A difficult day

Hello all,

Yesterday’s shootings at the Trump rally in Pennsylvania have surely provoked a storm of reflections and emotions in all of us. The injuries and the loss of life are deeply saddening. It is cause for profound mourning that things have come to this point. 

It feels premature to advance any reflections or analysis while the facts are still emerging, and so I won’t engage in any of that at the moment. I would be interested to hear your thoughts as they develop. 

I was reminded of a moment in one of Trump’s debates with Hillary Clinton from eight years ago. Trump observed that a future President Clinton might choose justices who favored gun control. Here’s his statement as per the New York Times article of Aug. 9, 2016:  “If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks,” Mr. Trump said, as the crowd began to boo. He quickly added: “Although the Second Amendment people — maybe there is, I don’t know.” I very clearly remember thinking, “wait… did he just call for the assassination of Hillary Clinton?!” I wonder how this offhand remark looks now—though such self-reflection seems unlikely. In the words of St. Paul, “what a man sows, that he will also reap.” 

It is a sad harvest, to be sure, this crop born of anger, furious thoughts, and violent rhetoric. A strong case could be made that the MAGA movement is chiefly responsible for the noticeable acceleration of this unfortunate trend in our culture. Of course, fear, anger, and violence in thinking and speaking are deeply human traits and transcend all partisan divides. The raw material, the instinctual reactivity, lies there, coiled up, in all of us. That layer of the human psyche is all too likely to react to violence with violence.

This, I think, is where the counter-intuitive wisdom of nonviolence can be applied. It’s not just a matter of refusing to punch back when someone punches you. That’s a significant moral accomplishment to be sure, but even deeper than that lies the cultivation of the nonviolent mind and heart, where instinctive reactivity can be short-circuited at its source. A heart/mind trained in this practice would be able to rise above all provocation. This practice, if it could be mastered, would allow us to pursue politics in our current environment without anger or bitterness. 

Thus endeth the sermon for today; it is Sunday, after all! 

Take care friends,

Greg