Join Jim and others at 10AM on Saturday February 15 for Sermon #6. This week’s sermon is 35 minutes long and will examine the American Dream and asks two important questions, “What is the difference between a promise not kept and a lie?” and “What will you do to deliver on the American promise?’ We can talk about the sermon afterwards, or not.
Recordings for past sermons are available contact me at codger817@gmail.com
Join us EVERY Saturday at 10am for Tillamook County’s version of “Civic Saturdays” with Jim Heffernan hosting. The sermons explore new and better ways to be a citizen. The are aimed at developing “citizenship muscle. Each sermon functions as a stand-alone sermon. Don’t worry about missing earlier sessions. Zoom link below
Invite link for Saturday 10AM
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/88905106346?pwd=TEaw5qfSN2X5UoxBHgZSF7UsqwMugD.1
Recordings are available for those who are unable to attend the zoom. Contact me at codger817@gmail.com and I’ll e-mail one to you. Recordings also available for earlier sessions.
Transcript for Sermon 5, Part 2
AMERICA IS IN THE ACTS
One of the ways that Jena and I count ourselves lucky is that we have neighbors we love, who are good friends and something like family.
Some of them are here today. Our little block-not even quite fully a block, but more like a rectangle of homes-has something that is hard to describe, much less to replicate. It’s trust, to be sure. It’s also a spirit of mutual aid. We’re always helping each other, cooking for each other, taking each other to the light rail. It’s a sense of ease, making the street and sidewalks that separate our dwellings into a common area-an out door room-and not just a thoroughfare. But most of all, it’s a sense that we’re in this thing together.
I’ve been cherishing this good fortune lately because I know how little neighborly love there is in so much of this broad land. We are a people who’ve become isolated and atomized and insensate to the
human hearts aching and striving and singing right alongside our own. And in that isolation Americans have become susceptible to people selling untruth as truth, scapegoating as solution, and crisis as purpose.
I’ve also been thinking about what it means to be a neighbor because a week ago my Citizen University colleagues and I were in the other Washington. We were at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum for two gatherings we had helped to organize. The first was a meeting of the Civic Collaboratory, a mutual-aid society of catalytic civic leaders from the left and right who meet every quarter. The second was a leadership summit of campus leaders from ten colleges across the country.
Downstairs at the museum, there is an exhibition that our groups toured and that I wish every American could experience-and indeed, you can see much of it on the museum’s website. It’s a departure from Holocaust histories that focus on the Nazi machinery of state. Instead it focuses on everyday acts of complicity by ordinary people.
Friends betrayed friends, joining the mobs that ransacked the homes and businesses of Jews. Classmates informed on classmates, coworkers sent coworkers to the camps and took their possessions, out of jealousy or greed or a desire to please authority or the inability to resist the tide. The exhibition is called “Some Were Neighbors.”
Some are always neighbors. Indeed, whenever authoritarianism takes hold, its most effective agents are neighbors. There are only so many uniformed officers of the government. Only when the people become collaborators can the leviathan truly work. Their capacity for mutual aid must be redirected to mutual suspicion and containment.
All of that collaboration and complicity boils down to acts. To simple choices that then compound and become contagious.
Do you choose to rush to the airport to stand in solidarity with a refugee you never met who’s being detained without cause? Or do you choose to tell Homeland Security that you have suspicions about your Arab neighbor when in fact all you have is a beef with him about the property line or his noisy parties or something else so mundane?
Small acts. Small compromises. Small stands. Small choices that turn large tides. That’s what every nation’s culture is made of. Where do we find America today? In the infinite catalog of unseen and unrecorded acts that we the people commit. You-not just the president of the United States-have the power the rewrite that catalog.
I recently read a powerful article in New York magazine about life in Putin’s Russia. It was by a reporter named Michael Idov who’d been born in the Soviet Union but emigrated here as a child and returned for five years to write about Moscow. It began with an anecdote about
being in traffic on a Moscow highway when an ambulance siren started blaring. Instinctively, as an American, Idov expected cars to yield and make way. No one moved. The ambulance crawled along with everyone else. Why? The driver explained that “Everyone knows ambulance drivers make money on the side selling VIP airport rides. Who knows who’s in that van right now?”
Who knows? The safe bet, the smart bet, was not to trust. And so it went. Idov chronicles the deep kleptocracy, the expectation of corruption that implicates you in the corruption, the absolutely self-fulfilling way that “everyone knows” life is just a series of bribes and betrayals.
Add a few laws pushed through by Putin to criminalize protest. A few mysterious deaths of dissident activists. The rest takes care of itself. The title of his piece is “Life After Trust.” It is a story of cynicism as a way of life. It is chilling.
