Last week I
spent three days in Washington, DC with 700 or so strong, outspoken women and a
handful of men courageous enough to join the League of Women Voters. We
were wrestling with issues of democracy:
- Roll-back of voting rights in the wake of the Supreme Court decision that gutted the Voting Rights Act
- Vast infusions of undisclosed donations that followed the Supreme Court Citizen’s United decision declaring corporations are people.
- Erosion of public trust in the structures and systems of government.
The speakers I
heard brought the headlines alive with context and stories and troubling
insight into underlying issues.
Amanda Taub
spoke on the rise of
American authoritarianism, describing the way rapid social change
can become an occasion for whole groups of people to look for scapegoats to
blame. Powerful, punitive leaders can stir anxiety into fear and sweep laws
aside with a promise of protection from encroaching others who bring unwanted
social change.
Jennifer Lawless focused
on the dangerous dismantling of trust in public institutions and the undermined
legitimacy of those institutions when the majority withdraws from
engagement.
Arturo Vargas, of the National
Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, spoke, in
tears, of the obstacles put in the way of a growing Latino population. He
insisted that his people care deeply about their communities, yet find it
difficult to translate that concern into civic engagement when so much is done
to ensure their votes don’t count.
Kristen
Clarke, President of the National Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under
Law, and Christine
Chen, of the Asian Pacific Islander American Vote, described
new forms of voter suppression and ongoing barriers to full inclusion of
minority voters.
Ari Berman, author of Give Us the Ballot, gave a masterful overview of the struggle that shaped the Voting Rights Act of 1963 and continues to play out in polling places and courthouses across the country. As he said with passion: "It is fundamentally immoral to try to win elections by stopping people from voting.”
The primary
focus of the convention was democracy, voting rights, the forces undermining
the ability to reach good solutions that serve the common good. But we
also spent time looking at some of the fallout of our political dysfunction,
acknowledging that every political decision has real-life human outcomes.
My friend,
Jennifer Levy-Tatum, presented insights from our year-long criminal justice study,
demonstrating in tragic detail that little shifts in sentencing legislation can
throw thousands of families in to poverty and ruin more lives than anyone
imagined. Speaking to a room packed with men and women from other states
she shared just a little of what we’ve learned, about county jails packed with
people waiting trial for months. Defense lawyers with schedules so tight they
meet clients just before a trial begins. Mentally ill men and women kept
in solitary
confinement rather than receive appropriate treatment. Pregnant
women giving birth in shackles. Millions of
tax dollars invested in building new
prisons rather than putting money into teachers and schools to
give poor communities a better path to the future.
In the news
between our meetings, like the rumble of thunder, we heard ongoing coverage of
the Orlando shooting.
In the days since, disruption on
Capital Hill has captured the news, with civil rights hero John
Lewis and others pleading for the House Speaker, Paul Ryan, to allow a vote on
gun safety bills.
The temptation
to place blame runs high.
For some,
President Obama is the cause of all our current woes.
Others point to the Republican Party.
Immigrants.
Muslims.
Hillary and Bill
Clinton.
But what if
people are symptoms, not causes?
Donald Trump
didn’t undermine our ability to weigh facts and fiction. That started long ago,
with philosophical relativism, deconstructionist theory, the post-modern
dismissal of objective reality and absolute truth. A culture that
still believed firmly in objective truth would have little patience with
Trump’s obvious lies.
Gays haven’t
destroyed our families. That honor goes to a dizzying stew that could include
slavery, pornography, birth control, growth of women’s rights and
opportunities, loss of job security, oppressive work hours, addiction, abuse, a
“me-first” philosophy endemic to our current culture.
Governmental dysfunction wasn’t invented by Paul Ryan or his fellow GOP representatives, or by President Barack Obama. It’s been built into the system, with steady intent, over long decades of determined self-interest by leaders from both sides eager to bolster their own standing.
Hate, fear,
suspicion, prejudice? We can’t pin those on any one group, religion, race.
They’re our constant companions, held in check by compassion and self-control,
or fanned into destructive fire by careless speech and lazy patterns of
thought.
As Paul wrote to
the church in Ephesus,
we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in heavenly places.
Are they spiritual forces?
Oppressive
systems?
Embedded patterns of action and thought that hold whole
continents captive?
Scholars and
theologians have written reams on the question. Walter Wink alone wrote five
books on the topic: Naming the Powers (1984), Unmasking the Powers
(1996), Engaging the Powers (1992), When the Powers Fall (1998),
and The Powers that Be (1999). All address the disordered worldview
that puts trust in violence rather than love and prioritizes wealth over
justice.
There is much to
learn about what it means to wrestle with principalities and powers, but the meaning of the first part of Paul’s
observation seems very clear. We aren’t doing battle with mere humans.
Individuals aren’t the cause of our deep dilemmas.
Omar Mateen, the
man who opened fire in the nightclub in Orlando, killing 49 people and injuring
53 others, was certainly the immediate cause of death and injury.
Yet he himself
was and is a symptom of complex forces: misguided notions about race, religion
and power, conflicting ideas about gender and belonging, a cultural love-affair
with weapons and violence. He’s not the first
American man to turn his inner agitation outward in an explosion of deadly
power. Just the latest and most visible.
It’s always
easiest to scapegoat.
And always
dangerously wrong.
Any real
solution to our current morass will involve attention to causes, courageous
engagement, selfless service, a renewed willingness to seek and speak the
truth, great wisdom and
compassion.
No one person,
no one party can make that happen.
