‘And,’ in America

Where have you gone, Jimmy Doogan?

[Editor’s Note: Pull up a chair, everyone. He has a lot to say. And he uses Naughty Words.]

I love Tom Hanks.

Yep, that is where I am starting this column about the unconscionable and indefensible insurrection we all witnessed at the U.S. Capitol building this past Wednesday - with America’s greatest living actor and a true national treasure, Mr. Hanks.

(Oh, and if you see Wednesday as anything but insurrection and sedition, go ahead and get pissed off at what follows, but try to read through to the end and see if you can be honest with yourself about what you might want to consider moving forward. I think you can. And, to stave off the charges that I know are coming that I am a damned liberal or a damned conservative - guess what? I’m a lifelong Independent. So there. Thhhhbbt.).

I thought of Hanks often on Wednesday afternoon. I thought, yes, about his iconic roles in movies about American history and American life – Saving Private Ryan, Apollo 13, Forrest Gump, Bridge of Spies, Captain Phillips, Sully, and A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood – and how they all highlight the best of what it means to be American. But, primarily, I thought about him in one specific scene in one specific movie – one of his most underrated roles, in my opinion.

This one. Watch to the very end.

“It’s supposed to be hard. If it wasn’t hard everyone would do it. The Hard is what makes it great.”

The Hard is what makes it great.

Hanks as Jimmy Doogan was right about baseball, and I thought of it on Wednesday as I watched an armed man in Kevlar armor with a bunch of twist ties for hostage-taking hopping over railings in the Senate chamber (and I cannot believe I just wrote that sentence as nonfiction).

“Democracy is so hard,” I said to myself. “But, (say it with me), the Hard is what makes it great.”

Yeah, democracy is hard. American Democracy perhaps even more so. Because it’s slow, contradictory, incomplete, enraging, disappointing, and often falls short of its ideals.

And yet, we seem to have forgotten, it’s supposed to be that way - it’s a system that recognizes the imperfection of people, with built-in checks and balances against abuses, and can be adapted over time to increasingly reflect the larger will of the people, gradually and intentionally. 

Because that’s what makes it great – meaning our ability to continually challenge ourselves and our fellow citizens to strive towards “a more perfect Union.”

That process never stops. It’s not supposed to. It’s also supposed to be hard so it doesn’t unravel easily, whatever the threats thrown at it, be they foreign or domestic. It doesn’t mean it can’t move faster at times, or that it always meets our notions of justice. And that’s a problem - but the problem can only be rectified within the larger parameters of that system. 

Which then, in turn, relies on the people’s continued faith in it. 

And their willingness to defend it when it is attacked, like it was on Wednesday. 

In baseball, new ideas and strategies and tactics and uniforms and practice regimens and technologies come along to shape and reshape it, but the Hard continues. The agreed-upon rules and goals and outcomes remain the same. And at the end, without fail (unless it rains), there is a winner and a loser.

Then they both go home, rest, and reflect.

And the next day, winner and loser go to bat yet again. That’s how it works.

Those basics remain, and they must. Otherwise, there is no game.

Democracy is like that, though it is far beyond a mere game – lives and livelihoods, dreams and resiliency, opportunities and accomplishments all depend on it. Its health and vibrancy and relevance depend on us embracing and protecting how we face each other “on the field,” how we treat one another on it, how we agree to both stated and unstated rules of conduct. How we work together (owners and unions and paying customers) to defend and grow it so later generations can enjoy it.

We might disagree and argue over vital issues like fairness, inclusivity, equity, protection of rights, extensions of protections, pensions, health care, and integrity in leadership and conduct, and penalties for those who go against them, harm someone else, or damage the “game itself.” 

But healthy American Democracy starts with our agreement to value those basics, work within them – even when they go against our interests or disappoint us or enrage us – and unite around them despite differences when we are faced with clear and present dangers to that system. It relies on a healthy American citizenry or, if it is ill, one that commits itself to recovery and attitudinal changes to keep it well.

Yes, I know this all sounds too simple. It is in theory, but it’s enormously difficult in execution, primarily because it takes faith even when signs of it appearing weak or ineffective or exclusionary assault us. 

American history is full of groups that have had to fight – and continue to fight – to realize fully their own rights and protections and opportunities under the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. So, I understand charges that my analysis may strike some as sanguine and naïve. I call it optimism based on historical facts and rejection of myths. 

