“Angry Men”

January 3, 2021

I was riding home yesterday coming from Home Depot, where I picked up 5 boards I needed to complete a storage project.  Riding home, minding my own business, a red truck driven by an apparently angry man came behind me with an American flag placed in the back of his truck, so it would flap in the wind as he was driving.  Since there is no national holiday and New Years is over, I tried to surmise what all this might mean?  This person was obviously in a hurry as he was riding close the back end of my truck.  I knew an alternate way home, so I took it and let this truck and its contents of an angry man with his American Flag go on down the primary road.  I thought at the time, this really is a sad state of affairs, when angry men in pickup trucks roam our highways looking for someone to intimidate.  Of what are these men angry?

Is this man in his red four-wheel drive truck angry because he lives in a country that still allows him to roam the countryside looking for someone to intimidate?  Is he angry because the police in our local communities look the other way when they see this type of behavior?  If he angry because his man in the White House who has encouraged such “scourged earth” tactics is about to be booted out?  Is he angry because the free and fair election of 2020, now over, gave a result for which he cannot abide?  Is he angry because all the legal challenges to declare the election invalid have failed, with only one challenge remaining when Vice President Mike Pence presides over the vote in the Senate to confirm Joe Biden as President of the United States?

There is a perceptive article entitled Across the Great Divide, by Jim Rice, SOJOURNERS, January, 2021.  This is what he said:

“Trump’s presidency made unarguably clear, for those who harbored doubts, that racism and white supremacy are not restricted to a small, inconsequential fragment of society tucked away in the shadows.  Now, it’s distressingly but importantly clear that a very significant minority of voters either harbors these views explicitly or is fine with ignoring or downplaying them for their own perceived advantage.  As painful as that is to acknowledge, it’s actually a step in the right direction, since a problem cannot be addressed until it is first named.”

Living among my kind neighbors in South Carolina, I have experienced this “Great Divide” first-hand.  We also have our share of “angry men and women.”  I feel it is reasonable to assume that these “angry men” and some women are not limited to the great state of South Carolina.  This being true, the Christian church has its work cut out for us.  As a retired Presbyterian Church minister, I feel it is my duty to speak up about this divide among us.

We are all quite aware that President Trump’s rise to power came as a surprise even to many Republicans, some who support and some who now oppose his presidency.  There are some suggesting a new and different Republican Party be started and leave this one tainted by Trump behind.  There are others, as Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, who are betting their political futures on Trump’s legacy of “angry voters” and plan to make noise in the Senate when the vote for Joe Biden is finally rendered.  So even if Trump is no longer president, the problems he has caused and continues to cause will remain.  There will be those who seek to imitate his success by using dark emotion to motivate gullible voters, who vote with their gut and not with their reason.  Trump has used religious sentiment and primal fears of a coming boogie man or “socialist agenda” to frighten the very persons universal healthcare, a living minimum wage, a program to address climate change with ‘green jobs’ in manufacturing will actually help.  Republican senators and congressman who promote such untruths to their own electorate should be ashamed.  If 3% of the American populous has the most wealth and obtains the most benefit from the American tax code, it is no wonder we have a lot of ‘angry men and women’ in this country. 

Everyone is simply trying to survive in the age of Covid-19.  We are against big government if it keeps us from having a decent job with a living wage, but I expect we would celebrate a government small or large who actually helped people find work.  What Trump’s policies did was akin the old ‘trickle down economics’ of the Reagan era.  Reagan stimulated the economy by borrowing a lot of federal money to modernize the military.  Similarly, Trump’s administration gave huge tax breaks to the wealthy 3%, but only a pittance to the middle-class Americans.  He also said it would stimulate jobs.  It did that for a time, but transferred a lot of wealth to the richest Americans.

 When many Hispanics voted for Trump in the 2020 election, they showed everyone they cannot be treated as a monolithic voter block.  Many liked Trump because they thought he represented jobs.  There is no reason a government run by Democrats cannot do the same thing.  These jobs, instead of being in coal and steel manufacturing may instead be in new kinds of energy, more efficient and less carbon footprint transportation, investments in reducing instead of expanding carbon emissions to address the problem of climate change.  This is not an either/or scenario.  It is a both/and!  We can grow the economy, provide jobs with a living wage, reduce the carbon footprint of the economy, move truly into transformational age, but this will require all our participation.  We do not need the oppositional politics of the last twenty years.  Trump and Mitch McConnell are the worse example of this type of government , but the problems Trump identified have been here all along.  Apparently, we do not like and are afraid to trust our fellow American citizens.  We must get beyond this if we are ever to succeed in the transitioning from a carbon-based economy to something more carbon neutral!  This sounds like radical change, but it does not have to be.   Some European countries are already doing it.  If the Chinese can commit to being carbon neutral by 2050, why can’t we do the same?

The persons who desire progressive change and looking forward, and not backwards have not done a very good job at articulating a new vision for the future.  Instead, we have allowed the ‘scorched earth’ tactics of the current administration to dominate the news cycle.  The politics of division promulgated by Trump and his allies only works when there is churn in the media reporting, when false news carries equal legitimacy to truth.  It will never prosper when we have news sources which have been fully vetted and can be fully trusted.  For the last 4 years, I have obtained all my news from the BBC network, which seems to be the least politicized of the new sources and have for the last eighty years been trusted as a news source around the globe.  Obviously, not perfect, but much better than information found on Facebook, Twitter and You Tube.  Objective information must be objective,not based on someone’s feelings of what is true, or the last conspiracy theory hatched on the dark web.President Trump makes up his own news and after saying it over and over and hearing others say it actually believes his own misinformation.  What kind of news source is that?  Even his own generals don’t know what goes on in that man’s mind, and apparently neither do most Republicans.  God help the average citizen who wants figure all this out!

I believe and feel that this great nation of the United States of America has been given the opportunity now for a real transformation into a new way of living.   We can either get this right and be around to celebrate a hundred years from now, or we can get it wrong and we may not be around to celebrate anything at all!  This is the urgency of Climate Change, which we all know.  The immediate urgency of the Covid-19 pandemic has proven to be a real distraction.  The even more urgent divisions among us between ‘angry men and women” and the rest of the population left wondering what in the hell is going on are our immediate pressing concern.   How do we as an American people get out of the quagmire, we currently find ourselves mired in up to our waists!  I honestly don’t know.  But I can hope and pray that our God knows and that God will show us a way!  I have faith in Jesus Christ who loves us all that through the love of God and the grace of our Redeemer Savior we can be saved from ourselves and from hatred, anger and greed separating us from one another.  I believe in the possibility of our redemption!  I hope that many will join me in this short prayer of healing and redemption:

Prayer for All:

Lord Jesus Christ, who have said that whoever calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.  Lord Jesus Christ, Lamb of God, Holy One who takes away the sins of the world, have mercy upon us all.  Save us from ourselves, from our hatred, from our bigotry, from our racism and from our pride, that we may serve you well into this coming age, that we may serve our neighbors as our friends, that your will may be done on this earth as it is in heaven.  In your holy and blessed Name we pray, In Jesus’ name, Amen.

Bill Wilson