Skip to main content

Our Confused President





Symbol [sim-buh l] 
noun: something used for or regarded as representing something else; a materialobject representing something, often something immaterial; emblem, token, or sign.

**************
Patriot [pey-tree-uh t, -ot] 
noun: a person who loves, supports, and defends his or her country and its interests with devotion.
Yesterday, President Trump asserted that NFL players who refuse to stand for the national anthem display "a total disrespect of everything that we stand for."

But the national anthem is not "everything we stand for." Like the American flag, it is a symbol of everything we stand for, namely the ideals that were enshrined in the founding of our nation - "certain unalienable Rights," as stated in the Declaration of Independence, among which are "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

 When some among us are denied their rights, and the symbols of our nation are used by others among us as weapons to further this denial, it is a right and honorable and noble thing to refuse to honor them. This practice - an expression of the broader practice known as "civil disobedience" - is an intrinsic part of our spiritual charter as Americans. On these occasions, when we refuse to honor the symbols, we honor what they stand for.

Our nation was founded by people who called themselves patriots, and who refused to adhere to laws they deemed unjust. Throughout our history, patriots have protested unjust laws, including laws that sanctioned slavery, segregation, and the denial of due process and justice to entire classes of people, the list of which is too long to summarize here. No American should need reminding that this, also, is part of our history as a nation.

 The struggle to fulfill the ideals of our nation's founding - to live up to the things our symbols stand for - continues in our day. Any American who would choose to denigrate those who exercise their right to protest - including those who would protest the singing of the National Anthem - is, themselves, un-American.

Yesterday, our President was the un-American.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

THE HUBRIS OF INCLUSION: Thoughts on the Future of the United Methodist Church

The United Methodist Church was born in a specific time and place, in the mid-twentieth century in the United States of America. Protestant denominations were ascendant, and with them a brand of "ecumenism" that would only decades later be recognized by those who championed it as culturally bound to the white "mainline." Mergers were all the buzz, including the one that created the UMC in 1968, and Methodists embraced their new denomination as partial fulfillment of a dream of "Christian unity." As the historian Robert Handy noted in his wonderful little 1971 book,  A Christian America: Protestant Hopes and Historical Realities , leaders of the new denomination thought of it as "a kind of unofficial national church." Because they sat at the midpoint of mainline American Protestantism in so many respects -- ecclesial, theological, liturgical -- it was easy for them to assume that as all churches became one, pretty much everyone else would eventua...
3 comments
Read more

Methodism's Many Pasts and Futures

From the time the brothers John and Charles Wesley first convened a "holy club" of friends at Oxford University in 1729, Methodists have declared theirs a pursuit of “holiness” or “Christian perfection.”  For early Methodists, the pursuit of Christian perfection led inevitably to disagreements about what it meant to live a holy life.   As early as  1741 the Wesleys distanced themselves from their closest collaborator, George Whitefield, over his Calvinist teachings.  And while Wesley proclaimed himself to possess "a catholic spirit," his practices - not least, his own refusal to conform to the conventions of Anglican parish ministry - were widely perceived by his contemporaries to be divisive or even "schismatic." Methodism on the other side of the Atlantic retained this same spirit, which should come as little surprise since it was born in an act of separation - in 1784,  Wesley consecrated Thomas Coke as Superintendent, setting in motion the cre...
2 comments
Read more

On the 40th Anniversary of Friendship Park

Imagine the First Lady of the United States punching a hole in the fence on the U.S.-Mexico border.   Imagine her publicly lamenting that there was a border fence at all. In fact this scenario doesn’t need to be imagined … because it happened forty years ago right here in San Diego County.   The date was August 18, 1971 and the location was “Friendship Park,” the small cement plaza on the U.S.-Mexico border, at the southwest-most corner of the continental United States. The First Lady was Pat Nixon, who had been a prominent champion of our state’s public parks when her husband Richard Nixon was Governor of California, before being elected President of the United States.    She came to Friendship Park to inaugurate the surrounding area as California’s Border Field State Park.    After planting a tree as part of the inauguration ceremony, Mrs. Nixon approached the large stone monument which sits at the heart of Friendship Park.   The monument commemo...
Post a Comment
Read more