For our Democracy can hold those paradoxes, as can I as a citizen of this republic. I must listen to opposing ideas that challenge my own and consider them, even as I advocate my own. I can plead my case and vote for it, and accept an outcome that goes against me – even if I bitch and moan – on the promise that I will have later opportunities to come to bat again.

The proof – ideal and not so ideal and downright ugly – is strewn throughout American history. It is a history of what I’ve called elsewhere the Power of ‘And.’

‘And’ is a powerful word, as it allows two paradoxes or juxtaposed elements to coexist. That’s the Hard. 

Thomas Jefferson and George Washington and James Madison were some of the greatest intellectual minds of the age and perhaps of all time who put their stamp on what has become the most successful democratic system of all time, AND they claimed ownership of other human beings. 

America is the country that invented and enshrined the individual right to vote, AND took far too long to extend that right to all its citizens. 

America has been more open to ethnic immigration - and more appealing to the rest of the world - than any other nation in history, AND it is the nation that produced the Chinese Exclusion Act and, more recently, tore immigrant children from their parents at the border. 

We are the country that embraces the call of the Statue of Liberty AND produced Executive Order 9066. 

We are the nation that fought a Civil War to end slavery AND failed to defend its gains after 1876, paving the way for Jim Crow laws, Black voter suppression, and segregation that was anything but equal. Nearly one hundred years after that bloody war to save the Union, it was the country that produced Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Civil Rights Movement, AND that assassinated him and allowed for movements to develop that tried to roll back those Civil Rights from the moment they became enshrined in law in 1964 and 1965. 

We are a nation that celebrates individual rights and limited self-government that has helped the country expand its economic strength and quality of life, AND that has, in times of unprecedented emergency, embraced the need for government to become much more involved in daily life to, you know, keep people from starving and the country from collapsing (the New Deal and the recent Covid aid packages come to mind). 

We are a nation that once fought around the globe against those who hoisted the swastika in the name of murdering and enslaving millions, AND now has watched for four years as more and more fellow American citizens brandish that swastika publicly and proudly - and, as of Wednesday, inside the center of American government alongside flags of the rebellious South (I won’t even call them by their other name here, as that gives them a legitimacy as a nation and movement they never had or deserved). 

All sides of the mainstream political spectrum have contributed to the successes and failures of America’s development, AND alongside the landmark Supreme Court cases that have shaped greater liberty and freedom in this country, others stand out as horrendous failures - the Dred Scott Decision and Plessy vs. Ferguson are only two such examples. 

We are a nation of people, which means we are alternatively magnanimous and magnificent in our generosity AND can be riven by selfishness, anger, resentment, and dismissiveness of others who don’t look / believe / act / behave like us. We all have within us what Abraham Lincoln called “Our Better Angels,” AND he personally witnessed on numerous occasions Americans exhibiting the exact opposite of that. 

Today, we are a nation whose ideas of opportunity are still appealing enough for people across the political spectrum, from all ethnic groups and economic backgrounds, to continue to fight for them, AND we are a nation where some work to actively overturn or deny those rights for others even if they have to lie about anything and everything to do it. 

I heard a lot of “this is not who we are” on Wednesday and Thursday, and I get what they really mean - it is not the BEST of who we are. 

That is true - open sedition is not our best (well, duh). 

And…

Our best is not rejecting accountability and responsibility for responding to it.

Our best is not slamming the door on communication and peaceful protest.

Our best is not giving sanction to actions and words that fly in the face of the inherent integrity and value of every human being.

Our best is not when we excuse destruction and mayhem and murder by anyone for any reason.

Our best is not when we are so intent on being right that we refuse to see where we might be wrong.

Our best is not when we close our minds to facts, feelings, and decency.

If you think I am making a “pox on both your houses” case here, I can see why. But that is not my point. In fact, right now it’s not about blame - at least beyond the current discussions of who is culpable for Wednesday and to hold them accountable. 

My point is that WE have the responsibility - whatever our “house” - to move forward and learn from this to make sure no such thing happens again. 

That responsibility falls on us all, no matter who we voted for. 

Right now, this call is particularly tough on those who voted for the loser of this election - and it was a fair election, make no mistake. And, I submit, they do not need to like the winning side to accept this responsibility. 

Because no matter who you voted for, Wednesday’s events should be so far beyond the pale of acceptability for any elected official or everyday citizen. Even if you defend this current president’s policies, Wednesday should be enough for you to, at the very least, withdraw your support. 

