So Obama Won, Now What?

If you are prone to politically motivated anger, just skip to the last paragraph.

First, to the Democrats:

Well you got it. The Republicans blew their lead by kowtowing to corporate greed and excess, by lying to the public, and by insisting upon a foreign policy that also helped to cripple the French an British Empires in earlier centuries.

Now you inherit a nation in desperate straits. Our economy is failing. Our health care system is a mess. We are hated abroad. We owe a great amount of money, and we are divided into camps that seem to hate and distrust each other.

What will you do?

If you follow the path taken by Rove, DeLay, and Cheney Republicans you will fail as surely as they did and a decade from now, or even 4 years from now, a reborn Republican party will be standing over the ruins of your excess. Don't do it! Don't alienate the other side by demonizing them. Don't cast away the opinions of Christians and Evangelicals as conservative nonsense. At least listen. Don't push through bills that punish those on the other side. Don't kowtow to the lobbyist money that starts flowing your way now that you are in power.

Do what you said you would do. Redistribute the wealth from the super rich 3% to the 97% of the rest of us. Stop the erosion of middle-class property values and rights. Rework the tax code. Make it more simple and fair. Work to get us out of debt and out of Iraq as soon as possible. Start working toward a health care system that fairly addresses the issues facing modern America. Hold both the poor and the rich accountable for the assistance they receive from the government and help both groups to break from the cycle of dependency. End corporate welfare and work toward weaning individuals from entitlement to empowerment. You said you would. You said you could. Do it. Leave none of us behind, and DON'T get stuck in your own pride.

We're watching, we're waiting, and we're willing to do our part. Don't blow it.


For My Friends and Family who are Ardent Republicans:

It isn't the end of the world. God is still sovereign.

Give Obama a chance.

If he is, indeed, as some of you have told me, the Anti-Christ, then there really isn't anything that will stop him anyway until the coming of Christ. Wait until the Rapture and let people like me suffer from our mistake by going through the tribulation.

If he isn't the Anti-Christ, it is quite possible that he could be some of the things that he claims to be: A patriot. A person who wishes the best for this country. And a person who is willing to look beyond the partisan bickering of the last few years and work toward an America that is more just for everyone.

See past the rhetoric and remember the core of our Christian values.

Christianity isn't really about amassing private property, so we shouldn't have a great deal to fear from a bit of redistribution. In fact, the book of Acts has a great amount of redistributive sharing in it. The problem with Marxian socialism wasn't the sharing, it was the atheism.

Christianity isn't really about free enterprise and making a killing in the market. It is about caring for others. Our unholy alliance with the defense industry and with large soulless corporate entities has to stop. If we are to be a people called by God's name then we should humble ourselves and pray, not humble others and prey on them. We Christians need not conform to the greed and rapacity of the world. We should be the counter culture working to make the world more and not less just.

Two things happened at church tonight. I overheard two teen aged boys talking with a sort of glee about how great it was going to be when Obama was assassinated. Both of them had obviously been hearing hate-filled talk about our current president elect. Never in any of my disappointment with the current administration did I ever feel that it was justifiable to talk abut how great it would be if the president was killed. I was appalled and saddened.

The second thing that happened at church tonight has to do with an issue with which I've been struggling and to which I've not come to a satisfactory conclusion and that is abortion. At church tonight, one of the women in our congregation reminded my 10 year old daughter and other children sitting with her at the meal that we had just elected a "baby killer." Such rhetoric is not useful and it is not Christian. Barack Obama is not a baby killer any more than George W. Bush is a murderer of Palestinian children. Both are a part of party politics that have some unfortunate consequences. Democrats, it is true, may have much to answer for when it comes to the euthanizing or murder of millions of potential humans that has become a staple of their party platform because of the power of the pro-choice constituents who serve as one of the voting blocks of that party. However, neither party is without sin. The Democrats, it is true, believe for the most part in coddling and protecting the dregs of society after they are already here, but are quite content to see them murdered before they become fully legally human, and they hide behind words like "choice" and legal definitions of humanity to justify what is often a choice between the convenience and inconvenience of the mother and of society. The Republicans, on the other hand, generally decry abortion as murder and insist that they are pro-life while generally supporting policies that punish many of these unwanted persons when they enter society and commit crimes against it up to and including the death penalty. So one side works to prevent the criminals from being born and the other works to let them be born so that they can be put into prison after causing harm to other innocents. (Of course this is a simplification -- not all potentially aborted babies will become criminals, but the statistics I have read seem to bear out the truth that unwanted children raised by single parents often end up making negative choices). It seems to me that the few families who don't use birth control, who adopt anyone that needs to be adopted, who oppose the death penalty, and who work with the poor and those in prison are the only ones who can consistently say that they are completely pro-life in every sense of the word. I certainly can't make this claim. It seems to me that with the exception of the saints in my last sentence, we can all admit that there are weaknesses in the stances of both parties in regard to the way we value life and we can get beyond the labels of baby-killer vs. fundamentalist and start working on the messy thing that we call human civilization. True, every abortion is the destruction of potential human life, but then too every act of intercourse (even one that produces a viable embryo that leads to the production of a living, breathing baby) is also an act that causes multiple potential humans to die in the accident of implantation. Every menstruation that a woman has is the death of a potential human. Every wet dream kills millions of potential humans. We cannot help but participate in actions that create disaster for some potential person. So what we must do is try to work it out in the best way that we possibly can. And, like most of the rest of life, it is going to be difficult and messy.

To sum up. Democrats, do what you said you would do and don't gloat about it.
Republicans, help clean up your mess. Take your licks, help out around the house and regroup and think about how you can do better next time. Independents, get off your rear ends and make the world a better place.