What inoculates us from that kind of cynicism is acts, repeated acts of principle. We have to build our principle reflex into a principle mus cle. We can’t just have a twinge of conscience. We have to have bursts of it, sustained bursts that enable us to move great obstacles and sur mount high walls. We learn to trust by being trustworthy. We become trustworthy by trusting. I do not want to find out what Life After Trust is like in America.
This is a time to sharpen our moral faculties, to contemplate what we will do when principle is tested. This is what I told those student lead ers we organized at the Holocaust Museum. We were gathered on the day after the refugee ban was issued. The day after the president failed to mention Jews in his statement marking Holocaust Remembrance Day. The warning of history was self-evident but also sobering. In 1938 over 70 percent of Americans recognized that Germany was oppressing Jews-and over 70 percent opposed letting in any Jewish refugees.
Which is why no American politician, from Franklin Roosevelt down, felt the need to act with moral courage on behalf of the Jews. Their inaction became action. Our borders closed first in their hearts.
Which brings me to the final proposition to explore today.
AMERICA IS IN THE HEART
In 1942 a teenager named Gerda Weissmann was delivered from her hometown in Poland, via the trains of the Third Reich, to a Nazi labor camp in Czechoslovakia. Her parents had been sent in a different direction-to Auschwitz. She survived the extremity, the unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust, by holding on to a dream of a new life, by honing her will to live into something vivid. She dreamed of the small details of freedom, picturing the ball she would one day attend, and deciding whether to wear the red dress or the blue dress. She imagined her way to freedom.
When Gerda Weissmann was liberated at war’s end she was twenty one years old and weighed sixty-eight pounds. She had not had a bath in three years. Her hair had turned white. She was liberated by an American GI named Kurt Klein. He had been born in Germany, a Jew, and had fled to America to escape the Nazis. His parents too had been sent to Auschwitz, never to be heard from again.
When Kurt met Gerda, he did a simple thing that restored her to humanity: he held a door open for her. Gerda would eventually marry that GI Kurt Klein, move to America, and raise a family to live a life both extraordinary and beautifully ordinary. She wrote a bestselling memoir called All But My Life, which became an Oscar-winning film, and created a nonprofit called Citizenship Counts. She was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom. But as she says, she didn’t cure cancer. She wasn’t Mother Teresa. All she did was enjoy the simple freedom to be a wife and a mother and a grandmother, and to make friends who would become like family to her. A subsequent book she titled A Boring Evening at Home. That was her wish, her ambition: the humble, grateful experience of everyday freedom.
Gerda and I have become like family. She has a magical spirit in her heart and eyes. And I suppose she is drawn to my earnest idealism. She demands that I call her Grandma, instead of Mrs. Klein. And though we speak in the idioms of different generations, we are asking the same question. What does it mean to be American?
The other night I had dinner in Los Angeles with my friend Melvin Mar. Melvin is what they call a “showrunner.” He’s the creator of the pioneering and acclaimed ABC sitcom Fresh Off the Boat, about a Taiwanese American family, and another new sitcom called Speechless, centering on a boy with a disability that prevents him from speaking. And Melvin’s got other ideas for shows that will include the faces and voices of once-marginalized Americans into this most American format of myth-making.
Melvin told me something that his dad, an immigrant from the Toishan region of China, once said to him. It’s something I think many children of immigrants have heard at one time or another. It’s basically this: “You’re not of them, and they are not of you. Don’t kid yourself Keep your head down and don’t speak your mind.”
Thank God Melvin didn’t internalize that message. Thank God he believed he belonged and decided to make the change he wanted to see. His body of work embodies and literally broadcasts a message: I am of them, because they are of me. He is claiming America. He is redefining America by rewriting the storyline of who us is.
The next morning, I had breakfast with another such claimer and rewriter. My friend Jose Antonio Vargas, who I’ve spoken of before, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. He is a creator of an organization called Define American, which is using popular culture and campus activism to spark more inclusive conversations about immigration reform. And he is perhaps America’s most famous undocumented immigrant.
Born in the Philippines, brought to the U.S. as a two-year-old, raised by his grandparents in California, growing up an average American suburban kid, Jose didn’t learn he was undocumented until he was in high school. He kept it a secret for many years, with the complicity and collaboration of teachers and neighbors and mentors and bosses. Then finally, a few years ago, he came out as undocumented in the New York Times. Since then he’s been a representative and a heat shield for other undocumented people. He is courage incarnate. And now, every day, he gets tweets from gleefully malicious Trump trolls telling him, “Tick tock-you’re getting deported any minute now.”
