How to make sense of the chaos
A crisis of morality in the face of global suffering
The planes hit the towers, one after another, unrelenting. The silent screams from passengers, as seen on tv, the horrified but dignified responses from newscasters who had lived a decade of Rwandan and European genocide… We weren’t unacquainted with sorrow, but we were used to it being over there, not here, never here.
The aftermath of the 9/11 attacks was devastation that lingers to this day.
I’m not sure we ever get over something like that.
Yes, I did feel the same gut punch deep pain on January 6th. Only it was worse, because it wasn’t a wound that was going to be healed in the community. No, I would be on my own with this one. It was personal on a whole other level from September 11th, but September 11th was the narcissistic injury that got us to January 6th, I guess.
Images of Trump after 9/11, sanctimoniously ordering his men to go do dirty work at the twin towers after the event, talking big as always, but never getting his own hands dirty or putting himself through any trauma…that was the whole of the Trump campaigns and presidency, in a nutshell. These images are being replayed now, 22 years on, as we try to come to terms with the past.
22 years after 1945 is 1967. Germany came to terms with their past in an arguably better way, and by 1989 democracy won. Are we now to go through 44 years of Vergangenheitsbewältigung? Perhaps we should. Maybe we need 100 years to reckon with the genocides and abuses we have refused to acknowledge with humility. In our pursuit of greatness, perhaps we have yet to know what that really is.
I do know we need to deal with the chaos we have allowed to build up in our lives. But we aren’t just dealing with things we can control, change or ameliorate. We are also dealing with cataclysmic disasters. We’ve lived through tsunamis and fires and floods and earthquakes, all the signs of the apocalypse, and the faithful have become ever more paranoid, ever more hypervigilant, and ever more fearful. Instead of faith, we are living through a time of fear.
Our crazy times make the faithful fearless really stand out.
When you see all of the suffering in the world, it makes no sense how many would willfully add to it. The response to suffering seems to be to ignore it, and hope you won’t be next, or to try to help as best you can, feeling ever more helpless, because you can’t drain an ocean of suffering with a thimble. There is another response we are seeing increasingly more of now: the response of the sociopath, who truly hates people and intends to add to their pain. Soulless, they invade Ukraine, they buy up nuclear weapons, they threaten their own family with bullets, they erect a gallows at the US Capitol, they declare civil war and try to destroy their own government.
I cannot understand a response that would add to the pain of this world when you have the power to heal it, even if you are only armed with a pen.
The kinds of people who seem to enjoy causing suffering rather than healing it, are, perversely, the ones with the most means to act for good. And not just to act, but to actually do good that would ultimately benefit everyone, including themselves. But they’d rather do evil.
Evil, like a rapist taking out a full page ad to accuse the innocent, of rape. Evil, like the Christians claiming to value life, but voting with the pro civil war caucus. Evil, like accusing women who have grieved losing a baby, of being “baby killers”. Evil, like attacking LGBTQIA+ neighbors and making them unwelcome. Evil, like smearing doctors, teachers and librarians as groomers, for caring for people as they come. Evil, like abusing power rather than using it to serve in love.
We have been living through a time of evil chaos, because the people with the means, and even the alleged gospel message, have no desire to do what is right.
The questions we face right now are less about what we do about the chaos, and more about why we are seeing so much evil in the midst of situations that could be improved with goodness, righteousness and truth in love, instead. Why waste time being evil, while the world burns? It doesn’t even make logical sense, not to mention moral. Eventually all chaos comes around to harm even its agents.
The evangelicals, who have never been persecuted in the United States, have told themselves a story of persecution and oppression, painting themselves as heroic victims, and here we are.
As things stand, it is the Christians in America who are persecuting the rest of us.
How else can we make sense of the Republican support for a con man? We all knew what he was back in 2015 when he came down that escalator. We know what he has been proven to be now, too, and yet he is the frontrunner of the Republican party, whose adherents are more often than not, self-professed Christians.
After January 6th, I had thought we might actually see some repentance at last. The years of immigrant families being mercilessly re-traumatized on arrival over our borders, by their children being taken away; apparently that didn’t warrant reflection enough in white Christian circles. Never mind saving real children.
And apparently unborn American children matter more than living, breathing babies right in front of you, evangelicals. More than DACA, who were brought here as children for a better life, a life you already had. You’d never stand for your own children being treated badly, and you’ve never known what it is to suffer as many immigrant families have, and yet, you overlooked babies being traumatized, for the sake of your border security.
Evangelicals, you’ll still vote for the guys who want to shoot immigrants to stop them coming here, and you’ll smugly call yourselves pro life.
There is no sense to be made of such chaos. It is a crisis of morality.
And I think I’ll leave it there.
Selah, Christians.