The Prosperity Gospel

When I was a child, I heard a version of the prosperity gospel that was a bit different from the way it's promoted today. The basic idea was that a good-hearted person who generously helped others was rewarded materially so that he could share his fortune, using his resources to lift others out of poverty.

The protagonist in the story was a man who had given his last $10 to help someone who was even worse off than he was. That act of self-sacrifice led to his getting a good job, where he rose through the ranks by working hard. Whenever he got an increase in salary, he used most of his money to feed, clothe and shelter unemployed and homeless people, no strings attached. As he got richer and richer, he gave away more and more money.

This was not a story about a man with multiple mansions and a private jet, whose conspicuous wealth was supposedly a sign that God considered him morally superior. It was a story about a man whom God trusted to help those with the greatest need.

It's sad how twisted that story has become.

 

Ugh

This was something I wrote back in October 2016. It's old, but it still feels relevant.

Back when Donald Trump famously remarked that his followers were so "loyal" that even if he shot someone on Fifth Avenue, they'd still vote for him, I partly suspected that he had found a subtle way to marvel at how stupid his followers were. Of course, I soon came to realize that Trump is not, in any way, capable of subtlety.

This morning I watched an excerpt of a news program where a reporter was talking to Trump supporters. Most of these people were as un-subtle as it gets. They didn't admire Trump for his grasp of foreign policy (do they even know what that is?) or his knowledge of the Constitution and how government works (they don't know those things, either). They didn't admire him for his ability to build coalitions within the party, his honesty, his morality, his charm, or even his good looks and physical fitness. They admired him because he is "strong" - and by strong, they meant loud and aggressive. That's what they like. They like bullies.

All the people talking to the reporter (including the women) were loud talkers, the kind of people you don't want sitting near you in a restaurant.The men were particularly obnoxious. In one case I was a bit concerned that one of the men might physically attack the petite female reporter, as he began to try to intimidate her with his looming stance and aggressive comments. She moved away, keeping an eye on him just in case. (That's the kind of behavior Trump supporters see as good debate skills.)

Trump supporters don't care about his racism, his sexism, his hypocrisy, his dishonesty, his possible criminality, his disloyalty, his ignorance, his crudeness, his impossible ideas, his overall obnoxiousness. All they care about is his loud voice. That makes him "strong", and by golly you gotta be strong to be a leader. Ugh.

And while there are some people who finally, finally, are moving away from Trump because at long last they have seen that he has no redeeming qualities, there is a core group that actually admires and identifies with the very things that make him a monster. Those people will never change. If he actually does shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue, they will still vote for him. I'd say, go ahead and vote for him, because if he wins you will get what you deserve. But the problem is that if he wins, it won't be only those who voted for him who pay the price. We will all suffer. I don't deserve that. The good people of America and the world don't deserve that.

 

Hoarding

My Mom, as a young married woman, noticed when visiting her Mother - my Grandma - that Grandma kept junk mail. Mom complained to Grandma, who denied that it was junk. When Grandma wasn't looking, Mom threw the junk mail away. But Grandma found it in the trash and retrieved it. So Mom sneakily took the junk mail and threw it away at her own house.

Forty years later, I realized that Mom was a hoarder. She kept old papers and useless junk that piled up all over her house and made it look like a garbage dump. I couldn't get her to part with anything. I complained, and she said she wasn't so bad compared to her own Mother, and then told me the story about the junk mail.

"But you save junk mail!" I protested. "No I don't," she claimed. I turned to a box on the floor and reached inside, exposing a handful of Grandma's ancient junk mail, carefully preserved along with dead relatives' bank statements from closed accounts at banks that no longer existed, postcards from the vacations of long-forgotten people with indecipherable handwriting, clothing still in the original packages, and the occasional spoon.

What Mom didn't know was that I had already developed the habit of taking her hoarded trash home wth me to throw out.

 

Will Real News Return?

News outlets have completely forgotten what news is, or how to find it and how to report it. They all became obsessed with trump in 2015. I believe it was Jeb Bush who said the coverage of trump in 2016 seemed to blot out the sun. Since then, whether they are allegedly conservative, allegedly liberal, or something else, they all report endlessly on 78-year-old trump's every move, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

If they aren't repeating something he said or did, they are quoting what other people said about him. If they report any story that isn't actually about trump, they find a way to slip his name into it. It's like being suffocated under an orange blanket.

Someday, the old geezer will be gone. They'll manage to keep reporting on him for a while - how he died, what others said about his death, the funeral plans, the actual funeral, the various facts that finally "come out" once he's dead, etc. And for a long time, they'll keep finding ways to relate other stories back to him. But gradually, the blanket will be lifted. A day will go by without that name being mentioned. Then two days, then a week, a month, a year.

Someday folks will realize that there are people in their 20s or 30s who don't remember trump, who don't even know who or what it was. Maybe then, the concepts of news and news reporting will be rediscovered. ^@themrskwest