It’s true that Jose and eleven million other undocumented people in this country now live in great peril. His stress is palpable. And what made my heart hurt was hearing him say how much he loves this country-the only country he has ever known, the country to which he has contributed so much. Jose quoted the Filipino American novelist Carlos Bulosan yesterday, not in a flight of rhetorical fancy but to console himself. Wherever he may live, America is his heart. And all he wants is simply to enjoy freedom. To not have to look over his shoulder. To enjoy a boring evening at home.
So now I must ask: Does my love of Jose outweigh my belief in the rule of law? How do I reconcile what I just said about rules mattering with the fact that his residence here breaks the rules? Here’s how. I remember that ruleness is not what makes a rule legitimate. Justice is. And a rule that would deport Jose to the Philippines, where he has no memories or life and where the Trumpish strongman Rodrigo Duterte has set loose murderous vigilante gangs against journalists and dissidents, is unjust.
That was the day before yesterday. After a day of meetings and events, I flew home from LAX-a place Jose is now afraid to enter- to Sea-Tac, where seven days earlier a spontaneous throng of people arrived to defend not just the suddenly disfavored but the rule of law itself. I drove straight to Benaroya Hall to meet Jena and our friends and neighbors Tom and Barb. We heard a Seattle Symphony concert that opened with an ambitious project called “All of Us Belong.”
This project takes four pieces by the early-twentieth-century com poser Charles Ives that he combined into a symphony for New England holidays. Quiet dissonance and roiling storms of sound, all interleaved with snippets and faint echoes of old American folk tunes. Ives, if you don’t know the music, can be described as cacophony plus memory.
America, if you don’t know it, can be described the same way.
The performance Thursday night combined the music of Ives with images of and by many homeless Seattleites, projected onto a great screen. And it combined all that, in turn, with four gorgeous poems composed and read by Seattle’s first Civic Poet, Claudia Castro Luna. We read today her poem for the Fourth of July movement of the symphony. It moved me so much to hear the music of her words, the spirit of her Americanness: “We are equally susceptible to kindness and to cold.”
In the program for the performance it says “Home is Where the Art Is.” And with Jose in my heart, I scribbled on the program: What are we made of? Are we a cruel, indifferent people? Or a people with basic decency? Do we stand and speak when others won’t? Or do we too bend like serfs to power?
We Americans are made of more than fear. We are made of more than shame. We are made of more than loss and pain.
ODE TO JOY
I want to close with some words about joy.
Joy? Really? In these times? Yes, really. Not a Pollyanna joy that can’t or won’t see what’s dark and terrible out there. But a defiant joy. Last night in front of the new Trump hotel in DC there was a protest. It was a dance party. That’s what I’m talking about. At Citizen University we’ve launched a project called The Joy of Voting that’s bringing raucous creativity and art and fun communal rituals to voting in cities around the U.S.
Joy is not frivolity. Joy is the generative spirit that emerges when there is underlying trust, respect, imagination, openness. Joy is a symptom that we haven’t given in.
And we haven’t. Certainly the citizen surge of the last two weeks shows that. People are willing to fight. But it’s not just about fighting Trump. It’s about fighting the thing that feeds Trump, which is self-ful filling cynicism.
Don’t fall into doom loops of conspiracy theory and powerlessness. I can’t tell you how many people have asked me what I make of the article on Medium depicting the actions of Bannon and Trump as a dry run for a coup. De-staff agencies like State and Justice of their professionals. Stack decision-making councils like the NSC with loyal insiders and remove independent generals who could check them. Attack the courts. Lie incessantly. Enrich self. Punish minorities. Claim to represent the majority.
To be sure, these are all things the Trump circle is doing. And I know the weird thrill that smart people get when they read a piece that suggests sophisticated hidden motives and plans. But having worked in American government, I’m here to tell you: any inner-circle master plan cannot move very far or fast. Our institutions, though weak, are not so weak that they could be that easily captured. At the same time, they are just weak enough that they would be inefficient and unresponsive tools for would-be autocrats. The bureaucracy is a quagmire for the good and evil alike.
And in any case, the answer to world-class levels of cynicism is not more cynicism. We who believe in inclusion and integrity can’t out cynicism the likes of Bannon and Trump. We can out-believe them. We can out-love them, out-trust them, out-mobilize them, out-imagine them. Out-joy them. Have you ever seen Donald J. Trump smile with joy? He cannot. We must. We must do that at home. With our neighbors. With strangers we encounter face to face. And with strangers we can’t see or touch but can imagine.
Trump is weak, not strong. That’s why he has to use a strategy of chaos creation. The people are strong, not weak. That’s why we mustn’t panic. Persist, believe, organize. Do so with love, and with joy. In our laws, our acts, and our hearts, this land is our land.
