by Laurie M Johnson
In the cacophony of voices reacting to the Trump administration’s attempt to dismantle the US government, one sentiment is largely missing: shame. We—all of us—should be ashamed of ourselves for letting this happen, for lowering our standards for decent, humane conduct, for becoming morally and culturally illiterate. All of us, but especially Christians, should be dismayed, especially by the emergence of leaders who, rather than denying such a thing is even real, proudly and openly call themselves “Christian nationalists.”
For decades and decades, we prepared for this unraveling, exhibiting characters beneath our inherent human dignity—characters of deep narcissism and crass materialism. We couldn’t be bothered to humble ourselves and learn from our past, or value things that could not be seen but could make us fully human—our beautiful natural world, the life of the spirit and the mind, the simple humanizing obligations of friendship and community.
Because of our narcissism, carefully nurtured by our advertising industry and our demagogues, we were trained not to humble ourselves and accept leadership with more vision and wisdom than we individually or collectively had. And now, through some quirks of history, particularly a pandemic, this process has been accelerated, and we are at the point of clearly visible self-destruction. This is the point at which the imperial power gets sacked by the “barbarians,” and the unimpressive, sad dismantling begins.
We are watching in real time the destruction of an empire it took generations of people, often terribly used, to build up, with all its wealth and influence around the world. This imperial power has within it all sorts of good people, people who just want to live their lives, who crave stability and security. We can see how dysfunctional our society has become by the fact that the “party” that has long told us that it cares about families, especially children, and soldiers, veterans, farmers, and old fashioned values, etc., frightens all those sympathetic people and entirely disregards those values. Only inveterate havoc-makers are happy now. Thousands of people here and around the world, often those who least deserve it, are now being humiliated, intimidated, and dispossessed–by an unelected man from South Africa, no less.
No one can understand exactly how intertwined we all are until enough threads are pulled, and then it becomes painfully and tragically clear how our myopia has obscured our view of our human interdependence. When thousands of federal workers are fired, not only do government services that touch all our lives slow down or grind to a halt, but customers disappear, then more jobs disappear, bankruptcy home sales begin, property values plummet, suicides, poverty, crime and homelessness increase, etc. The consequences of one thread pulled out of our overly complex economy, such as the loss of migrant workers, creates unintended ripple effects for the rest of us—scarcity, rising food prices, and major changes in our misguided priorities.
Ultimately, even if all this stopped right now, so much damage would have been done, not only to the Behemoth US economy but also to the concept of the US constitution and what it means to live in a “democracy” that the situation would be forever changed. And despite the fact that some of us did not admire the course of US imperial power, we have benefited personally from it, and it is almost certain that what replaces it will be even worse for us and most everyone else. There certainly is no guarantee it will be better.
The only way to dismantle such a vast power and have the result work for people would be if a plan was in place, a plan made by someone far wiser than most of us, a plan for dismantling it with care and with better aims in mind. But planning at that level has never happened, and it will not happen this time, unless AI is much more benevolent than its makers have been.
We have very little time to even try and slow down the precipitous decline of this beast and redirect it towards more humane ends. We will decline, because no imperial power lasts forever. But will it be cataclysmic? It looks like it right now.
What should we do? The time for planning is probably past. We will know we have an opportunity to change things when we see it. In the meantime, it’s time to humble ourselves and, if we believe in a higher power, to pray. Reconnect with something, or someone, beyond you. Not some pathetic human or material substitute for God, but the real transcendent power beyond our ability to grasp or manipulate.
We are all different. Some of us say we believe in a traditional God, and if we do, we should turn to him in humility and ask for mercy and guidance. All of us can contemplate the natural world, whose actions and power are beyond us. Despite our gargantuan efforts, it remains beyond our control and increasingly it is hostile, foreboding, awesome, and sublime. It is trying to tell us something. All of us can humble ourselves and recognize the wisdom of those truly great people who have come before us, those who have offered philosophic and theological knowledge we have long neglected as lacking immediate utility.
It is time to reconnect with what it means to be human, before we lose access to the opportunity, and we slide too easily into another dark age.