This system we live in is bigger than one person, one party, or one era. It exists beyond our temporal notions of just about anything. 

American Democracy is a system that has long inspired and fascinated the world, and has served as an intellectual, legal, and ethical bulwark against the appeal and spread of authoritarian, murderous, exclusionary counter-ideologies. 

In order for that example to be maintained, it has to be protected. 

If we do not renew our commitment to American Democracy now, with equal access to the ballot box, better education on civics and history, and renewed commitments to dialogue, civil discourse, and owning our own bullshit, it is only a matter of time before something even worse happens. 

The world has seen worse before. 

Let me tell you about a pertinent historical example from a very different context. Let’s roll back exactly one hundred years to Germany. Specifically, Bavaria. Even more specifically, Munich. 

And yes, Hitler is about to appear. But it isn’t really about him - I avoid such comparisons since they are limited. 

No, this is about what made Hitler possible. 

That’s right, it’s (Hi)story time.

************

As with anything, context matters. 

In 1921, Germany was a society torn apart internally after being externally defeated three years earlier in the Great War. At the end of that war, as the country buckled under the crippling British blockade and its people dealt with starvation, the German military - which had effectively run the country during the war years and had proclaimed Germany’s imminent victory the entire time - told Kaiser Wilhelm II the truth that defeat on the battlefield was inevitable. Meanwhile, inspired by the victory of Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks in Russia, German communists rose up to resist renewed war deployments and to overthrow the monarchy. Wilhelm and the military leadership fled the country, but not before disguising the true state of affairs from the fledgling democratic parties in Germany to whom they handed power - and the blame for Germany’s sudden surrender. 

Thus, the “stab in the back” theory was born - that Social Democrats (who were NOT communists but were lumped in as such by the political right) had betrayed Germany on the verge of its victory and had opened the country to communist revolution. After the November 1918 armistice, those communist revolutionaries rose up en masse around the country, seeking to achieve Lenin’s dream that what he’d started in Russia would spread like wildfire around the world. This culminated in the communist-led Spartacist Revolt of late 1918 - early 1919. 

With the end of the Great War in mind - a story which did not match the facts at all -  demobilized and demoralized German military units returned home afraid, angry, confused, and bound and determined to prevent a communist takeover of their country. Some soldiers - still armed and well versed in warfare - formed into ad hoc units from their native areas to crush the Revolt and communism. These units came to be called “Freikorps” (roughly “free units”).They were particularly powerful in the staunchly conservative and pro-monarchy southern areas of Germany - especially Bavaria. They succeeded in crushing the Revolt, but thwarting it and embracing the stab in the back theory left many of these soldiers radicalized against both communism and democratic practices. 

With the Revolt crushed, the democratic parties of Germany worked to create Germany’s first democratic system - the so-called Weimar Republic. To put it mildly, it wasn’t popular, particularly among conservative Germans, the remnants of the military class, remaining communists, and the hundreds of newly-organized radical right parties that cropped up all over the country. 

Hundreds of them. Meeting in barns or beer halls or in open fields. 

One, in particular, eventually became more notorious than all the others - the German Worker’s Party in Munich, which after one Adolf Hitler (himself a radicalized, angry former German soldier who believed the stab in the back theory) joined it and became its leader was renamed the National Socialist German Workers Party - or “Nazi”, shorthand for Nazional. 

The Weimar Republic had a target on its back from both sides of the political spectrum, and it had no German historical experience to guide it or build widespread support for it, something made worse by the horrible economic situation the country faced in the aftermath of the Great War and a peace treaty that punished the country severely by stripping its military power and levying crushing economic reparations on it - in short, Germany had to pay for losing. 

For far-right, radical parties like the Nazis - who very few people had heard of by 1921 - this was fertile soil in which to grow their ideology via propaganda that, as is common in extremist groups, provided simplistic solutions for complex problems that ALWAYS focused on outside groups to blame, thus making themselves righteous victims entitled to a “return” to the way things “used to be.” Thus were created powerful mythologies about the “good old days” when the country was pure - and decadent influences like foreigners, new art forms like jazz and cabaret, and democracy were kept out. 

In short, all of these radical right parties, big or small, wanted to Make Germany Great Again. 

Yeah, I fucking said it. 

But it was a Germany that had never existed. 

Ever. 

At any level. MGGA was a complete fabrication. 

