip to Insurrection Mountain.

White Boy Number One, no less a figure than our President, was pleased as this stunning show of Trumpist masculinity; he was beaming and full of love,  like a proud Papa bursting with pride at the triumph of his football champion sons.

Monday, a campaign press secretary went on television to describe President Trump as “the most masculine person, I think, to ever hold the White House.”

Finally, somebody there told the truth to us.

The Stupid White Boy Insurrection is a tragic thing to see, for them, for us. Donald Trump has no idea what it means to be a real man.

And he has taught a bunch of Stupid White Boys the same thing, along with half of the congress.

But I would be cautious of seeing them as more than they are.

September 6, wrote Hesse, showed us the Trump brand, “a combination of inchoate fury and utter buffoonery, feeding on each other as they become more angry and more preposterous. It was that aspiring insurrectionist, scaling a railing with all the artifacts of a domestic terrorism coup. It was that dude from the steakhouse, hanging out with his mom.”

They had the artifacts, but not the heart, and not the cause.

I had this thought over and over again, watching those tapes and videos.

They can hurt us, frighten us, and drive us mad. There is no way they can beat us.