Behavior

That’s what the caller said to the talk radio host. Then he proceeded to make his comments about health care reform.

I can’t help but wonder what, “I’m a Christian,” means or why he invoked his faith as preface to his comments about a hot political issue. Actually, I’ve heard many people declare their Christianity as part of their expression of their opinions, which, as it turns out, were mostly offered as absolute facts rather than their personal opinions. What does the caller’s thinking he’s a Christian have to do with health care reform? Sure, we can manufacture a connection; still, the more interesting part of this is his intent of saying, “I’m a Christian.”

Does he want us to ascribe certain values to him because of his pronouncement of his religious beliefs? Are we supposed to see him as merciful or generous or caring? Of course, I’m making up those qualities, since the caller didn’t explain the meaning behind his declaration, but that was the sense I had. And isn’t it odd that he would find it necessary to make this religious declaration, as though we would then know something useful about him?

James Earl Ray said he was a Christian and then he murdered Dr. Martin Luther King. Robert Chambliss was the ringleader of the gang who blew up the 16^th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963, killing four little girls as they sat in their Sunday school class. He said he was a Christian, too.

Less dramatic but insidiously damaging are the fervent Evangelicals and people on the religious far right who are certain in their beliefs, clearly unable to discern the difference between their beliefs and truth. They have a satisfyingly simple view of the world: They got it right and anyone who disagrees with them is wrong. Unfortunately, there are, they believe, consequences to being in the group they call “wrong”, as they announce with impassioned, vaguely compassionate certainty that all who don’t believe as they do are damned and will go to hell. What a bummer for so many of us. They may pray for the salvation of the wrong-ies, but either way they call themselves Christians as they marginalize and sometimes demonize all who are not just like them.

King Ferdinand II of Spain was the 15^th century poster boy for that kind of thinking and he was all about action in support of it. He murdered everyone who would not declare themselves to be a Christian. He, too, it seems, saw himself as a Christian. There were a number of popes like him, some of whom sent armies to kill the non-Christians in the middle-east. What could be more Christian than that? It turns out there is something.

Erik Prince, founder of Blackwater, Inc. (now called Xe Services LLC), the “contractor” hired by Cheney-Bush to kill Iraqi’s, thinks he’s a most devout Christian. He wants to eliminate Islam and kill all three billion Muslims in the world. He must really be a Christian.

When people invoke their Christianity as some sort of placeholder for values they think ascribe to them by such a declaration, rest assured that they’re only creating a smoke screen, something to hide behind while they believe whatever they believe and go about doing whatever they do, either good or evil. So, if you’re inclined to preface your opinions by declaring you’re a Christian, you can save the pious label, because, knowing that it’s used to justify nearly anything, I have no idea what it means.

Yes, that Grant Park. The one that the world remembers from the 1968 riot that happened concurrent with the Democratic National Convention. It was defined by the Kerner Commission as a police riot, which infuriated Hizzonor The Mayor (Daley the First) and confirmed for much of the world that Chicago was still a frontier town. It also made for a stunning visual image of radical kids seeming to be connected to the Democratic Party. The spectacle assured doom for the Democrats for decades to come and Grant Park has been remembered ever since as the site of a riot.

I was of an age that I might have been in Grant Park on that dreadful August night in 1968. I wanted to be there, but I wasn’t. I followed a more conservative path, starting and running a business for 25 years. So, what was I doing in Grant Park this time?

Forty years can change a lot. Now, two generations later, the crowds were back – somewhere between 250,000 and 400,000 in Grant Park on a November evening. There were no protests. There were no police in riot gear. There were, instead, police eating pizza. And police guiding visitors. The most aggressive show of force by the police was a phalanx of cops astride those gorgeous thoroughbreds just watching, as if to say, “We’re here if we’re needed.” They were never needed. Not this time. Not in this place.

This was a singular night of celebration. The energy was entirely joyous and periodically exuberant. It was a gathering of a long separated family, come from distant places to rejoin in a communion of belief. It had been so very long and the night so dark. And there we were, witnessing together the first rays of light to break across the sky of the future.

We’ve suffered the lies and wrong wars, from repeated attacks on the Constitution and from the crush of a falling economy and the nonsense of no accountability. This night the message of change was overwhelming and the energy in Grant Park felt like enormous relief. Hurray for the Obama house that fell from the sky and landed on the Wicked Witch of the West! Let the joyous celebrations begin and we’ll start the journey down the yellow brick road back to the America that has seemed lost in an eight-year fog. Ding-dong, the witch is dead.

And, of course, there was so much more. Did I mention that Barack Obama is black? Well, half black. Logic would suggest that he is also half white, except we probably still carry around the hateful “one drop” notion that helped to perpetuate racism for 400 years, so he’s commonly referred to as black. Setting aside the multi-layer stupidity of that, consider the messages we have delivered to ourselves and to the entire world: about possibility and hope; about belief in ourselves; about change that has taken not years, but generations, even centuries; and that we have put a stake in the ground to declare that something profound has occurred. The racial tectonic plates have shifted. Even the political hate mongers cannot sway us from taking yet another step in the direction of the true promise of America.

After Barack Obama won the Iowa (that’s the 95% lily white Iowa) primary, Rachel Maddow said it best: “This is the kind of America I want to live in.”

I never lost my 60’s idealism and still get a lump in my throat at the Memorial Day ceremony on the Village Green. I sing the National Anthem out loud at ball games and write letters to the editor over our government abandoning so many of our tribe in New Orleans. I still have stars in my eyes for America.

And so do several hundred thousand of my friends who gathered in Grant Park on a balmy November evening in 2008. This is the kind of America we want to live in.

JaxPolitix

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