A myth built on outright lies and selective half truths dressed up as righteous revelation and mission. 

In reality? Total horseshit. 

And yet - that myth, combined with grievances about the end of the war that were based on lies by the true culprits of Germany’s collapse, all centered within the unprecedented crisis of the aftermath of the war, grew more entrenched each day that passed where the democrats (on the left and centrists mainly - conservatives in Germany were mostly staunch monarchists) could not bring economic or political stability to the country. Which would have been difficult in any circumstance for a fledgling democratic system. 

By 1921, these radical parties were growing and the “stab in the back / return to glory” mythology had set in deeply amongst their adherents, seemingly impossible to drive out with reason or logic or compassion - because those groups didn’t want any of that, seeing it as weakness and “proof” of the rightness of their belief system. 

[Editor’s Note: You nervous yet?)

As Germany limped on, always on the verge of collapse, matters worsened. In 1923, having refused to continue making its reparations to France on the agreed upon schedule, Germany saw its primary industrial area, the Ruhr,  occupied by French troops. The German currency, the Mark, had already been deflating as the government foolishly printed more paper money to pay workers. When the French seized the Ruhr, German authorities simply printed even more money to pay off their reparations debt while ordering all Germans in the Ruhr to go on strike. The result was a catastrophe. Within months, the Mark had sunk to an incredible 4 trillion to 1 ratio against the American dollar. A loaf of bread ended up costing 2,000,000,000 Marks. That's a billion with a ‘B.’

The Germans essentially flushed their already stagnating economic recovery from the war right down the toilet - out of pique - and democratic participation was so low and cynical that no one held them accountable. That cynicism set the stage for something drastic. 

The Nazi party in Munich took that step. In November 1923, as the Mark finally began to slowly recover after the Weimar government realized how insane they’d been, Adolf Hitler and his fledgling Nazi Party decided to seize the opportunity they’d long sought - to overthrow the local government in Munich, then ride the resulting national support all the way to Berlin. 

The idea was ludicrous and doomed to fail. 

The Nazis numbered at most in the few hundreds, and needed the support of other conservative parties in Bavaria to have any chance. Most of those looked at Hitler askance - at best - and dismissed his rantings as that of a blowhard doomed to flame out spectacularly. So when Hitler, worried the country’s emerging recovery was closing his window of opportunity, decided to force the issue on November 9, 1923, things quickly tanked. 

Meeting with other conservative groups - including one of the German military leaders most responsible for the stab in the back deception, Erich Ludendorff - in a Munich beer hall, Hitler pulled a gun on them and jumped on a table shouting, “the national revolution has begun!” Hitler demanded his fellow radical group leaders order their “legions” out into the streets in support of the Nazi brownshirts. Much more bemused than intimidated, every leader simply nodded and gave Hitler verbal assurances that they were “right behind him.” 

Incredibly, Hitler took them at their word and left. The other party leaders then went home. 

Not long after, walking defiantly arm-in-arm with fellow Nazis through the heart of Munich, Hitler was confronted by Munich police, who opened fire on the march when the brownshirts refused to lay down their arms. The men on either side of Hitler were shot, and he ran away. 

To his apartment, where he was arrested a short time later. 

Not a particularly well-conceived revolution.

So ended what came to be known as the “Beer Hall Putsch.” It was a stupid act with no real plan, and while it made the papers in Bavaria and elsewhere, the few in the country who reacted to it with anything other than eye rolling indifference mocked Hitler and his radical nutjobs (not the German word for that) instead. Hitler and his minions had posed no threat to the order in Germany, and Hitler was tossed into jail to await trial on charges of sedition and treason. 

Had the story ended there, we could laugh at it, too. Just like we’ve giggled at the various names being given the events on Wednesday by cleverer than half online commentators - the “Beer Belly Putsch” trended hard on Twitter, for example (To be fair, I’ve done this, too, though “Dumb Quixote” is the best I was able to come up with before I came to my senses). 

But, obviously, things didn’t end there for Hitler. 

And THIS is the important part of this story for our purposes. What came AFTER the Beer Hall Putsch should serve as a warning to all of us. 

Hitler went on trial in 1924, and it should have been a footnote to a failed life. Instead, Hitler ended up appearing before a panel of sympathetic judges - all ardent nationalists with little respect for the democratic Weimar system - who allowed Hitler to stand in the dock and spout his radical ideas for the German press to write up and print. Thus Hitler’s name entered broader German consciousness. He was eventually convicted for treason, but was sentenced to a mere five-years in prison. 

