Tag: Jimmy Carter

Our President, Our Enemy

Our President, Our Enemy

At Saturday morning coffee in downtown Chicago, a friend and naturalized citizen joined our small group. They work (or by now, worked) at a federal agency where half the workforce had just been fired.

“Are you next?” I asked.

“I wrote a list of things I can do to make money. Nothing to do with my profession but at least I have options,” they said, “I have EU passport and know some languages. My European colleagues are already strengthening connections between their countries. There’ll be jobs.”

Watching TV on February 28, I was like a six-year old sitting cross-legged in front of a life-size screen expecting it to throw itself at me. The Trump-Vance shakedown of Ukraine President Zelensky in the Oval Office presented TV reporters and viewers with a clear and present danger. The US just changed sides. We would now be the puppet ally of Russia’s Vladimir Putin. The reporting immobilized me. What happened to Putin the mortal enemy? Another historical norm thrown onto the MAGA heap of used-to-be’s. Cafe societies the next day ratcheted up conversations about how to leave the country.

Our President was now our enemy.

How I want to write more about my friend! Their story about growing up behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War intrigues this nosy Midwesterner. But I fear exposing my friend to gotcha algorithms that worm around the internet. I even write “they/them” so the sex can’t be identified.

They said, “Big difference between here and country of my childhood. Before the breakup of USSR, you’d be killed if you wrote forbidden words.” 

Alexander Dugin, a friend of Putin’s, on the day of Trump’s 2024 presidential victory, proclaimed that “traditionalism won. Globalism lost. A victory for Russia.”

Globalism has been the hallmark of the devil in fundamentalist Christianity since before Jimmy Carter’s presidency. At my small fundamentalist Christian church in the 1970s, a friend pulled me aside one Sunday during coffee hour. She said Jimmy Carter’s White House Conference on the Family was diabolic. We were both former hippies. We grew cabbage in our back yards. We made our own yogurt. We balanced our immune systems with apple cider vinegar. I thought I knew her.

A Christian convert, she’d been exposed to the idea that Carter would lay out his progressive American family values. Then spread those ideals around the world through programs like USAID. 

“Carter is promoting globalism,” she said. “He wants all families to think like him.”

Preposterous? Yeah. I thought so too. 

New York Times columnist, David French, is the original Never-Trumper. An evangelical Christian, French teaches history and the constitution. He explains Trumpism from a biblical point of view. Prophesying Christians, Pentecostals and traditionalists believe the Devil is the force behind globalism. Prophesied in the Bible. These Christians tell Trump he’s God’s man to lead America out of the spiritual darkness of globalism, especially because he survived a gunshot to the head. Trump’s leadership in anti-globalism, divvying up the world pie between the four leaders, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, is victory over the Devil. Oh.Yeah.

Long before Trump, when insecurity and doubt began settling in my young joints, I was desperate for certainty. I fell for these biblical prophesies, these absolutes. I sobered up, married and mothered a boy. I worked in a stain glass factory and had a garden. Despite these, I fell into a years-long fever dreams submitting to charismatic prophesying men. When I woke, a Presbyterian preacher told me doubt was good, certainty wasn’t. Putting church friends behind me, I rejected the prophecies of Christian fundamentalism. 

Strangely, I thought everyone else did too.

Cold Inaugurations

As an eighth grader I entered segregated St. Mary’s of the Assumption for two months at the end of the school year. My family had come apart in the Chicago suburbs and one of my sisters and I were sent to live with relatives in Upper Marlboro, Maryland. Whites and Blacks mingled at St.Mary’s only on the playground where I pitched in the integrated baseball games.  

On our first Sunday at St. Mary’s Church, my sister and I headed for the back pews. A white man ushered us out of our seats toward the front. Only Blacks sat in the back. The Sunday my mother visited from her temporary home in New Jersey, she pushed the usher aside and sat us all in the back. Her hangovers would not allow suffering through the entire hour of the Mass. She needed a quick exit after the obligatory Eucharist and delighted in integrating the back pew. 

One day St. Mary’s eighth grade class was bussed down the way to Andrews Air Force Base to greet President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Blacks in the back of the bus. Whites in the front. Having so little experience with segregation, I was sure it was wrong but had no idea how to take a stand. I wished my mother had come along to integrate the bus. We waved little American flags at President Eisenhower as he deplaned Air Force One, Blacks lined up on one side, whites on the other. It was 1959.  

Sixteen years later in a sleepy Jersey Shore borough, I read about Jimmy Carter’s campaign for president in Time Magazine. What caught my attention was Carter, as governor, in a surprise to fellow Georgians had denounced racism and segregation. I sent a note to Jimmy Carter, applauded his positions on race and volunteered on his campaign. He sent me a hand written thank you note. 

When we received an invitation to Carter’s Inauguration, there was no question that my then-husband and nine-year old son would head to Washington DC for the January 1977 swearing-in. Sitting high up on bleachers on the shady side of the Capitol, it was as cold as any day I can remember. Twenty-eight degrees with a wind chill to equal fourteen.  

 

My grandchildren, C.J. and Kirby, were 10 and 12, when we flew from Chicago to brave twenty degrees with 1.8 million others for Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration. We stood for hours on the frozen ground by the Native American Museum on the Mall. Every once in a while I’d ask my shivering grandchildren if they wanted to go inside. No they didn’t! The clutch of strangers that formed in our section treated us like family—retrieving packs of hand warmers from a far-away tent for the inside of our mittens and boots.

It was sunny. Cold. And glorious.

