“Just the Facts, Ma’am” Feb. 5, 2017
Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor
THEODORE ROOSEVELT, “Lincoln and Free Speech”
The President is merely the most important among a large
number of public servants. He should be supported or opposed exactly to the
degree which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or
inefficiency in rendering loyal, able, and disinterested service to the nation
as a whole. Therefore it is absolutely necessary that there should be full
liberty to tell the truth about his acts, and this means that it is exactly as
necessary to blame him when he does wrong as to praise him when he does right.
Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile. To announce
that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by
the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is
morally treasonable to the American public. Nothing but the truth should be
spoken about him or anyone else. But it is even more important to tell the
truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about him than about anyone else.
A sign posted prominently in a
neighborhood bar read, “No Wifi, Talk to each other and get drunk.” It is an
old fashioned idea and one that we would do well to remember when we are
meeting friends for dinner or going out to hear music. We are now so attached
to our technology that it is not uncommon to see a group of friends sitting at
a table in public, not interacting with one another but instead, they are
sitting in close proximity to one another but texting, snapchatting, or face
booking with friends scattered all over the globe.
A few years ago, a California
news station had a helicopter following a 600 lbs black bear that was wandering
through a neighborhood and they captured video of a man who ran into the bear
because he was staring at his phone and texting while he walked. I wouldn’t wish that encounter on anyone but
sometimes the real world really has to forcefully break into our cyber-world.
We have, in fact, become so
disconnected from reality and so locked into interfacing with our technology
that there is now a sub-discipline within the field of anthropology called
“cyborg anthropology.” Not that we are becoming RoboCop or the Terminator, but
we are cyborgs whenever we made a digital or mechanical device a part of how we
relate to the world.
When I go scuba diving, I put
on a mask to be able to see clearly underwater, like a fish. I put on fins to
be able to glide through the water, like a fish. I wear a regulator and air
tank to breath under water like a fish. And I wear a bc vest with weights that
allow me to balance my depth under water…. So for an hour at a time, with
cyborg equipment added to my body, I am a fish, living in a universe that is
entirely different from the world above the ocean.
Through our technology, many of
us check out from the world of reality and enter a universe that is partially
real and partially imaginary. Many of us are so locked into our televisions,
computers, smart phones, and digitally integrated cars and houses that we spend
more time starring into a screen than we spend doing anything else, including
sleeping.
I was an early adopter of most
of these technological innovations. I gladly made the switch from an electric
typewriter to one of the first personal computers because I was in grad school
and for me, simply being able to correct my papers on screen without having to
re-type my papers over and over was a huge gift.
But while my first computer was
little more than a smart typewriter, once you abandon the mechanical for the
digital, it is like falling into the rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland. You
enter a whole new universe.
Very quickly, my paper calendar
day runner, became a Palm Pilot. My land line was supplemented by a pager and a
car phone, then a cell, phone, then a smart phone that eventually completely
replaced both paper and digital calendars, and the home phone, the camera, my
GPS, and, to a large degree, the need to remember anything from my daughter’s
birthday to the phone numbers of my closest friends.
The sociological changes that
came with these technological advances were never anticipated, predicted, or
even much thought about until it was too late to avoid them. How we communicate
with one another and the larger world has totally transformed in the last
decade.
When I was in grad school
studying pastoral counseling, we spent a lot of our time learning how to help
families in conflict to work out their problems and to save their marriages. We
realized that couples would speak much more kindly to one another if they were
sitting side by side than if they were, for example, sitting on opposite sides
of a table from one another.
Proximity and physical contact,
help us to keep our anger in check and to be less inclined to exaggerate or use
harsh language. If, however, serious conversations were conducted by telephone,
they almost always got more heated and less rational quickly. But our new
technology of e-mail, texting and social media, adds even more layers of
separation. It becomes almost as easy to curse and libel someone on Face Book
as it is to cuss out the bad driver in front of you on the road who can’t hear
you at all. In social media, you can say almost anything.
Most people can tell you about
losing friends as soon as they opened a social media account because you find
yourself drawn into vitriolic exchanges that, if you were having them sitting
in someone’s living room, everyone would assume that you had entirely lost your
mind!
Technology has turned us into
watchers when we used to be readers. It has given us all a kind of ADD. A
decade ago, we used to start the coffee, go get the newspaper out of the
driveway, and spend 30 minutes to an hour, sipping coffee and reading the news.
Now we say that we get our news online but for the most part, if the news is
more complicated than a Face Book meme or the 140 characters in a tweet, then
we quickly lose interest.
People who get all of their
news by looking at the feed on their web browser and in scanning their Face
Book crawl, will tell themselves that they are informed, informed enough to
tell family members and former friends that they are stupid if they don’t agree
with them.
We didn’t see these changes
coming. This is not what we chose. But we have an increasingly uninformed
population that is more vulnerable than ever to fake news and manipulative
propaganda,…Fox News readers speak in such condescending tones that it gives
the people who made Cs and Ds in school the false confidence to assume that the
people who made As and Bs are somehow intellectually inferior. It gives the
uneducated the assurance that the educated are simply elites who actually know
nothing.