Five years. For treason. In a Putsch where people died. 

And….he served nine months, during which he had a cushy jail cell in Landsberg prison where the cell remained unlocked for most of the day. Hitler spent the time dictating to his lapdog adjutant, Rudolf Hess, his worldview manifesto, which became published after his release under the title, Mein Kampf (My Struggle). 

When no one bought Hitler’s book because he’d fallen out of the public eye, he changed tactics. He decided to rebrand the Nazis as a political organization that would run for votes and offices in the Weimar Republic system as a conservative party. It would not divulge its true purpose until the right time. 

Destroy the Weimar Republic from within. 

Canvas, campaign, give speeches, kiss babies, write op-eds, disown the rough tactics of the brownshirts who beat up and even murdered their communist counterparts in the streets, demonize communism and democracy equally, and then gain enough votes to seize power and end democracy and communism by fiat. 

Their plan was ambitious, and took time to bear fruit. And when it did, it was because of an event no one anticipated back in 1923, or when Hitler was on trial, or when he was in prison, or when he was reshaping himself as a “statesman.” 

The Great Depression struck. 

Evolving out of the October 1929 stock market crash on Wall Street, it became a full-blown economic collapse: banks failed, companies folded, and agricultural production dried up. To help stem the crisis, then-President Herbert Hoover called in all government monies invested overseas to try to save the American financial system. 

The problem with that, though, was that the American dollar had been propping up the German economic recovery since shortly after Hitler’s failed coup. Known as the Dawes and Young Plans, this meant American money essentially bankrolled German reparations payments back to Britain and France, who then paid back their own American bank loans to the US with interest (I’m generalizing greatly here, but that’s the gist of it). The Germans had relied upon this system since the mid-1920s to stabilize their economy and shore up German public support for Weimar democracy. 

When Hoover called the money out of Germany, the whole arrangement crashed. And Germany’s economy went with it. As German unemployment skyrocketed to over 50% in some areas, any chance of German public support for democracy died a slow death as parliamentary election after election failed to bring together ruling coalitions that could work together to stop the bleeding. 

In this atmosphere, with Germans blaming democracy for their plight, two political parties grew steadily, gaining momentum - the Communist Party of Germany, and the Nazis. 

Before the October 1929 crash, the Nazis had earned less than 1.5% of the seats in the German parliament. They were inconsequential, and Hitler was frustrated. 

Three years later, the Nazis were the largest single political party in Germany, pulling in an average of 35-40% of the vote in the various elections held in 1932. The second biggest party in Germany by then was the communists, pulling in roughly 15-20% of the vote. 

That’s frightening math - in 1932, fully half (half, people...HALF. HALF!) of the German electorate was so anti-democratic that they voted for parties that, by then, were openly sharing their intent to destroy democracy once elected to power…democratically. 

That’s the point. People didn’t fight for their democracy because they didn’t see its value. They took for granted its protections or didn’t invest in them to begin with. Instead, they half-listened to simple solutions for complex problems that blamed others for Germany’s plight - Jews and communists and democrats and other “undesirables” for the Nazis, bourgeois capitalists and monarchists and nationalism for the communists. 

With the Nazis so strong by early 1933, the President of Germany - and the primary World War I military leader who’d lied his way out of trouble, Paul von Hindenburg - caved to pressure and appointed Hitler Chancellor of Germany (its Prime Minister, essentially). The hope was that the radical ideas and words of Hitler would be tempered by the responsibility of  ruling, rather than just being a revolutionary; that the coalition cabinet he’d put together would moderate him, get him to follow more acceptable modes of governance; that he’d follow the Weimar rules. 

Wrong. 

Incredibly wrong. Within a year and a half, Hitler had destroyed communist parties by force, opened concentration camps for political prisoners, strong-armed the other political parties into submission then destruction, and declared a national emergency by which he could suspend the democratic constitution and rule by decree. When Hindenburg died in late 1934, Hitler just claimed his title, too, and became Der Fuhrer (the leader). 

He, of course, promised to give power back, eventually, once the emergency had passed. 

He didn’t. Because, for the Nazis, the emergency was perpetual; enemies ALWAYS had to be found, rounded up, and destroyed. 

By then, the chance to prevent what Hitler would become, and what he would do, had passed. Hitler didn’t hijack the country as many have claimed. No. 

