My mother was strongly committed to voting in every election. In sickness or in health, in rain or shine, Mom always went to the local polling place to vote.
She once mentioned that in all her years of voting, she had only voted for a candidate once, Harry Truman for president in 1948. In every other election, she cast a vote against one or more of the candidates, a vote that counted for another.
Campaigning before Nov. 3 midterm elections on behalf of candidates who supported him, President Donald Trump told citizens that they should vote as if he were on the ballot.
I did, and my vote was one of many that contributed to replacing the Republican who represented my congressional district for several years. I voted as if Donald Trump were the epitome of his party and I voted against that party. That representative who lost his seat was, in a real sense, collateral damage.
Apparently, enough people voted as I did that the party that Trump considered his own possession lost massively in what has been described as a blue tsunami, blue being the color that on charts and maps stands for the Democratic Party as opposed to Republican red.
Of course, there is jubilation among those who oppose the president. There is “weeping and gnashing of teeth” among his partisans.
In the search for reasons for such a fall, a consensus is forming that points to increased fuel prices because of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz as Iran retaliates for Trump’s war against that country. Not only has the cost of filling the fuel tank of one’s private vehicle increased but so has the cost of every commodity that is shipped by truck, train, ship, or plane.
It is sad to think that it took high fuel prices to finally turn things against the Republicans.
The men and women convicted for violently attacking the certification of electors in the Capitol on his behalf, an assault on the nation’s democratic system second only to the Civil War of 1861-5, were pardoned by Trump.
Hundreds of thousands, possibly more than a million, people whose lives depended upon American foreign aid programs have died because of sudden, unplanned cuts in those programs. Domestic programs to assist the poor were curtailed or cut altogether.
Trump himself is a convicted felon, found guilty of 34 crimes in a jury trial. In a civil case, he was judged to be a sexual predator.
He put incompetent people in charge of government departments whose only qualification is their adulation of him.
Environmental protections have been abandoned, sometimes illegally, for the benefit of wealthy friends and supporters of the president. Some of that support consists of outright bribes.
International partners have been alienated and those who oppose democracy and human rights are embraced.
A litany of problems can go on and on. And there would be no problem finding them because they have not been hidden. All of this and more has been in public view all along.
Yet much of the American public chose to ignore it. Even the managers of the Churches muted any qualms they felt.
Catholic bishops who had threatened to excommunicate office holders because they did not obey episcopal commands regarding abortion have for the most part merely murmured and muttered when millions of American Catholics live in fear of a paramilitary force that can tear them away from family, home, and livelihood because of their skin tone.
Trumpism catered to the selfish interests of people, though that self-interest was often ill-advised, racist, deluded, or ignorant.
Many citizens protested and did what they could to awaken others and provide succor to victims. The No Kings protests showed that millions were appalled by what was being done to their country.
Yet it took record-high gasoline prices to finally arouse people sufficiently to say, “Enough!” Has the electorate repudiated Trumpism or has it merely protested the petroleum pricetag?
So long as it did not directly affect them too many Americans were content to close their eyes to what was being done to others and even themselves in their name.
Now the same selfishness that protected Trump and his ilk has turned against them.
Despite the election results and the efforts of many people all along to call the nation to a more humane, more honest, more informed approach to national and international challenges,the US remains a swamp of selfish individualism.
If a new Congress eases some of the problems we allowed to fester, how likely is it that the Beatitudes will become the new standard for political behavior?
I recently learned that the ancient Greeks had a word, 𝛼̓𝜈𝜃𝜌𝜔𝜋𝜀𝜐́𝜀𝜎𝜃𝛼𝑖 (anthropeuesthai), a verb meaning “humaning,” to act as a human being.
I do not know what the implications or nuances of the ancient Greek word might have been, but what might they be if today in English we had a verb “to humanate”? I humanate. You humanate. He or she humanates, and so on.
Pope Leo has given us an encyclical message about it, Magnifica Humanitas, “magnificent humanity.” The title gives an encouraging gloss to what humanating might mean today.
But what does humanating look like? There has been one perfect humanator,the Incarnate One, Jesus Christ, and only way to better ourselves is to imitate his selflessness, faith, and love, because he is the exemplar and enabler of full humanating. And so, the synonym for humanate is “love.”
We humanators as a species do not on first view have much cause for pride. We cheat, steal, kill, betray, and cause each other physical, emotional and even spiritual harm. We wage war. We pollute the air and water without which we cannot live. We inflict irremediable damage upon our home planet. We chase wealth, comfort and prestige while ignoring or even causing misery for many. We designate ourselves homo sapiens, wise humans, but can be, and often are, incredibly stupid and shortsighted.
Even as individuals, we are not skillful humanators. I fail to treasure the life with which I have been gifted. I use and abuse people around me. I waste the precious gift of time, the context in which I live.
Any verb can be performed well or badly and our humanating clearly is not always done well.
The United States is not alone in being plagued by bad humanating, insufficient loving. No people, nation or individual is a perfect humanator.Generally, we are not even good at it, though in our finer moments we wish we were and even struggle against our de-humanative tendencies.
“I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. … Wretched person that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Romans, 7:19, 24-25)
If pain at the gas pump awakens us to at least moderate selfishness and alerts us to the danger of dehumanating it might draw people to see in the Church’s proclamation of the perfect humanator an answer to more than our political problems.