And then, to seek confirmation
of their single sentence grasp of current events, they use the most pejorative
language they can to demand that everyone they know agree with them. We don’t
look deeply into the financial conflicts of Trump cabinet appointments; we just
start calling them all Nazis.
Honestly folks, I make my
living in a profession that is rife with exaggeration and apocryphal story
telling but really, unless someone has set about murdering 6 million people in
a modern holocaust then they are not a Nazi. Let’s save some of our vitriol in case
we are going to need it later.
When my daughter was little, I
never allowed her to use the word “hate” for things like homework, broccoli, or
bedtime. I would tell her, “Honey, we really only hate Republican congressmen.”
But when I found out that she was correcting her classmates with the same
insistence that we really only hate Republican congressmen I had to tell her a
little white lie and insist that we don’t even really hate Republican
congressmen.
The election of Donald Trump to
the office of the Presidency has thrown this whole cyber universe into
overdrive. Our nation has suffered from serious partisan divide for a long
time, it has progressively gotten worse over the past two decades and now
social media and our cyber connections has poured gasoline onto the fire.
We are out of balance. We hurl
the most absurdly exaggerated insults at those on the other side of the fence
and we are seemingly incapable of being self-critical. When we started this
church a few years ago, I naively hoped that a church created specifically to
be a liberal-intellectual- and social justice oriented community would be free
of the kind of ego-driven political battles I had seen in my 30 years as a
Disciples pastor.
That wishful thinking was
exploded over and over in our first two years with people coming and going from
our community so fast that the ink never dried in our membership book. One
large multi-family group left our church in our first months when I published
an article that was critical of our troops for torturing prisoners of war. I
asked the patriarch of the family, “Are you going to go to a pro-torture
church?” And he said, “I’ll go to one where the pastor has the sense to not
bring it up!”
Hardly a month later, when I
criticized President Obama for appointing a Monsanto executive, Michael Taylor,
to be in charge of the Food and Drug Administration, several members left the
church because I had dared to criticize our new Democratic president. They
didn’t like the fact that he had appointed a fox to guard the hen house, but
they didn’t think that I should say anything critical of a Democrat. Look
folks, is it hard to see that I am an equal opportunity offender?
Søren Kierkegaard said that we
tend to be objective about others and subjective in our judgments of ourselves
but intellectual honesty demands that we try to be subjective about other
people but coldly, accurately, and fearlessly objective in assessing ourselves.
We are liberals, but that cannot mean that we are uncritical of our own tribe
while slandering all other tribes.
We began today with this wisdom
lesson taken from a speech by Teddy Roosevelt. The media had taken a rough turn
during his time and you can find examples of some mud slinging that would put
some FaceBook trolls to shame. Roosevelt tried to speak a word of balance to
the world in saying that we need to be honest and objective about our
president. You don’t praise the president because you voted for him or her, or
because she or he is a member of your party, but you don’t cut the president
down just because he or she is from the other party.
To fail to be critical of a
president when he or she is wrong is, as Roosevelt said, a failure to be
patriotic. To fail to be acknowledge when president does something right, is to
embrace dishonesty. Folks, I am certain that there is not a person in this room
who voted for Donald Trump and I am reasonable sure that among our 15,000
internet listeners that we couldn’t find one in a thousand who voted for Trump.
But Trump is not Hitler. He is not Stalin. He isn’t even Putin even if he lacks
the critical thinking skills to see how Putin has played him.
We were on the losing side of
this election and we will have a lot to do over the year or two that he stays
in office, or if he is lucky, the full four years of his term to confront the
xenophobia, homophobia, islamaphobia, and misogyny of his enthusiastic base. We
have lost an election, but we do not have to lose in history. We have lost an
election, but we must not lose our way. We lost at the ballot box, but we must
not lose our souls.
We cannot meaningfully insulate
ourselves from the hysteria of the 24 hour news commentators. We are not likely
to avoid contact with social media, e-mail, or political slander; but we can
choose to be better than all of it. I’ve been shocked, and angry, and itching
for a fight, but I implore you to avoid burning bridges unnecessarily. Speak in
ways to be heard and understood, not simply to make your point and leave your
opponents bleeding. Persuade, educate, inspire, but don’t eviscerate, alienate,
and reject people.
I will not be giving our new
president a pass on any violation of public ethics but I invite you to not give
me a pass if you ever hear me exaggerate the facts beyond reason or pass along
false information. The way to fight against fake news is to be painstakingly
honest. The way to avoid being a fawning fan of anyone is to be thorough enough
to read beyond the headlines and to look for the more complicated truth that
always lies beneath the surface of the too simple assumptions of gossip.
Let us be committed to the
truth but if we must err at any point, let us err on the side of being
generously loving, forgiving, and accepting. Trust me, if you have a friend
left in the world it is because they have decided to be generously loving,
forgiving and accepting of you and it is only right that you show them the same
consideration.