He was voted into position to destroy democracy. Germans abandoned democratic parties in droves to embrace, out of fear and resentment, systems that made them feel simultaneously victimized AND powerful. 

Because of the particular circumstances at the time in Germany and because of the peculiarities of their democratic system, it only took about 35 - 40 % of the electorate to make it happen. 

[Editor’s Note: So, how you feeling?]

Do you see my point? 

It is NOT that what is happening here in the U.S. today is parallel to or identical to what happened in Germany from 1921 - 32, though there are some scary “rhymes” as Mark Twain once said about the nature of history. Germany then and America today have vastly different contexts. 

What I AM saying is this - what made Hitler possible was the ambivalence and then, the growing antipathy, of German citizens towards democracy. So disillusioned, enough were willing to entertain his insanely simplistic ideas for some hope amidst their terror, a solution to their suffering. 

And something unexpected - the Depression - harvested a field ready for it. And no one saw it coming back in 1923.

But here’s the thing.

Germany had zero experience with representative democracy prior to 1919, and it wasn’t born under anything remotely close to stable circumstances. Considering all the Weimar Republic had to face to simply exist, it is easy to see why it had a very slim chance of success in retrospect.

America, meanwhile, is in year 245 of its Great Experiment in Self-Government.... 

So, what exactly is our excuse? 

Unlike Germany in the 1920s, the American democratic system has benefitted millions of people for over two centuries, even as it has struggled to apply its lofty principles and practices to all within its borders.

Unlike with the Weimar Republic, or with Russia’s short-lived Menshevik led democratic rule in 1917 (which Lenin crushed later that year), or with the descent of the French Revolution into the dictatorship of Napoleon at the turn of the 19th century, the America of today remains the longest standing democratic system in the world. 

So, why have so many of us come to take it for granted enough that some will tolerate - even praise - what we saw on Wednesday, over the previous four years and even beyond (all of this predates this administration by decades, in my opinion)? 

Are we victims of our own collective national prosperity? Have we come to simply believe we are destined to remain a great, stable, growing democracy where opportunities and liberties for ourselves AND others are simply things we don’t have to understand or defend - only take advantage of? 

Our biggest problem is NOT that we need more people to believe in God and He will reward us. It is NOT that communism is at our doorstep and we need to do something about it (it’s not. It’s not anywhere close, actually). It is NOT that we are extending too many rights to too many groups or are NOT extending enough rights to enough people fast enough. 

No, our biggest problem is that we’ve forgotten that, first and foremost, we ALL have to be invested in participating in the best of what democracy offers us, protect the rights of others to do the same even when they disagree with us, and work together when necessary to defend that process from those who just want to throw it all out and impose their own insanity on us all. 

This is on us. 

No one else. We may not be at fault for what happened at the Capitol, but we are responsible for addressing it and preventing worse. We have to act on it, not just pray on it or argue about it or wring our hands about it or complain to others who think exactly the way we do. 

We are in this situation because enough of us have, in our complacency, allowed this. Our voting levels, until 2018, have been embarrassingly low. Hyper-partisanship, for its own sake, poisons everything it touches. Fear of differences, of change, of “not having enough” has overtaken many of us, blinding us to the fact that this system can help and serve everyone if we all agree to act on its principles and live them out in our daily lives. Cynicism about everything from wealth to race to red state to blue state to history has distracted us from the common problems we all have that need solving. 

And, perhaps most importantly right now, far too many of us are unwilling to challenge our own perceptions and perspectives and biases and beliefs. Unwilling to read more than one book - if that - on a subject before we make our minds up about what we believe. Unwilling to even try to connect with those who disagree with us on things big or small. Unwilling to see the tension and debate and constructive conflict in our politics as necessary to achieve the ends we seek even as they protect us from far worse systems, individual whims, and outright evils.

That chronic unwillingness is the perfect recipe for a body politic where lies become embraced as truth. Even insanely untrue shit like QAnon. 

And that is no laughing matter at all, no matter the Beer Belly Putsch or Dumb Quixote. 

Instead of debating each other, we’ve turned on each other. Instead of doing the hard work of discourse and collaboration, we’ve taken the easy route of working against the other for the sake of “winning.”  

Instead of ‘AND’,  far too many of us have gone with ‘BUT.’ And when that doesn’t work, we go with “Whataboutism.” Which is, to go back to the baseball analogy, like taking the balls and bats away from everyone and into the dugout because you didn’t like the called third strike that you let go by. 