Obama quoted Founding Father Thomas Paine in his in Inaugural address. 

”Let it be told to the future world … that in the depth of winter,  when nothing but hope and virtue could survive … that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet.”

 

How I love Jimmy Carter!

How I love Jimmy Carter!

As an eighth grader I entered segregated St. Mary’s of the Assumption school for two months at the end of the school year. My family had come apart in the Chicago suburbs and one of my sisters and I were sent to live with relatives in Upper Marlboro, Maryland. I’d never been in a school separated by race. The only time whites and Blacks mingled at St.Mary’s happened on the playground where we defiantly integrated ourselves into two mixed-gender baseball teams.  

For as long as I can remember my sisters and I followed our parents into the very last pew of church for Sunday Mass. They timed it so we arrived about twenty minutes late, in time for the Consecration of the Eucharist, the attendance marker at the mandatory once a week Mass.

As we approached our first Sunday at St. Mary’s Church in Upper Marlboro, my sister and I naturally headed for the pews in the back of the church. A white man ushered us out of our seats into a pew toward the front. Only Blacks sat in the back.The Sunday my mother visited us she pushed the white usher aside and insisted on sitting in the back. Her hangovers were far too severe to suffer through the entire hour of a full Mass. She needed a quick exit after the obligatory Communion. 

One day St. Mary’s eighth grade class was bussed twenty minutes down the road to Andrews Air Force Base to greet President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Blacks in the back of the bus. Whites in the front. We’d been given little American flags to wave at the president as he deplaned Air Force One. It was 1959 and my first experience at an event for a President of the United States.

Sixteen years after my St. Mary’s grade school graduation, I read about Jimmy Carter’s campaign for president in Time Magazine. Carter, as governor, in a surprise to fellow Georgians had denounced racism and segregation. I wrote to him in Plains, Georgia, applauding his positions and volunteered for his presidential campaign. He sent me a hand written thank you note with a postscript to contact the local Democrats in my small New Jersey town. 

Around that time, my son’s hockey coach was mounting his own campaign for mayor. Eventually the coach endorsed Carter and opened a local campaign office. To the great consternation of my then-husband, I spent all my spare time campaigning for Jimmy Carter. That husband expressed his silent scorn by laying on the couch drinking cases of beer. I, in turn, after a year of abstinence in Alcoholics Anonymous, slipped into the basement with quarts of vodka to escape what looked like a doomed existence.

We both stayed sober for our last family excursion—waving little American flags outside the U.S. Capitol for Jimmy Carter’s Inauguration in January, 1977.  

A month later I finished my last drink and got a divorce. In years since, I’ve organized events for many Democrats and eventually worked for President Bill Clinton. I’ve never failed to distribute small American flags to the diverse crowds. 

Believe in the Devil

Believe in the Devil

In my twenties I accepted Jesus Christ as my personal savior in order to belong to the bible fellowship I had been attending with my friends. I “became” (as if that were possible) a born-again Christian just before Jimmy Carter, also a born-again Christian, announced his candidacy for President. 

I volunteered every spare moment for Carter’s campaign, a Democrat who proclaimed himself a sinner, saved by Jesus, just like me. After he was elected, some men and women in my small community bible fellowship preached that Carter was a tool of the devil, because he promoted sex education and family planning in public schools (today’s purity tests are abortion and gay rights). I had naively become part of a Christian sub-culture that wanted no government interference in family matters. These Christians yoked Carter’s actions to his character and denounced the whole man as the anti-christ. That’s what evangelical Christians did then.

What Evangelical Christians do now is the exact opposite. Those who support Donald Trump have an ends-justify-the-means theology. As long as abortion is outlawed and gay rights are quashed, the means to get there (coercing Ukraine to dig up dirt on his potential political opponent) are not only ok, but justified, even applauded. Donald Trump’s interior life is not considered important or relevant, nor is the outward display of his character. They worship the end product.

In his book, Prayers of the Cosmos, Neil Douglas-Klotz notes that Aramaic, the language of Jesus “…does not draw sharp lines between means and ends, or between inner quality and outer action.”  There are no words in this ancient language for an ends-justify-the means psychology: a person with unrepentant character defects is so unlikely to perform noble deeds that it cannot even be talked about. Logic follows that a person who provides immoral leadership is likely to be of ignoble character.

A guy named Josemaria Escriva de Balaguer established an ultra-conservative, ultra-secret Catholic lay organization in 1928, Opus Dei. Followers learn to abandon their principles, that the ends always justify the means. They believe Trump was chosen by God to protect the unborn fetus and restore Judeo-Christian moral order. Trump’s Attorney General, Bill Barr is Opus Dei (as are other Trump appointees). Doesn’t this explain a lot?

I left that Christian cult years ago. However, I understand, even admire, their members’ rejection of Jimmy Carter because they considered his views on sex education immoral. I disagreed with their opinions but I too measured his character by words and deeds and came to a different conclusion. Perhaps this ancient Aramaic Jesus language trickles into a collective consciousness enabling some to see inner qualities and outer actions as one big squishy blob and accept or reject that whole person.Untitled 2.png

I keep asking myself what’s wrong with those Evangelical Christian (and conservative Catholic) Trump supporters. Don’t they care that his morally corrupt outsides match his morally incontinent insides? Their religious fervor veils their eyes to the hypocrisy Jesus condemned. They justify the deeds of their beloved lawbreaking reprobate. Have their souls separated from their minds? Or as Rev. William Barber has said, “After this year (with Trump) if you don’t believe in the devil there’s somethin wrong with your fuckin mind.”