Musings of Valentine

This morning the world is shocked by the death of Sen. Lindsey Graham. I, too, am shocked and extend sincere condolences to his family, friends, and colleagues. I was also shocked by the continued vitriol and death celebrations online. It stopped me and turned me deep to prayer.

His is not the first celebration of death online, and I should not be shocked, because it is common and frequent. I see memes mocking the deaths of young Black, innocent children, of many Black adults, and deaths related to ICE, with many people creating celebratory memes.

Our country is sick….. very sick. We hate and no longer love! It seriously turns my stomach to celebrate hatred and demise like we do in this country. In Tennessee we tried to remove healthcare for children whose parents are immigrants, and posts showed a blatant disregard for human life. Also, here is my cognitive dissonance – churches fundraise and do so much for missions out of this country, but when someone is asylum seeking or has children in need, we greet them with “hate.” We hate the homeless, we hate women who may need to terminate a pregnancy to live, we hate the elderly that need better healthcare, we hate the working class, we comfortably go to war, kill, and are boastful of destruction….. yet our military families do without…. but we can play with a reflecting pool and build a gaudy ballroom. Wondering how many of these poor constituents across the country will ever see this ballroom and continue to support legislators of BOTH parties that could care less about their well-being?

Being born in the mid-60s, I never dreamed that kids today would have to live with WORSE race relations than I had ever experienced. Former President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama depicted as apes on #47’s social media. The current administration has no decorum, class, morals….. I could go on. Let me also address another subject, comparison of the First Ladies. One grew up with middle-class and working-class parents, academically excelled, and lived the American Dream of building herself up and being self-sufficient and esteemed in her workplace. The other is revered and beautiful, while the other is an ape. Wow, what an image for your children to be molded by.

Anyway, the celebrations of sudden deaths…. I can’t! Does the camp of Mitch McConnell need to be forthright, absolutely. He works for the people and is accountable to the people. You know, accountable to people’s questions like when you ask for a birth certificate to prove citizenship. You are elected by the people, and people have demands, right? Isn’t this how we have been living?

Projection is crazy and real, and what tortured souls are we in the USA?

We are the souls who quote scripture on Sunday and mock a man’s death on Monday. We are the souls who cry “sanctity of life” from one side of our mouth and cheer a stranger’s cardiac arrest from the other. We are the souls who have confused disagreement with dehumanization, and dehumanization with entertainment. Somewhere along the way, we stopped seeing each other as neighbors and started seeing each other as content.

I did not agree with every vote Senator Graham cast. I do not agree with much of what has been said and done by leaders on either side of the aisle in recent years. But disagreement was never supposed to require the death of decency. You can oppose a man’s politics and still bow your head when his family buries him. You can want different laws, different leaders, a different country even, and still refuse to let your heart calcify into something that laughs at a widow’s grief. If we cannot hold both of those things at once, then it is not our politics that have broken. It is us.

I keep returning to the word “tortured,” because I believe it. A people at peace with itself does not need to watch other people suffer to feel something. A people at peace with itself does not require an enemy in every headline. What I see online, in the comments, in the memes, in the smug little jokes about who deserved what, is not strength. It is pain wearing a costume of certainty. Hurting people hurt people, and a hurting nation entertains itself by hurting louder.

So what do we do with a sickness this deep? I do not have a five-point plan. I have a prayer, and I have a question I keep asking myself, and I will leave it with you too: when was the last time you extended grace to someone you were certain did not deserve it? Not agreement. Not endorsement. Just grace, the kind that costs you something because it does not feel earned.

That is the only exit I know out of this. Not a new policy. Not a new party. A return, person by person, household by household, to the basic and unfashionable belief that every human life, the senator’s and the asylum seeker’s, the child in Gaza and the child in Mississippi, the soldier and the homeless veteran he became, is worth more than our applause for its ending.

Rest in peace, Senator Graham. And Lord, have mercy on the rest of us, because we are going to need it.