There’s no crying in baseball, and there shouldn’t be crying about THAT. So leave your Whataboutism at home or toss it in the trash - I brought my own balls and bats and I’ll just play without you until you calm the f*%& down and remember that the game is played a certain way, regardless of how you feel about it. 

We need to get back to ‘AND.’ 

To the messy business of conflicting ideas and policies coexisting and needing to be debated without a scorched earth policy being the norm. Of agreeing on the problems we face and working through our different ideas on how to solve them. Of not assuming that this system we rely on doesn’t need our participation and investment to survive. Of agreeing that disagreeing doesn’t have to be a blood sport. Of rejecting all those whose ideas and practices violate the inherent dignity and value of each human being’s body, mind, heart, and soul. 

It is what we preach everyday in our pulpits and classrooms and government chambers, so maybe we should get back to actually practicing it. 

And that goes well beyond punishing those responsible for what happened on Wednesday. That is the just accountability for those perpetrators, and then ours has to follow for how we move forward. 

And before you dismiss this as unrealistic, I’ll prove to you it’s not. And if you think long and hard enough, I’ll bet you can find places in your life where you have proof. 

My proof are these people (last names withheld) - Robert, Tom, Steve T., Derek, Jeff, Jamie, Steve G., Kassi, Kristen, Steve R., Rich, Ed, Steve M., and Rachel. 

These are the names of my closest friends in my graduate school cohorts, who all exemplify exactly what I’m talking about. Those names cover all sides of various spectrums - politics, religion, music, sports, food and drink preferences, you name it. We debated and argued about them animatedly and, occasionally, angrily. And yet, we did so knowing that there was something larger at work in the process - gaining knowledge and pursuing truth. Arguments were usually followed by laughter and more than a few wings and beers. It got tough, but it was never bloody, and not one - from conservative to liberal - ever believed or spouted lies or labeled the others as fascists or communists or existential threats to the republic, because none of them were or are. 

Fascists and Communists tend to announce themselves openly, by the way.  Just FYI. 

My grad school friends blew me away with their knowledge, their passion, their skill in debating, and in their humanity. They each embraced the same broad ideals for America and beyond, but battled over how to realize them. They were always battles worth having, and I am far better for them all - even though I often ended up in the middle of their views somehow (none of them will be surprised to read that). They challenged me to examine my ideas and reevaluate myself regularly, and to stand up for my own positions and defend them with evidence and sound reasoning and, importantly, a good dose of heart. 

They live and practice ‘AND.’ They do the Hard because that’s what makes it Great. 

And they’ve taught me a lot about how to do the same. They are my proof that it can be done, and that it works. 

And it sure as hell beats what we saw on Wednesday. Let’s make sure that is the nadir of whatever the hell this has been, wherever the hell it came from. 

Maybe not everyone can do it, but why not try? We’ve seen what happens when we don’t, both this week and a hundred years ago. 

So, I’m recommitting to the Hard. Starting now. 

How about you?

Chins Up, Everyone. 

If you are interested in learning more about Hitler’s rise and rule, track down anything by the following names and read their work - Ian Kershaw, Richard J. Evans, Norman J.W. Goda, Claudia Koonz, Timothy Snyder, Doris Bergen, and Gisela Bock. That’s for starters. With the help of my aforementioned grad school friends, I’ll share an American history reading list with you at the end of the next My Sunday Post.

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Thanks for reading My Sunday Post. Here are important updates from my past week:

Soul Book of the Week: Love Her Wild by Atticus (Poetry Collection)

Book On My Nightstand: Red Famine: Stalin’s War On Ukraine by Anne Applebaum

Worst (Shit)Show I Watched: Wednesday, January 6, 2021

Best Show / Movie I Watched: The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart (HBO Max)

Strongest Earworm Song of the Week: Stayin’ Alive by the Bee Gees (I blame / credit the above….)

Best Meal I Cooked: Braised Sirloin Cap with mushroom / wine sauce and sautéed vegetables

Longest Walk / Run of the Week: 7.79 mile run / 18 mile ride (Monday)

Most Fun Moment: Learning my nephew piloted his first solo flight

Most Exciting Quarantine Thing That Shouldn’t Be Exciting: New razor blades and body wash

Most Anticipatory Thing Going On: New radio show / podcast - This Show Is All About You